Careful Gestures:

Design-led Coalitions

in Shetland’s

Creative Communities

This research investigates how community-based and design-led approaches can mobilise care from within Shetland’s creative communities. It engages in theories of care to expand Participatory Design’s (PD) orientation toward the ongoing ethical (re)configuration and sustainment of people’s relationships with place in a sparsely populated island context. While care has been an emerging subject and area of debate in PD literature, it often remains focused on the reflexive stance of the researcher, rather than examining how design-led approaches can ethically join pre-existing ecologies of care and contribute through material involvement to ongoing processes of renewal and sustainment.

The research emerged from a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) with Shetland Arts Development Agency (SADA). It commenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time that intensified attention to (and the absence of) care and underscored the ethical tensions of researching as an incomer within tight-knit island communities. Adopting a participatory and programmatic design research approach, the work emerged from within the dense relational proximities of island life and had to navigate between the institutional and grassroots research partners. To engage with this tension, I utilised Manzini’s (2015, 2017, 2019) concept of designing coalitions to co-facilitate creative engagements with local creative practitioners and young people, cultivating a critical and generative understanding of mobilising care through relational design practices and processes.

Therefore, the collaborative approach enabled Shetland Arts to explore a care perspective from across multiple layers of the creative eco-system through evaluating its own arts development approaches against the care principles, values, and practices identified through the research. Furthermore, this research contributes to contemporary debates on relationality (Escobar, 2018; Escobar, Osterweil, Sharma, 2024; Smith et al., 2025, p.7) by positioning a design-led approach to mobilising care alongside situated accounts of communal island resilience and sustainability. This practice-based inquiry developed an approach to ‘designing otherwise’ (Calderon Salazar and Huybrechts, 2020; DiSalvo, 2022; Abdulla, 2025; Smith et al., 2025), which resulted in a transferable place-sensitive framework for other PD practitioners and community-based researchers interested in exploring approaches to mobilising care. This articulates an ethico-political agency centred around engaging in communal matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In doing so, this research presents an auto-ethnographic-in-style account that engages with pre-existing and ongoing care practices in Shetland’s commons.