We discussed the possibility of focusing on women who had studied abroad and returned to China, because this user group may experience tension between personal freedom and traditional family expectations. After reflecting on it, I felt this user group might not fully represent the pressure I wanted to study, as families who willing and support overseas education may sometimes be more open-minded.

Therefore, I decided to refine my user group to single migrant women aged 25–30 who work in Shenzhen while their parents live in their hometowns. This group feels more connected to the Shenzhen context. Many of them move to the city for work, face high living costs, work pressure, and limited time for dating. At the same time, marriage pressure does not disappear because of distance. Instead, if often happens through messages, phone calls, family groups, and holiday visits.

This shift also helped me reframe the core problem. My project is no longer only about “parents arranging meet-ups.” It is about how care becomes pressure in long-distance parent-daughter relationships. Parents may see arranged introductions as support, while daughters may experience them as control, especially when there is no space for consent, boundaries, or refusal.

My updated HMW question is: How might we help single migrant women in Shenzhen and their parents negotiate arranged meetings in a way that respects both family care and personal autonomy?

Moving forward, I will research Chinese traditional family values, filial piety, marriage as an institution, and parental involvement in mate selection. I will also look at alternative models of negotiated dating and family-supported relationships. This tutorial helped me move from a broad social issue to a more specific and researchable service design opportunity.

As a next step, I have also started to contact a women’s organisation in Shenzhen called Her Voice. This organisation focuses on women’s social networking, entrepreneurship, and resource sharing. They have also organised workshops around women’s relationships with family, which makes them highly relevant to my project.

I see Her Voice as a potential field connection for my research. Their community may include many non-local single women who are building their careers in Shenzhen and may share similar experiences of family expectations, marriage pressure, and limited time for dating. This aligns closely with my updated user group: single migrant women working in Shenzhen while their parents live in their hometowns.

The values of Her Voice also connect with my project. The organisation supports women in building networks, sharing resources, and finding their own voice. Similarly, my project aims to help women express boundaries and personal autonomy within family communication, without completely rejecting care from parents.

Working with or learning from this organisation could help me access more relevant participants, understand real stories from women in Shenzhen, and possibly test early design ideas in a more grounded community setting.

I had to present my project to a classmate. She listened, and then tried to fill in a table with what she heard. She hesitated. Her pen paused. She asked me to repeat something. Then paused again.

That hesitation told me everything.

I realised that my explanation was not clear enough. I thought I knew my project well: arranged marriage/meeting in China, the gap between parents and young women, the pressure and the miscommunication.But when I tried to explain it simply, without slides or notes, the details became blurry. My classmate could not easily capture the key points because I had not made them easy to capture.

In service design, communication is not just about sharing information. It is about making sure the other person truly understands. If a listener hesitates when filling out a structured table, it means the story lacks clarity, structure, or specific details.

This was a wake‑up call. I cannot assume that people will follow my thinking just because I am passionate about the topic. I need to practice explaining my project in short, clear sentences: who the users are, what the problem is, why it matters, and what I plan to do.

After the Learn stage, we moved to Link. I combined all keywords, identified repeating patterns, and clustered similar ideas into themes. This was where things started to make sense.

My scattered words: “pressure”, “parents arranged”, “no voice”, “emotional needs”, were grouped with similar words. Suddenly, patterns emerged. One cluster became “intergenerational misalignment.” Another became “structural pressure on women.” Third became “lack of collaborative tools.”

I think I need a tighter pitch. Core loop only: parents worry → arrange dates → young women feel pressure → no communication → cycle repeats. And this is also the problem summarize. Thematic clustering is not just an academic exercise. It is a way to let the data speak back to you. My half‑empty canvas from last week started to fill up after this session.

This session reminded me that a service designer’s first tool is not a prototype, it is clarity of communication. If the person sitting next to you cannot capture your problem in a structured table, the problem is not yet ready to be solved. The Learn stage exposed my messy storytelling. The Link stage gave me patterns I could not see alone. That loop is now the spine of my project.

I have decided to build my methodology around four interconnected approaches: the Double Diamond process model, participatory design, human‑centred design, and design action research. Each of these serves a specific purpose in my project.

Double Diamond as a Structural Framework

The Double Diamond model provides a clear visual structure for my design process. It is divided into four phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. The Design Council describes the Double Diamond as a model that moves between divergent thinking, where designers explore an issue more widely, and convergent thinking, where they focus and refine the problem or solution (Design Council, n.d.).For a project where the problem is not yet fully defined and the solution remains unclear, having this kind of structural guide is essential. It prevents me from jumping too quickly into solutions or getting lost in endless exploration. The first diamond (Discover and Define) will help me properly understand the intergenerational communication gap before I even think about designing anything. The second diamond (Develop and Deliver) will guide me through prototyping and testing my intervention.

Human‑Centred Design as a Guiding Value

I also want to be explicit about my value orientation. Human‑centred design places human needs and limitations at the centre of the design process. SO 9241–210 defines human-centred design as an approach that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on users, their needs and their contexts (ISO, 2019). This might sound obvious, but in the context of arranged marriage, it is actually quite radical. My project will consistently ask: what do the people in this system actually need? Not what their parents assume they need. Not what society expects them to want. But what they themselves say matters. This human‑centred lens will inform every stage of my research, from how I frame interview questions to how I evaluate my final design.

Participatory Design: Giving Users a Voice

My project is fundamentally about people who are excluded from a decision‑making process that directly affects their lives. Young women in arranged marriage systems rarely get to say how they are represented or who they are matched with. This is precisely where participatory design becomes relevant. Participatory design engages users as full participants in each phase of the design process. It raises questions of democracy, power and control, seeking to equalise power between designers and users by ensuring users become co‑creators.

Design Action Research: Learning Through Doing

Finally, I plan to use a Design Action Research (DAR) approach. While action research traditionally involves iterative cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting, design action research specifically focuses on developing and testing design artefacts within a real‑world context. Sein et al. (2011) describe action design research as a method that combines building, intervention and evaluation, where the artefact is shaped through its interaction with the social context.

For my project, this means I will not simply propose a theoretical service and stop there. I will prototype small interventions, such as a collaborative profile card, or a workshop format, and test them with real users. I will observe what works, what fails, and why. Then I will refine and test again. This cyclical process is essential for a project like mine, where cultural norms are deeply entrenched and user behaviour is hard to predict without real feedback.

My tutor helped me realise that arranged marriage is a system built on assumptions: that parents know best, that conditions predict compatibility, that young women will accept what they are given. My methodology is designed to challenge those assumptions, not by rejecting them outright, but by introducing alternative voices, alternative data, and alternative ways of making decisions.

Bibliography

Design Council (n.d.) The Double Diamond. Available at: https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/resources/the-double-diamond/ .

ISO (2019) ISO 9241–210:2019 Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.

Sein, M.K., Henfridsson, O., Purao, S., Rossi, M. and Lindgren, R. (2011) ‘Action design research’, MIS Quarterly, 35(1), pp. 37–56. doi: 10.2307/23043488.

Right now, I do not have a partner organisation. I am in London, so I cannot easily talk to stakeholders in China. That makes everything harder. But the Design Research Canvas helps. It forces me to organise my thoughts, even when I feel lost.

I tried to fill it out, but it did not go well.

[image: design research canvas]

My thinking was to messy. I left many sections blank. I also wrote down a lot of questions instead of answers. Looking at that half-empty canvas, I realised something clear: my research so far is not enough to hold up a full project.

But I do know one thing for sure. I want to work on the communication gap between young people and their parents in China around dating and marriage. This is not a random choice. I see this problem everywhere, my friends, my peers, my relatives. Parents arrange meeting after meeting out of love and a sense of duty. But young people are already exhausted by work and daily life. They have no energy left for dating. And the constant pushing from parents only adds more pressure.

So I roughly know who my users are. I roughly know what they are going through.

Then a peer gave me a helpful nudge. She said: maybe focus on women aged 25 to 30. Because women face much stronger marriage pressure than men. There is the biological clock. There is the stigma — an unmarried woman in her late twenties is often judged or labelled unfairly. I think she is right. This direction helps me go deeper into a specific question: what problems do women face in the marriage market under a patriarchal society? That will shrink my project scope to something more manageable.

So here is what I learned from this messy canvas. To write a valuable and doable project proposal, I need to be specifics. And I need a lot of research. Knowing my users and a real gap is just the beginning. Now I need to build on that with more focused research.

Next step: dig deeper into this topic, and update the canvas again.

Bibliography:

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1949) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press.

1.Introduction

The work that keeps us alive, is the work that is most consistently undervalued, underpaid or invisible. In the UK, women do 60% more unpaid work than men, ranging from childcare to housework, to caring for elderly family members, according to the Office for National Statistics. This isn’t a neutral difference. This means straight consequences: the motherhood penalty. It translates to lost promotions, lower pension contributions and a lifetime of lower earning.

This blog reflects on my Design Futures project, which explores how unpaid care work might be recognized, measured and redistributed in the future. Rather than treating the future as a prediction, I use it as a critical space to examine the present. The project asks itself the question of what might happen if a government tried to formalize care work by implementing a national system for valuing care. What would happen if the economy were founded on caring and compassion? Would this make for a more equitable society, or would it foster other forms of surveillance, pressure and inequality?

I will first discuss the theoretical grounding that shaped my work, such as speculative design, feminist speculative design and experiential futures. I will then describe my evidence horizon, world building, future artefacts, testing and iterations with my research through design process. Lastly, I will discuss the important concepts I will incorporate into my future design career. Overall, this project has prompted reflection on design as not only a means to problem solving, but also a means of questioning related to power, justice, future, and labour.

2.Designing futures through feminist critique

2.1 Speculative design as a way to critique the present

Speculative design is useful to my project as it will enable the future to be a tool for questioning the present. Augers (2013) suggests that the practice is for “two purposes: first, to help us think about the future; second, to critique current practice”.

He also says there should be a balance to the speculative design, not going too far off the ground. For a speculative proposal to be effective, it needs a “perceptual bridge” between the audience’s existing world and the fictional future being presented. In other words, the future you create must not be entirely unfamiliar. It must have some familiar parts to let them in and then start to question it.

This is what I tried to do with the Care ID system. 2038 is not a distant science-fiction world, it is built from systems that already in place today: digital identity, biometric tracking, welfare assessment, and productivity measurement, etc. These familiar elements help make the speculative world believable.

That is the perceptual bridge. The audience is shown what is already taking place in the UK now. Then they start seeing these systems being used in care work, and it seems to be plausible and wrong. The strangeness makes them step back and ask: Is this recognition or is this control? Staying close enough to reality to be believable, but strange enough to make us uncomfortable. Because that discomfort is where critique begins. As Auger’s work reminds us, thinking about future and critiquing the present are not separate tasks

2.2 Feminist speculative design and intersectionality

While speculative design gave me a method for using the future to critique the present, feminist speculative design helped me question who is included in that future, who is excluded, and whose labor is being valued. This was crucial as my project is about unpaid care work, not only an economic but a feminist and political concern. Care work has always been linked to women, particularly in the house, and often considered as natural, emotional or moral work instead of real work. By taking a feminist perspective, I was able to go beyond simply asking how care could be rewarded and instead ask how systems of reward might reproduce existing forms of inequality.

According to Martins (2014) it is a theory that has been “theorised within the safe confines of developed, european countries and practised largely by a privileged and mostly white, male, middle class crowd.” Although speculative and critical design can be seen to be socially critical, they have not always been sensitive to gender oppression, privilege and intersectionality.

The term intersectionality was key to the project as not all women are equally impacted by unpaid care work. Gender inequality is intersected by class, race, disability, migration status, age and family structure. A single mother, a disabled person, a migrant care worker and a woman from a wealthy profession for instance will experience the national care system differently.

This means that a feminist reading of my project cannot end by declaring that ‘care work should be recognised’. It should also ask, what care is being recognised, what body is being monitored, and which failure to care is being penalised? As Costanza-Chock (2020) argues, design is never neutral; it always distributes benefits and burdens. In my project, the Care ID system is supposed to benefit un-paid care work, but it also is producing new “good” and “bad” citizens. Registration leads to greater tiers of welfare through care work and collection of Care Credits. Refusers or failure are restricted, judged and socially stigmatised.

Therefore, feminist speculative design helped me understand my project as an ambiguous future rather than a simple utopia or dystopia.

2.3 Experiential futures and future artefacts

Candy and Kornet (2019) state that futures should not stay as abstract concepts or written scenarios. In their introduction to Ethnographic Experiential Futures, they describe how a researcher can take participants’ spoken hopes and fears and translate them into concrete objects, as if they had actually come to pass. A written scenario can tell of a “possible” world and is often abstract. Experiential futures make the future scenarios more tangible and accessible for people by engaging them with objects, images, services, performances or environments. That’s the exact same method I used for the Care ID system. Objects I designed were not intended to demonstrate that Care ID system should exist. Instead, they were intended to make people “enters” into the system as though they already lived in it.

Our future artefacts focused on the everyday administrative touchpoints of the 2038 care system. These could include a Care ID registration video, a wrist-chip consent document, a Care Hub kiosk, a Care Credit system dashboard, a video post on social media, a reddit post, or a Care Credit website. Different parts of the system are visible in each artefact. They assist the viewer to comprehend the notions of care and identity, care and welfare, care and citizenship and care and social judgement.

These artefacts are valuable in that they make an abstract moral question a more personal one. It is easy to agree that unpaid care work should be recognised. It is more uncomfortable to imagine receiving a government letter telling you that your welfare tier has been reduced because you did not complete enough verified care work. It is also uncomfortable to imagine wearing a chip that tracks whether your care has been officially counted. The project provides a first-hand experience of the effects of the future system through these artefacts.

This also influenced my testing procedure. Rather than only asking participants what they thought about unpaid work in general, I could observe how they responded to specific pieces of the future. Their confusion, discomfort, agreement or resistance became part of the research. Candy and Kornet describe this as part of a wider EXF cycle, where future artefacts are mediated, mounted and then used to capture audience responses. For me this meant considering the reactions of the audience as anything but mere feedback, but as evidence of how the speculative world was functioning.

Overall, experiential futures helped me to realize that future artefacts are not just outcomes that are visual. They are research tools. They allow people to enter a future emotionally, socially and ethically.

3.Reseach Through Design Process: Building, Testing and Iterating the 2038 Care System

3.1 Horizon Scanning: Tracing the present signals

In the process of creating the world 2038, we first conducted a horizon scanning process to identify the signals, trends and tensions of the present day regarding the unpaid care work. This stage assisted us in not imagining what the future scenario would be. We took the current social, political, and technological developments and used these to get us started in our speculations.

The first signal was demographic pressure. here is a growing need for care due to ageing populations and women’s workforce is underutilized in the broader economy. The second signal was the growing recognition that unpaid care work is not simply a private “women’s duty”, but a structural issue linked to poverty, welfare, childcare and social care systems (Smallwood Trust, 2025). The third signal was the digital economy, where the so-called ‘pink-collar’ jobs have grown more, including social media management, a role that is often feminised and that can be emotionally demanding, but not valued like jobs in the technology sector that are dominated by men.

We also looked at youth movements as a political signal. Recent protests led by Gen Z demonstrate how younger generations can challenge old hierarchies and demand new forms of governance. Finally, there was a technological signal in the form of integration of digital identity. techUK proposes that Digital ID can evolve into an infrastructure over the next 5–10 years that is linked to verified credentials, consented data flows and cross sector services (Ifayemi, 2025).

These signals shaped our design question: what might happen if the government tried to solve the invisibility of care by making care measurable, traceable and exchangeable? This question became the foundation for our 2038 Care ID and Care Credit system.

3.2 World building: The Ministry of Care

Based on the signals from horizon scanning, our project became a speculative 2038 world called The Ministry of Care. In this future, the UK has experienced a youth revolution against gender inequality, the care crisis and outdated work systems. In response, the government establishes a new ministry to officially acknowledge the care work as national labour.

The system is built around Care ID and Care Credit. From school age, citizens are taught that care is a civic responsibility. They will be required to go to a Care Hub when they turn 18 to get a Care ID, and a small chip embedded in their wrist. This chip keeps track of an approved activity in the care sector and links to every citizen’s digital care file.

Care Credits are given to citizens who finish a recognised act of care, like childcare, caring for the elderly, cleaning the neighbourhood or some other kind of home care. They are required to do a minimum number of care hours each quarter. The level of welfare they receive is based on their Care Credit balance, the more care they contribute, the better the benefits and the more access to public services they receive.

While the system appears to value unpaid care work, it also turns care into something measurable, traceable and enforceable. If someone refuses to register or does not do the minimal amount of care work, they will face punishment and will be sent to a care correction prison to study care ethics and work for free as a part of their rehabilitation.

3.3 Designing future artefacts

To make The Ministry of Care feel real, we designed future artefacts that showed how the system would appear in everyday life.

These included:

Newspaper: Showing what happens in world 2038, let participants better immerse in this setting.

Leaflet: Explaining how the Care ID system operates while also revealing the persuasive and coercive language used to encourage participation.

Posters: Normalise Care ID through friendly messaging, while creating social pressure to participate.

Website/ The Care Hub Kiosk: Explains the system as an official public service and shows how citizens would register and interact with the system in everyday life.

2038 limited edition skin art: Makes the future feel official and time-specific, showing how citizenship, care status and state recognition are visually branded within The Ministry of Care

Orientation video: Introduces citizens to the Care ID system, using a friendly instructional tone to make registration feel normal, necessary and socially responsible.

Youtube video: Using familiar online media to make the future system feel accessible, official and normalized.

3.4 Testing method

The future artefacts were used as a way to introduce the participants to The Ministry of Care and then to see how they reacted to the system for testing purposes. Instead of only explaining the concept, we showed them the Care ID, Care Credit and website of The Ministry of Care, so they could experience the future as a possible public service.

The testing focused on three areas. First, we tested whether participants could understand how the system worked: how citizens register, earn Care Credits, complete care work and move between welfare tiers. Second, we asked for emotional and ethical responses, especially which parts felt fair, uncomfortable or controlling. Whether they are willing to participate in this system. Third, we used the discussion to test the feminist critique of the project: whether participants felt the system truly valued care, or whether it created new forms of pressure and inequality.

3.5 Iteration: what changed/kept after testing

Testing helped us understand which parts of The Ministry of Care felt believable, persuasive or too extreme. Based on participants’ feedback, we made three main iterations.

3.5.1 Forced Registration vs. Indirect Coercion

In the first version of the system, registration was c mandatory for life. Those who resisted to the Care ID system would be put in jail where they would learn about the ethics of care and engage in care work. During testing, many participants felt this was too extreme and removed personal freedom completely.

“it’s forcing me to do work that I don’t want to do … I feel like I’m in jail”

What changed after testing: We modified the system in such a way that citizens can in principle refuse to be registered and can exit the system. However, doing so means losing access to major welfare benefits, facing social stigma, and needing to complete re-education courses if they want to rejoin later. This made the system less directly forceful, but still coercive through welfare, peer pressure and public judgement. We wanted to show the number of women that are not necessarily legally compelled to do care work but are nevertheless pressured socially, for instance through motherhood.

3.5.2 Weak Tax Rewards vs. Tiered Benefits

In the original version, Care Coins could mainly be exchanged for tax reductions. However, during testing, participants did not find this reward attractive enough. One tester said, “As an accountant I know there’s so many legal ways to avoid and reduce your tax.” This feedback showed that tax reduction alone was not a strong enough incentive to make citizens want to join the system.

What changed after testing: We restructured the benefits system with various welfare levels. Citizens with more Care Credits gain access to stronger benefits, such as housing support, travel rights, public service priority and other everyday privileges. This made the system more persuasive as the participation has an impact on a lot of aspects of life. It also made the future more unsettling, as citizens can seem to ‘choose’ to join and in fact their choice can be influenced by access to welfare and social opportunities.

3.5.3 Frightening Visuals vs. Friendly Persuasion

Our early visual design used a strict and warning-based tone. The posters featured forceful government-like messages and negative language. Some of the participants in the test found this too frightening. One tester noted that it was too much poster anxiety before the idea could be absorbed and that the bold NOs were not readable and were stressful.

What changed after testing: We toned down the visual style and moved away from the command style to one that was more encouraging and community-based. We didn’t use terms like orders or warnings, but rather something like “Our community needs you! ” so on the surface, the system seemed kinder, more approachable. However, it also made the project more critical, because it showed how control can appear through friendly language, emotional appeal and community pressure rather than obvious threats.

3.6 What the process revealed

The project showed how from research to the design perspective, making, testing and iterating, not only theory can lead to insights. The artefacts enabled us to investigate the reactions of people to the different types of power used in The Ministry of Care: direct punishment, welfare incentives, social stigma and friendly persuasion.

One key insight was that the design of “choice” is political. In the begining, citizens had to sign up, an action that was immediately interpreted by the participants as authoritarian. Following the iteration, citizens were given a right to opt-out but participation was linked to welfare, benefits and social respect. This made it more realistic and brought out a feminist tension: care work is often done seemingly out of choice, but it is formed by social expectations, particularly for women in the role of carer, mother and/or daughter.

It also revealed how the incentives of service can evolve into a design mechanism of coercion. The new system which made the tax reduction more appealing evolved by introducing tiered benefits that would impact housing, traveling and the provision of public services. This also made the “choice” to participate less free. By design iteration, we found that control is not always necessarily expressed as punishment and that it can be engrained within service accessibility and the daily need to rely on others.

Lastly, it was evident in the visual iteration that tone and aesthetic values are not neutral. If the posters were too scary, participants concentrated on fear before they could think about the concept. The system was made easier to enter, but more unsettling by changing its tone to be softer and more community friendly. It revealed how care can be a kind rhetorical code of governance: “Our community needs you” is a supportive statement but it can also elicit guilt and moral obligation

Overall, the research through design process helped us to transition from an obvious dystopia to a more subtle and critical future. It brought out in the process that the feminist care system is not to be judged only by its care redistributive dimension, but also by the way in which participation, consent, reward, refusal are designed.

4.Key Takeaways

This project taught me that design futures are not only about imagining what might happen next. They can also be used to question the systems, values and power structures that already exist. Through The Ministry of Care, I explored a future where unpaid care work is finally recognised, but only through measurement, welfare tiers, surveillance and punishment. This helped me understand that a future can appear progressive while still reproducing control.

My first lesson that I will carry forward as a result of this lesson is that design should not only provide solution but should provide questions. The problem at the start of the project was thought to be: how is it possible to value unpaid care work? This question became more complicated, because of the research through design process, because now there is a question of who is determining the value, who is being measured, and what is being done when caring is made a criteria of welfare and citizenship? I want to consider how design can be used to begin to open these sorts of critical discussions rather than quickly seek out solutions in my practice.

The second lesson is that good intentions are not enough. The Ministry of Care begins with a feminist aim: to recognise and redistribute care work. However, the project shows that even a system built around care can become oppressive if it relies on surveillance, ranking and coercion. This reminds me that designers need to consider not only what a system claims to do, but also how it operates and who may be harmed by it.

Overall, The Ministry of Care has changed how I understand my role as a designer. I do not want to design futures that only look innovative or efficient. I want to design futures that ask who benefits, who is excluded, and what kinds of relationships they produce. For me, the key takeaway is that care should be valued through support, solidarity and redistribution, not through chips, coins and punishment.

Reference List

Auger, J. (2013) ‘Speculative design: crafting the speculation’, Digital Creativity, 24(1), pp. 11–35. doi: 10.1080/14626268.2013.767276.

Candy, S. and Kornet, K. (2019) ‘Turning foresight inside out: an introduction to ethnographic experiential futures’, Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3), pp. 3–22. doi: 10.6531/JFS.201903_23(3).0002.

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020) Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hall, L. (2026) ‘Social Media Is Still Being Called “Women’s Work.” And It’s Costing the Whole Industry’, SocialDay. Available at: https://socialday.live/features/social-media-is-still-being-called-womens-work-and-its-costing-the-whole-industry.

Ifayemi, L. (2025) ‘What do you want for Digital ID over the next 5–10 years?’, techUK, 13 October. Available at: https://www.techuk.org/resource/what-do-you-want-for-digital-id-over-the-next-5-10-years.html.

Prado de O. Martins, L. (2014) ‘Privilege and oppression: towards a feminist speculative design’, in Lim, Y., Niedderer, K., Redström, J., Stolterman, E. and Valtonen, A. (eds.) Design’s Big Debates: DRS International Conference 2014. Umeå, Sweden: Design Research Society.

Smallwood Trust (2025) ‘Presenting our latest report on the state of Gendered Poverty in 2025: Where Inequality Lives’, Smallwood Trust, 21 July. Available at: https://www.smallwoodtrust.org.uk/news/presenting-our-latest-report-on-the-state-of-gendered-poverty-in-2025-where-inequality-lives/.

She was born in 1999. Her parents had arranged another date. “They already printed my info and took it to some park,” she said. She had just turned to 26. In her parents’ eyes, that was already late.

She doesn’t want to be introduced like a product listing height, salary, housing, age. “They don’t even ask what kind of person I like,” she said.

The conversation stayed with me. I have always been deeply curious about relationships between people, especially the kind that stretch across two generation, filled with both conflict and love.

I am not hear to judge either parents or their children. Parents love their children and want to take responsibility for helping them settle down, but the methods they use are outdated. Young adults want to decide for themselves who to spend their life with, yet they are reluctant to take the initiative to meet new people or they resist to enter into an intimate relationship.

I want to explore:

What truly determines happiness in marriage?
In intimate relationships, does interest-driven matching actually lead to better outcomes that value-driven matching?
Where is the balance between parents’ and children’s views on marriage?
How do we maintain family harmony under pressure?
What role does social pressure play in marriage and family?

Everything is still in the early stages of exploration. I still feel lost about the topic. Should I start from the parents’ perspective? But at least I have a general direction.

I’ve found some reference to read for further exploration:

CHAN, A.H.N. and CHEN, P. (2022). Parents and Unwed Daughters as an Intergenerational Alliance? — Parental Matchmaking and China’s Single Women. Journal of Family Issues, 45(1), p.0192513X2211346. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513x221134658.

Cheung, S.N.S. (1972). The Enforcement of Property Rights in Children, and the Marriage Contract. The Economic Journal, 82(326), p.641. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/2230003.