Paper short abstract:

Ex-life is a European-Vietnamese social design project encouraging Vietnamese youth to exchange views on organ transplantation.

Paper long abstract:

The interdisciplinary project aims to increase young people's capacity to make confident decisions about whether to join the organ donation register, as well as to create a familiarity with the practice of transplantation.

Conversations with university students in Ho Chi Minh City were facilitated by touching of organ shaped objects in an artistic research, asking how they can imagine to share an organ with another. The recurring theme of the relationship between donor and recipient relates to ideas of solidarity and community of the young educated generation. Many students thematised the difficulty of communicating a decision to join the register to their parents because they do not have the permission before. In Vietnamese culture, a younger's decision has to be accepted by the older domestic generations of a family. The designs, drafted to be distributed on campuses in HCM, are in style of travel tickets, referencing the contemporary trend of backpacking. Unknown to the older generation is many young people's desire and opportunity to travel without their families. The tickets titling 'a different journey of life' invite sharing thoughts about organ donation with someone. Comments and questions can also be posed online, where medical professionals comment and provide reliable information in Vietnamese language using the hashtag #tiepnoihanhtrinh. The tickets can be kept as reminder or to get in contact with the cooperating hospital's transplantation unit.