Listening as Agency

The problem

Long term care homes in Canada have faced critical challenges, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Listening as Agency sought to propose listening, a design approach focused on sound, as a novel approach to improving resident experience and agency within care homes.

My role

I led the project end to end as the lead researcher and designer, building a partnership between Emily Carr University and Vancouver Coastal Health. The project went through a harmonized ethics review through Emily Carr, UBC, and VCH's ethics boards. I trained a team of three recreation therapists on research protocols, gathered informed consent, facilitated a series of participatory workshops with care home residents, and developed theoretical and applied applications of our findings.

The approach

Instead of designing for residents, I designed with them. I ran a series of participatory workshops where residents recorded, talked about, and reshaped the sounds of their environment. The method turned listening itself into a kind of agency: deciding what to notice, what to keep, and what to change.

The hard parts

Research in long-term care is difficult to get right. Approval alone meant clearing ethics boards at three institutions at once, and accounting for diverse accessibility needs of participants, and shaping workshop methods accordingly. I also collaborated and trained a group of recreation therapists at the care home on the study protocol, and had them in attendance at the workshops to ensure resident comfort and safety.

Outcome

The work showed that even small acts of choosing — what to listen for, what to quiet — shifted how residents experienced their own agency inside a space designed largely without them. It became both a completed thesis and a model for doing inclusive, sound-based research in care settings.

Recognition

• Future Creative Catalysts Graduate Research Fellowship — awarded to support the project.
• Student Research Design Award, Emily Carr Research Ethics Board — for the consent and recruitment design.
• Findings presented internationally at the Ways of Listening symposium, Catania, Sicily.

What I took from it

Listening is a powerful tool for design research, and for demonstrating the interconnected aspects of design that may not always be visible — internal experience, relationships, infrastructure, and policy. Participatory approaches embody listening, and allow for participant agency to be built throughout the process.