Hanna and Marc facilitated a conversation with Pittsburgh’s design community about what “human-centered” means when we’ve left out death, loss, and grief—universal parts of human experience.
The invitation asked: Something is knocking on our door. Something wants to come in and join us for dinner. Its knocking may make us uncomfortable or even frighten us. And answering the knock might be an expansive and joyful surprise.

This was the work Hanna had been doing for years—teaching people to face what can’t be avoided, to stay in the room when everything in you wants to leave. She brought the same practices she’d used in racial healing work, in teaching Design for Social Innovation, in learning to live while dying: making space for discomfort, staying with what’s difficult, finding possibility in the shadow.

The workshop moved through an arc—from comfort to discomfort to possibility. First, participants named what’s easy to talk about: home renovations, sports, food, hobbies. Then came the unwelcome topics, surfaced through playful chaos that reset the room’s energy before the difficulty. The invisible was made visible—participants seeing that they weren’t alone in carrying experiences like grief, addiction, poverty, abuse.

Hanna shared her story: learning to love both the light and shadow sides, because “I am the shadow side of the paper, and I’m dying. My choice is to learn to love them as much as the others.” She asked: “How do I and we enlarge ourselves enough so we can welcome all of the human experience?”

The evening closed with possibility—what becomes available when we stop facing away from what’s hard? What sources of connection and wonder live in the topics we’ve exiled?