W. Mahfouz
This work-in-progress paper is driven by the question: how Resonant-Writing (RW) can be designed and aesthetically assessed to approach alienation phenomena in German social-spaces of German and migrant women in cancer?
The question is emerged in a design-project by a community of volunteer coworkers interested in supporting German and migrant women in cancer. The migrant-women have been migrated to Germany due to wars in their home-countries (e.g., Ukraine, Turkey or Syria).
The paper presents the challenging issues of RW aesthetic-assessment that face the community coworkers during three practices to enable aesthetic-Illustration driven writing, namely:
a) writing practice by theater assisted social-workers,
b) writing practice by art-therapy workers, and
c) writing practice by platform-development workers to serve the community's online-platform.
To approach the community’s challenges, the paper suggests an innovative design-approach towards inquiry based RW aesthetic-assessment.
The paper shows how the design-approach is conceptualized to enable researching how to integrate the design theorist Christopher Alexander's views on "inner beauty & living-structures" and the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s theory of “resonance” to approach alienation phenomena in social-spaces. The alienation phenomena under study in scope of this paper are limited to alienation phenomena that face German and migrant women in cancer.
The paper also shows how the suggested design-approach can enable a space for RW aesthetic-assessment in the three practices of aesthetic-Illustration driven writing. The suggested space enables also researching the community self-assessment methods for improving the holistic-quality of their aesthetic-Illustration driven writings.
To put the suggested design-approach in action, design test-cases are presented as next steps of this work-in-progress paper. Finally, the paper summarizes the limits of the design-approach and our future work to improve it.
Keywords: Aesthetic-Assessment, Resonant-Writing, Rosa’s theory of “resonance”, Women in Cancer, Alexander's Views on Inner beauty and Living Structures.