Shama Rahman

Designing for Ecologies of Care

Amidst lengthening healthspans and rising systemic pressures, this reflection engages with the symposium Designing for Ecologies of Care as a springboard for interrogating the evolving meanings and futures of care. Drawing insights from creative health practice, material and digital innovation, and interdisciplinary research, we foreground care as both a mode of knowing and making shaped by embodied, relational, and ecological processes. Through examples spanning dementia, mental health, and material interventions from wearables to speckled computing, we argue that creative and material practices render visible the complexities and circulations of care often obscured in biomedical or technological framings. Recognising care as a living, adaptive ecology challenges static models and offers new pathways toward equitable, inclusive, and resilient health futures. This work calls for design and research that embrace creative knowledge forms, systemic attunement, and collaborative transformation in conceptualising what it means to care.