Designing With and Through Care: From empathy to relational accountability

In contemporary design practice, care risks becoming an imperative that obscures asymmetric power relations. This paper interrogates the relationship between design and care, asking: how can design shift from producing solutions to cultivating relations of care without reproducing paternalistic logics? Through a comparative analysis of case studies through the lenses of knowing, making, and defining with care, we treat caring about, caring for, and caring with as simultaneous and co-present dimensions to examine how care operates within design processes. The analysis identifies a structural pattern: while caring about and caring for are compatible with existing design logics, caring with encounters systematic resistance. It is not sufficient to design for care; we argue for designing with and through care as a relational practice capable of repair, listening, and regeneration. The contribution outlines a critical-analytical framework as a vocabulary for interrogating when care becomes transformative and when it reproduces the asymmetries it claims to address.