Interweaving vulnerability and everyday design: Encounters around an aquarium in a paediatric oncology ward

Contemporary understandings of vulnerability highlight its critical, relational and enabling aspects. Through leveraging these understandings, this article contributes to conceptualizing the notion of everyday design by interweaving it with that of vulnerability. A case study brings vulnerability into view by zooming out from and in on everyday practices around an aquarium in a paediatric oncology ward. Subsequently, we unravel the notion of vulnerability as used in design research and in anthropology and philosophy: while vulnerability grounds everyday design philosophically and ethically as a form of care, everyday design challenges the tendency to situate vulnerability in (relations between) human beings. Our article thus exemplifies design anthropology understood as bringing in dialogue theory and methods from both anthropology and design. ? 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This article examines the relationship between vulnerability and everyday design, viewing vulnerability as a form of philosophical and ethical care through the lens of design research and anthropology. Everyday design challenges the tendency to confine vulnerability within interpersonal relationships.