This paper is published in the CoDesign journal, in their Special Issue call on the use of Autoethnographies of Social Design Practices, edited by David Perez and Spyros Bofylatos.

Abstract

This paper presents autoethnographic accounts from women design researchers, each sharing their culturally grounded approaches to support women in a transcultural mentoring programme. The authors examine the concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘safe spaces’, by unpacking these terms through decolonial perspectives. The paper’s title ความอุ่นใจ (Karm Unn Jai), roughly meaning warm hearted, represents the first author’s state of being, relating and co-becoming during the programme and became an invitation for all authors to reflect on diverse personal experiences of safety. This paper offers six reflections on atmospheric and felt dimensions of codesign practice as prompts for readers’ own explorations. Their differences and resonances point towards the intersectional positionalities and relationalities that comprise codesigning, rather than collapsing them under generic guidelines for designing ‘safety’ or ‘safe spaces’. We highlight the transcultural emergence of trust and kindness, and expand the scholarship on inclusivity in multilingual and multicultural contexts. This work advocates for a more nuanced understanding of codesigning that recognises and values diverse lifeworlds, thereby contributing to efforts in decolonising and pluralising codesign discourse.