Designing for Care: Building a Story Pharmacy

Catalog description

To create sustainable, positive change in the world we need to cultivate both our own capacities and the kind of shared resources that can help us all through hard times. In this class, students will have the opportunity to do both by helping to design and build a Story Pharmacy - a public, curated collection of stories that can help people meet specific challenges - from loneliness and self-doubt to anxiety and heartbreak. Students will learn how to "design for care": how to infuse presence, empathy, and courage into each step of collaboratively developing a resource for well-being. They will first explore how stories (anything from parables and poems to family tales and films) can nourish, guide us, or become important companions in challenging times. They will then learn foundational principles of narrative medicine and design thinking and skills such as interviewing for story, data-documentation, and experience design. Students will experience the impact of witnessing and being witnessed and will come away with new tools, frameworks, and models to apply to future projects aimed at building a more connected and caring world. By application. https://forms.gle/WHJoSj7H2nZ6aLbP9