Dates: 27 October 2022 – 10 November 2022

Group Members: Rebecca Hodge, Sushil Suresh, Kye Li Chia, Hong Zhou and me.

WEEK 1

‘Design a way to intensify how we experience hair‘ seemed like a huge, daunting area to work with because it can branch out in so many ways. So we looked at the links given to us alongside the brief for understanding the context and started with the initial areas of interest that each of us had about the topic.

The sub-areas that stood out were Baldness, PCOS, Wigs and Hairstyles . To hear about and learn from people’s personal experiences of hair we wanted to speak to friends and family using ‘Directed Storytelling’. We framed some fairly open ended questions like:

• A good or bad comment about your body or head hair
• An interesting experience with your body or head hair
• About a time when your gender or sexuality affected the way you experience or express your body or head hair

A common thread from our first set of interviews was of a few people talking about their experience of hair loss.

This got us thinking that we should think through ‘Bodystorming’ social situations in which people are dealing with hairloss.

Through our ‘Directed Storytelling’ and ‘Bodystorming’ we realised that hair loss seemed to play a big part in our daily lives and is an experience shared by many, even though it isn’t talked about openly. For these reasons, we decided to follow this into our conceptual ideas. 

We decided to make a representation of human hair loss. The threads represent individual strands of our hair and when the participant runs his/her hand through the hair some of it would be trapped between his/her fingers and fall off. Losing your hair can be a very traumatising experience that not everyone goes through or understands. Therefore, through this prototype, we aim to bring awareness to that fact.

We received feedback to be a little more sensitive and mindful while addressing a topic like hairloss. Our mentors advised us to co-design with a few of our participants instead of designing in a ‘top-down’ manner although they were supportive of us going ahead with a sensitive topic.

WEEK 2

We reached out to friends and relatives to share their lived experiences of hair loss with us. With the people that reached out to us, we were able to start with a pool of 14 participants. Our second round of ‘directed storytelling’ involved questions about their experience with hair loss, how they felt about it, their initial response, how did they go about it and what could make them feel more comfortable.

After transcribing each of our interviews, we sat together to read all of them and also highlight interesting bits of conversation from them.

All the common themes, were then put as part of a table, to observe recurring similarities between participants.

Through our collated research, we found acceptance and empowerment through shared experience as the most commonly running themes amongst our participants. So we decided to brainstorm ideas based on these two topics:

We shortlisted a few ideas such as

• a sound montage of real people sharing experiences,
• a photoshoot of people who have encountered hair loss and
• love and breakup letters with a potential letter exchange.

We went back to our participants for feedback of the ideas we were considering. With most of them inclined towards the love and breakup letters, we decided to take that forward and involve them in the experience since they had helped us get this far.

So we decided to take our idea forward in a couple of different ways to understand how it would work in real-world scenarios. Both the exercises aimed at sharing and receiving of hair loss experiences through different mediums. One was thought of as a physical exchange of handwritten letters amongst people in a small group.

The next one was a digital sharing of voice notes amongst our participants which was completely anonymous and was facilitated by us.

FINAL PROTOTYPE

Trying out the two exercises helped us understand what to take forward as part of a community experience. Taking the tactile and handwritten nature of letters from the physical exercise and taking the voice note and anonymity of the digital experience forward, we put our minds to combining the best that we saw in both.

We came up with the idea of having physical or digital postcards with personal notes written from people who have experienced hair loss. This is with the aim to help build a sense of community and support. We also built a link for our classmates to share their experiences anonymously.

Please feel free to have a look and share yours too:

https://padlet.com/rhodge111/q6olotbw97lrf9ab

Our project was well received by the class especially for it sensitivity, research, level of involvement with participants and an organic design process. We received ideas to make a book out of a collection of postcards and to post the existing ones to our participants as a token of gratitude.