Collective Healing to Support Design Futures: Building Community and Exploring Methods.

This workshop explores the role of healing ourselves as a key aspect for transformative social change. It brings together social justice and community based work in HCI that engages with healing and joy to expand on current methodologies such as autoethnography, somaesthetics, and embodied design which aim to describe different ways of knowing and describing and living experiences as inputs for design futuring. Our concern of interest is the ways in which all of us have lived through continuous community grief and loss due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and a continued climate crisis; and the resulting symptoms like anxiety, depression, body pain, and scattered focus. We believe that we must acknowledge these experiences and feelings about these events in order to effectively work towards more optimistic futures. This workshop takes the space and time to consider our recent collective traumas and explore how to integrate them into futures that support the development of futures that fit our emotional, ethical, social and physical needs. Our aim is to build a greater understanding of how the CHI community can integrate healing in support of social change.