There is a rock in my home that is older than every story I know.

I picked it up on the upper Oldman River, near the Crowsnest Pass, on a fly fishing trip. That part of Alberta has always held me in a way I can’t fully explain. The cold water. The sound of it moving over stone. The wind coming down off the mountains. I feel it before I can find the words for it.

The place carries human stories too. Long before any of us, it was Blackfoot and Ktunaxa land, and their stories of that river aren’t mine to tell. Then came the coal mines, the disasters, the mythology of the rum-runners. And something personal: many of the people who settled there were Italian immigrants, and that connects me to my own culture.

The rock was resting on that riverbed for millennia before anyone stood on the bank. It will be there long after we are gone. It sits in my home for a moment of its existence. It carries a few of my stories now. I can’t begin to imagine the ones it carried before.

A flat book about the body

Reciprocity by Design: Architecture for Indigenous Tourism was written by Vivian Manasc, Safira Lakhani and Tiffany Shaw of Reimagine Architects, and shaped by a team of architects, writers, illustrators and designers. I was its creative director and graphic design lead. One chapter, Crafting Sensory Experience, opens with a simple question: What is felt?

Of all the questions the book asked of us, that one stayed with me. The chapter is about the body: steam on cedar, heat in a concrete floor, the sound of a fire, the taste of bannock. A book is flat. You can’t feel a rock in a photograph. You can only see it and remember your own.

So together we stopped trying to reproduce the experience and started trying to trigger the memory of it. We chose paper to be held, not just read. The colours came from the land. For the illustrations, we photographed real materials and drew dashed lines around them, and I brought this rock to that table. Those lines are an admission, and they leave the designer’s hand visible. A drawing can only trace the edge of a thing. The rest, the reader brings.

The project gave me, as a designer, the opportunity to learn from Indigenous ways of knowing. I’m not here to speak for that knowledge. What I took from it is that we are in relationship with the land, that it was here long before us, and that some knowledge only reaches us through the senses.

Three questions

At an Edmonton Design Week salon on the book, I hosted a table on that chapter. I passed the rock around and asked three questions.

1. Introduce yourself through one place your body remembers. What did you notice first: a sound, a smell, a temperature, a texture, the ground under you?

2. When has something someone made slowed you down or made you feel you belonged? What did the maker do that you could feel?

3. If a feeling can be remembered but never fully reproduced, what could designers do, or leave room for, to make experiences more intentional, more connected and more fully felt?

The last question became a brief. Each person finished one sentence on a post-it: Designers could leave room for…