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This project began with a desire to better understand my grandfather, his life, his experiences, and how these have shaped both him and, indirectly, myself. However, this exploration takes place in his absence. He passed away prior to the start of the project, meaning that I am unable to engage with him directly. Instead, I am working with what remains: memories, objects, stories, and the traces of a life shaped by industrial labour. This absence fundamentally shapes the nature of the work. Rather than a live exchange, the project becomes an attempt to reconstruct, interpret, and engage with a person through fragments. Industry forms an important backdrop to this as it structured his working life and informed the values and behaviours that continue to resonate through family memory. However, my focus is not on documenting industrial history itself, but on understanding how these experiences persist in indirect and often unspoken ways.
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Rather than direct collaboration, the process becomes one of engaging with traces, objects, memories, inherited behaviours, and second-hand narratives. In this sense, the project can be understood as a form of deferred or posthumous co-design, where the materials of a person’s life act as proxies for their voice. The “codes” that shaped his life, formed through industrial work and lived experience, are not accessed through conversation, but through interpretation and reconstruction.
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This approach aligns with the idea that much of lived experience exists as tacit knowledge, embedded in doing rather than saying. As highlighted in the work of Andy Clark, experiences tied to labour and identity often persist subtly within everyday life, even when they are not explicitly expressed. Co-design, in this context, becomes a way of working with those subtleties.
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In Visit to a Shipbuilding Yard, a party of children takes an eye-opening tour of John Brown’s Shipyard in Clydebank, where my Grandpa worked all his life. Glowing rivets, fresh from the furnace, are tossed through the air for workers to catch and secure in place. This process is just one of the moments captured at the Clyde shipyard in this engaging educational film, which follows a class of schoolchildren exploring the site. Created as a teaching aid shown to local schools in the area, Visit to a Shipbuilding Yard successfully combines clear, informative content with vivid, memorable visuals to hold students’ attention throughout.
Using the film as a proxy for dialogue allowed me to reintroduce a form of exchange into a process that was otherwise defined by absence. By following the steps shown in Visit to a Shipbuilding Yard, rolling, shaping, and assembling, I positioned the film as a stand-in for my grandfather’s voice, something he may have encountered himself at a formative stage.
In recreating these actions with scrap materials, the visual and material parallels to the source footage became both deliberate and imperfect: my process echoed the gestures and sequences of industrial labour. This became an introspective act, where I was not only looking at the past but attempting to inhabit it, questioning what could be understood through repetition alone. In this sense, following the film becomes a form of dialogue response that takes the form of action rather than speech. This feeds into the co-design aspect by reframing collaboration as something that can occur across time, using shared processes rather than direct interaction.
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Engaging with the film in this way felt intimate and unsettling. There was a sense of closeness in following the same processes, almost as if I was momentarily stepping into a shared experience with my grandfather. Watching the two films side by side created a feeling of tension between connection and absence; I could trace a lineage of action, but never fully access the person behind it. This left me with a quiet sense of frustration, but also a deeper awareness of how much is carried through gesture and repetition.
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When I visited my gran in the house they shared, the room was full of flowers, gestures of care, but many of them had no vases to sit in. They were temporarily placed, waiting for something to hold them. As I sat with her, another delivery of flowers arrived, and she remarked that she didn’t have anywhere to put them. This moment felt significant. It highlighted a practical need, but also something more subtle, the way objects can support moments of memory, and care. The vase, in this context, became more than a functional object; it became a potential continuation of the dialogue I had been trying to establish, grounding the process in a real, lived environment.
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I applied the sections of the yard to the object, producing it in the sequence of the film. The industrial processes became the methodology for developing the final object.
Marking out • Rolling • Drilling • Riveting • Welding • Finishing
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Producing the final object required me to commit fully to the process I had set out with care and consistency, with my grandfather’s voice in my head. Unlike earlier tests, this was about resolution: bringing together the sequence of actions into a single, complete outcome. Moving through each step in order reinforced the importance of process as structure, where each action depended on the last, mirroring the logic observed in the film.
As I was making, I found myself thinking less about the final object and more about the actions I was performing, how each step related back to the processes of my grandpa. There was a constant awareness of repetition and routine, and how these gestures, when carried out daily, would have shaped ways of thinking and being. The act of making became a way of briefly aligning myself with those rhythms, while also recognising the distance between my temporary engagement and a lifetime of labour.
This project set out to explore whether design could operate as a medium for engaging with absence, memory, and unspoken narratives, in relation to my grandfather’s life. Through the process, I found that while design cannot fully reconstruct or recover a person once they are gone, it can create a framework through which fragments of their life can be accessed, interpreted, and engaged with. In this sense, the hypothesis is partially validated: design does not enable direct dialogue, but it does allow for a form of mediated, posthumous exchange, one that exists through action, material, and reflection rather than words.
Overall, the process felt slow, considered, and at times unresolved, as I didn’t know the correct direction to go in. This lack of resolution is significant, as it reflects the nature of the subject itself, partial and fragmented. Within a wider design discourse, this project contributes to conversations around design as a tool for sense-making rather than problem-solving, particularly in relation to memory, loss, and lived experience. It suggests that design can operate as a reflective practice, capable of engaging with complex emotional and cultural conditions without needing to resolve them fully.
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Grandpa
Cerificate 1
Certifcte 2
Archive Selection
Visit to a Shipbuilding Yard
RIVETS: The Movie
Gran’s Living Room
Wedding
Gran’s Living Room
Vase Sketches
Vase Prototype 1
Vase Prototype 2
Vase Prototype 3
Vase Prototype 4
Roller Vase 1
Roller Vase 2
Roller Vase 3
Rivet Vase 1
Rivet Vase 2
Petal Vase 1
Petal Vase 2
Petal Vase 3
Final Vase
Jim Graham ID
Taylor Graham ID