CanDu: Weaving Design and Healthcare

A museum is an interesting lens to look at healthcare. On one hand, museums have little direct impact on front-line services; they don’t develop drug treatments or reset broken bones. However, cultural organisations are critical for the health and wellbeing of our communities in other ways. Museums are increasingly telling human stories, and new resources allow museums to care for people, just as much as they do for objects in their collections. Today, you would be hard-pushed to find any cultural organisation – large or small – not delivering some kind of wellbeing initiative.

The role of a design museum is not only to showcase, but demonstrate the everyday power of design – to show design as a living, breathing tool for affecting positive change, and enabling everyone to participate in that process. This was very much in evidence at the end of September 2023, when we hosted local cancer support charity CanDu (Cancer Dundee) and their annual conference, the focus of which was defining lived expertise by design.

This collaborative event was almost a full year in development, with around 80 people from all walks of life attending in various capacities over the day. The complex event involved multiple speakers, an in-conversation event, design workshops, a marketplace and networking, as well as musical performances from CanDu’s mindfulness group and the Maggie’s Just Sing choir. In the run up to the event, a public engagement activity was also developed to facilitate conversation around the design of the chemotherapy unit at Ninewells Hospital using the accessible and familiar medium of Lego.

The day culminated in the designing of a lived experience tartan, inspired loosely by themes explored in the museum’s current major exhibition, Tartan. Many objects in this exhibition delve into how designers have used tartan’s grid as a way to code information or tell stories. Far from being a purely aesthetic textile, colours, patterns, set widths and thread counts can all hold meaning, if the viewer looks a little closer. Examples include the ethnographic data coded into the Manhattan Tartan Project, or the social commentary on nuclear weapons by the artist Michael Sanders.

Therefore, tartan has been used to communicate both personal stories and visualise complex data. This was one of the starting points for the team of designers - Gary Kennedy from architectural design studio kennedytwaddle designer and co-design specialist Linsey McIntosh, and Kim Anderson and Robbie Beautyman from the Service Design Academy, based at Dundee & Angus College – who led the workshops.

Working on a scaled-up grid of tartan, the concept was to co-design a tartan, that would visually represent people’s differing lived expertise. The workshop drew on tartan’s grid, using the vertical warp and horizontal weft to represent the themes of why we share our lived experience, and what an expert (of any description) can bring. The threads – coloured ribbons, in this case, as the grid itself was nearly two metres square – then represented practical or emotional needs.

Just like the rules of tartan’s grid, participants were encouraged to consider the elements of pattern and symmetry when placing their ribbons on the evolving frame, not only for aesthetic purposes, but to see their experience and contributions mirrored by someone else, further promoting dialogue and empathy. As more ribbons were added, the two sperate warp and weft frames gradually filled with vibrant lines of colour, each with a personal story or experience behind it. The activity acted as a way to openly talk about experiences of cancer while engaged in the act of making – a therapeutic process that is often more effective than a clinical conversation.

At the end of the day, the two frames were brought together for the first time, the two sets of vibrant semi-translucent ribbons allowing new colours to form at the perpendicular intersections – in an instant, the individual ribbons changed into what was instantly recognisable as a piece of tartan, yet one inlaid with emotion and meaning. It was a new tartan that hadn’t existed a few hours previously, formed by a human-centred design activity to embody the themes of the conference.

Currently a supersized prototype, we hope that this new tartan will act as a legacy of the conference, and act as a talking point to discuss people’s lived experience with cancer as well as being a designed object in itself with a unique story behind it.

The creative, collaborative methods that were used to create it are used a lot here at the museum and these basic principles of design thinking – constantly questioning, communicating, collaborating, and iterating – can be just as effective in the clinical sector as creative ones.

As such, events like the CanDu conference at the museum, and the involvement of designers are incredibly important to foster collaboration, empathy and utilise creative methods of expression to ensure all voices are heard and valued. Such is the power of design.

If you'd like to find out more, please contact communities@vandadundee.org