Visible Care: The Empathy Jacket Project

Visible Care is a critical design project that challenges higher education's structural myth of the "unencumbered" student by exposing the invisible physical, emotional, and logistical labor carried by student-parents. Through an innovative blend of textile design and autoethnography, the project transforms personal lived experience into a shared, tactile encounter. Its central artifact, the Pregnancy to Parenting Empathy Jacket, acts as a wearable design intervention that invites non-parenting students to feel the literal weight of prenatal and caregiving realities while navigating everyday university environments