Working across Edinburgh and London, I developed a trauma-sensitive generative design approach that positions care-experienced young people as authors of their own stories. Drawing on Karen Barad’s thinking about entangled relations, Jean Rouch’s playful collaborative filmmaking, and my own practice with participatory photography, the research treats technologies, spaces, and objects as active co-participants in meaning-making rather than neutral instruments.
In two cycles of creative workshops, participants built fictional characters from fragments of their own lives, improvised futures, and produced participatory performances and interactive digital artworks using augmented reality. Verbatim audio techniques preserved their voices whilst protecting their identities. The work culminated in a presentation at the Department for Education in London, where policymakers and senior politicians encountered care experience through multiple senses.
The Digital Appendix collects what emerged from that process: the artefacts, the methods, and the relational conditions that made them possible. It is an invitation to encounter the research in the way it was made — through doing, playing, and imagining otherwise.