Design as reconstruction: UNBROKEN at the Ukrainian Design and Innovation Week
With this project, presented last May in Kyiv and online, resilience becomes a real design matter, through which the essence of new objects takes shape in workshop practice and co-creation.
There is a question that Ukrainian design has been forced to ask for more than three years now, a question no design school has ever put on a syllabus and that has nonetheless become, in a country under invasion, the most urgent of all: can an object help someone return to themselves? Not heal in the clinical sense, not compensate for a loss, but recover motor coordination, concentration, the sense of doing something with one’s own hands, without that hand shaking, or being absent entirely.
The sixth edition of Ukrainian Design and Innovation Week (UDIW), held in Kyiv and online from May 4 to 10 under the theme AMBIENCE, hosted among its projects what is probably the least spectacular and the most necessary: the collaboration with the National Rehabilitation Center UNBROKEN – a rehabilitation center specializing in complex prosthetics, surgery, physical rehabilitation, psychological recovery, housing, and reintegration for Ukrainians affected by the war.
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This collaboration produced neither a fair-ready collection nor a rhetorical manifesto about resilience, a world that in public discourse on Ukraine has by now the consistency of a cliché – but brought to Mystetskyi Arsenal a series of everyday objects: tableware, interior pieces, ceramic accessories, made inside a creative workshop where civilian and military patients, adults and children, use manual craft as a neuropsychological instrument of recovery.
UNBROKEN at the Ukrainian Design and Innovation Week:
The workshop as threshold
UNBROKEN is a full-cycle rehabilitation center – prosthetics, physiotherapy, psychological support – that has developed internally UNBROKEN Art, a program integrating ceramics, weaving, painting and other applied practices into the therapeutic process, not as entertainment to soften the dead time of hospital stays, but as a tool for rebuilding what violence has interrupted: the connection with one’s own body, with one’s capacity to act on things, to produce something that exists in the world. The repeated gesture – shaping clay, threading a loom, controlling a brushstroke – is therapy precisely insofar as it is also a re-appropriation of agency that war takes away.
“The process was not built like a classical design project,” UNBROKEN Art Association explains, “There was no external design brief or separate designer-led research phase. The starting point was the patients’ own experience: their rehabilitation, adaptation to prosthetics, physical limitations, everyday needs, and emotional state. Inside the creative workshop, patients work with materials, test ideas, and gradually turn their needs into objects. Marta Batura, Head of the UNBROKEN Creative Workshop, and Kostyantyn Tsyrkot, a Ukrainian veteran, provide technical support, help with realization, and ensure a safe working process, but the authorship remains with the patients.“
This project is important because it shows design not as external authorship, but as a tool for recovery, adaptation, and practical self-support. The objects are valuable because they were created by people who understand these needs from their own experience. As one explanation of the project states: “Patients often began by working with materials as part of psychological rehabilitation, but the process led them to create functional objects based on real needs.”
Against the object as signature
What the project stages is an implicit critique – and all the more effective for being unstated – of a design culture that still thinks of itself in terms of authorship, market innovation, the object as signature. That’s why the pieces produced in the UNBROKEN workshop matter: because they don’t seek that kind of recognition. They are – in the most precise and unassuming way possible – functional objects, marked by specific bodily histories, conceived from the standpoint of adaptation, from the renegotiation of ordinary gestures after injury, and their form is not the result of a creative brief but of lived experience.
It is no coincidence that inclusive design emerges here not as an aesthetic category or a market label, but as a direct response to a body that has had to relearn how to use things.
“One of the key insights was how naturally the process moved from a therapeutic activity to practical problem-solving. Patients often began by working with materials as part of psychological rehabilitation, but the process led them to create functional objects based on real needs.” continues the UNBROKEN Art Association “Their experience gave them a precise understanding of what would be useful, comfortable, and relevant for people undergoing similar rehabilitation. This made the final objects very specific and personal, rather than stylistically unified.“
What they created are not design products in the traditional commercial sense. Most of them respond to the patients’ changed physical needs, daily routines, and new bodily experiences after injury and prosthetics. The forms are shaped directly through physical experience: grip, balance, weight, comfort, and ease of use become determining factors in the making process, particularly for people adapting to prosthetics and altered bodily conditions. Some objects were made for personal use, while others were created for fellow patients, friends, or brothers-in-arms with similar needs. In this sense, the objects combine practical function with psychological recovery as they help patients regain agency through making.
The scale that reconstruction ignores
There is also a political dimension the project carries without needing to articulate it: while debate on the reconstruction of Ukraine focuses almost invariably on infrastructure, architecture, foreign investment – the logic of buildable space as the terrain of economic restart – this operation shifts attention to a scale that logic tends to ignore, but that is the most important for the life of citizens and their need for a normal everyday existence.
The domestic and bodily scale – that of the home, the table, the object held in one’s hands – is not a less urgent scale; it is the one where it is decided whether daily life will become livable again, whether the body that survived can also recognize itself in an ordinary gesture, whether the continuity of everyday existence – the cup, the plate, the gestures of the kitchen – can be recovered as a form of presence rather than a simulacrum of what came before.
“The hands-on process was central to the outcome. Patients made decisions through direct work with materials and through their own physical experience. For people undergoing prosthetic rehabilitation, aspects such as grip, weight, balance, comfort, and ease of use are especially important. These practical factors directly influenced the form and function of the objects. The collaborative environment also mattered. Patients could share experiences, observe one another, and create objects not only for themselves but also for people with similar needs,” says UNBROKEN Art Association.
The public program at UDIW included, on May 10, art therapist Iryna Holubetska in a panel discussion on the relationship between environments and recovery, and the day before, a conversation on the center’s methodologies with specific reference to the role of creative practices in neuropsychological healing. The edition also integrated a direct social mission, with a target of 200,000 UAH to be raised through donations and the sale of ceramic objects produced in the workshop.
The proposal of UNBROKEN remains, in this sense, both cultural and practical: a reminder that contemporary design cannot separate itself from the practice of care – not abstract care, but the concrete reconstruction of gestures, routines, and the possibility of imagining something that comes after.
About the author
Ludovica Proietti, journalist, design historian and curator, teaches in universities and curates events, always exploring projects with fresh, unconventional perspectives.
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