Reacting to the emergency by opening perspectives: Design-driven knit therapy as an adaptable tool to answer the change

Abstract

When the COVID-19 emergency has raised, the entire world had to stop, adapt, and face the challenge. The article reports the reaction undertaken with an ongoing project that in February 2020 was experimenting with the therapeutic effects of knitting on patients. The project, driven by scientific international studies, was bringing the intervention of designers on the topic with experimental pilot actions, designed and led by designers on-field, that were going on inside the hospital environment when the emergency changed the scenario, limited the environment, shifted the eye on a new, wider target of healthy people. Observing the new scenario and the initiatives risen on social media the designers involved in the ongoing project made knitting a tool to help individuals spending the forced time at home in meaningful ways. The project took a new perspective and evolved into a social media campaign, proposing virtual workshops for a better living in emergency times. The two projects, on-field and online, showed knitting to be a meaningful solution not only for healthcare but also for the daily life of people, and outlined how designers and a designdriven approach can act and react on the product-service creation, improvement, consolidation, and communication.