The Care Capsules

Andrea de la Peña & José de la O

As a Reach Network partner,  delao design studio started a collaboration on the Care Capsules project led by Reach partner The Care Lab, an international network of activists willing to transform Care through human-centred design practices in the health, social & education domains.

The Care Capsules project is a global design research collaboration as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Reach partners from the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Mexico, and Russia collected and analysed stories to learn about emerging care roles in our communities and determine how we provide care to one another.  

Through deep-dive interviews with a human-centred design approach, our studio attempted to understand a Mexican perspective around concerns on the pandemic situation that might influence the new understanding of caring and the transformation of our social needs. Between June and August 2020, we interviewed people considered vital workers during the pandemic, like caretakers, food delivery people, cleaning professionals and local food merchants. 

In each interview, we talk about participants’ first reactions, how this has changed their personal and professional lives, how this diminished some topics considered taboos or generated new ones, some of their concerns, and how they are coping with this situation. These conversations also served as space for them to unburden their thoughts or concerns and to make some reflections about them.

Reach Network is looking forward to defining potential next steps that include the publication of the research conclusions and finding potential collaborators interested in developing new solutions.

International collaborations like these are significant for delaO design studio. It allows us to bring local perspectives into global research and let us as a studio have a better understanding of our culture and society. Moreover, being part of Reach Network led us to learn from our partners and be part of global discussions that continuously improve our research approaches. Reach is a worldwide network of agencies specialising in human-centred design research and service innovation.

If you want to further read what we learned from this study, please click here.