Creative Care in Motion: Mediating Institutions Through Design

Abstract

Care-oriented initiatives often struggle not because they lack value, but because their early forms are difficult to sustain under uncertainty and institutional constraint. This paper examines how creative care—care emerging from underdefined desires or relational improvisation—unfolds within service systems. Drawing on three European cases, it introduces a structural model that reframes care as a trajectory shaped by mediation rather than a discrete service outcome. The analysis shows that sustaining care depends less on isolated solutions than on mediated infrastructures, and that care evolves through translation and provisional stabilization rather than linear implementation. Managing mediation thus emerges as a core organizational capability for sustaining care under uncertainty.Rather than framing creativity as an individual trait or a market-driven outcome, this model positions creative action as a trajectory. Practices begin as personal or collective impulses—dissonance, longing, aesthetic discomfort—and gradually take form through mediation. Drawing from effectuation theory, design mediation, care ethics, and capability theory, the framework conceptualizes creative care as a process shaped by translation across boundaries: between desire and means, between aesthetic disruption and institutional legibility, between informal practice and formal recognition.Three European cases—Circle (UK), WeMi (Milan), and Barcelona’s Superblock—serve as interpretive platforms for analyzing how creative practices move across the quadrant space. Each case demonstrates how symbolic representations, relational networks, participatory storytelling, material infrastructures, and policy environments mediate the evolution of creative care. These cases highlight not only the emergence of new practices but also the fragility of their institutional trajectories: expressive impulses risk dilution when formalized, while grassroots experimentation risks invisibility without translation. The paper argues that design coalitions—assemblages of actors, artifacts, narratives, and infrastructures—play a critical role in sustaining these transitions by holding open ambiguity, enabling proximity, and preventing premature closure.For fashion and cultural institutions, this framework offers a way to reinterpret styling, exhibition, and participatory design as relational care practices that rely on symbolic resonance, shared authorship, and situated meaning. For museums and service organizations, it reframes innovation not as solution delivery but as the crafting of enabling conditions—temporal, spatial, and relational—that allow cultural practices to become livable and collectively held. For the broader creative economy, it positions care as a generative infrastructure: a medium through which aesthetic impulses gain form, publics are composed, and new cultural ecologies emerge.By providing a structural grammar for understanding how creative practices travel across domains of desire, means, and institutional mediation, this paper extends current design research and offers a theoretical foundation for “styled innovation” as a relational and infrastructural process.

Keywords: Creative Care, Design Mediation, Service Systems, Design Coalitions

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007734