Design Map · Eindhoven
(Un)stilled Pain
Graduation project by Li Qiu at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
How can you communicate chronic pain when it differs from person to person? Drawing on the designer’s experience of living with endometriosis, ‘(Un)stilled Pain’ questions medical approaches that reduce pain to a numerical scale, arguing that chronic pain unfolds through time, recurrence and lived experience. Developed through workshops with doctors and people living with chronic pain, the project creates a visual language that connects subjective sensations with clinical terminology, challenging the gendered biases that have long shaped the diagnosis and treatment of women’s pain. A light table, projected patient records and a participatory card-based system invite visitors to draw their own experiences of pain while having access to an evolving library of transparent symbols to articulate their bodily feelings. By treating lived experience as a form of expertise rather than anecdotal evidence, the project proposes a collaborative relationship between patients and healthcare professionals, grounded in communication rather than measurement.