Exploring the Making Activities of Women in Crisis Situations.

Engaging in 'making' activities has been shown to have a positive impact on health and wellbeing. In this paper we present our work in progress towards an understanding of the making activities of a group of seven women in different crisis situations. Through self-reported probe kits and semi-structured contextual interviews, we found that our participants were involved in making for two main reasons -- as a way to serve their own healing process and as a potential business/entrepreneurial activity. We discuss implications of these findings and as part of our future work we describe our plans to conduct co-making workshops for designing tools that can support and empower women in crisis situations.