SF Design Week Healing Art Forum
- One Culture Foundation
- Jun 16
- 3 min read
How does healing happen? Perhaps it begins with a breath — a moment of stillness that allows us to feel again.
On June 8, 2025, One Culture Foundation sponsored and co-presented A Special Multisensory Healing Forum at Google Community Space During San Francisco Design Week, as part of San Francisco Design Week 2025.
The forum brought together artists, architects, designers, and cultural practitioners to explore one shared question:
How can art, design, and technology help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the world?
A gathering of senses and stories
The conversation opened with Justin Hoover, Curator, Cultural Strategist, and Director of Special Projects at the Chinese Historical Society of America.Drawing from his curatorial work with the Venice Biennale’s American Pavilion, the Riga Sculpture Quadrennial, and Oregon Contemporary, Hoover reflected on how collective ritual and participatory design can foster emotional agency and belonging.
He reminded us that healing is not only individual, but also cultural — a practice of remembering, reimagining, and creating together.
The dialogue was curated and moderated by Xinye Lin, artist and designer behind Nebula, an award-winning sculptural solid perfume designed as a portable ritual for calm and sensory clarity.Rather than a typical artist talk, the forum unfolded as a living conversation — part sensory experience, part philosophical inquiry.
A dialogue across disciplines
The panel featured three remarkable speakers whose practices each approach healing through different mediums:
Jenny Jiang, AI Product Lead at CVS Health / Co-founder of HarvardXR, shared insights on building empathy-driven AI tools for mental wellness.
Stephen Sun, Founder & CEO of D!G / Harvard GSD Alumnus / Y Combinator-backed Architect, discussed how intelligent architecture can embody care and restoration.
Antonia Dapena-Tretter, Art Curator at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, reflected on integrating art into clinical spaces to support emotional wellbeing.
Together, the speakers explored how technology, space, and art can create new pathways for healing — not as isolated efforts, but as collaborative, human-centered design.
The pause between words
Between discussions, participants were invited to experience Nebula — not as a product, but as a moment.The small sculptural solid perfume was passed between hands, its gentle click and scent creating a collective pause.In that brief silence, the group found what many of us crave in daily life: a sense of grounding, of being fully here.
It was a simple but powerful reminder — that healing can begin in the smallest gestures, in shared breath, in the act of noticing.
Toward a culture of collective care
As part of our Healing Art Forum Series, Inside of Nebula reflects One Culture Foundation’s belief that art is a language of empathy.We see creativity as a tool for connection — between cultures, disciplines, and generations.By bringing together diverse voices at civic spaces like Google Community Space, we aim to make healing a public conversation, not a private luxury.
At One Culture Foundation, we continue to explore how art, design, and mindfulness can help us imagine new ways of living and caring — together.
“When creativity meets consciousness,” a participant shared,“art becomes not what we look at, but what holds us together.”
About the Healing Art Forum
The Healing Art Forum is an ongoing initiative by One Culture Foundation that convenes artists, scholars, and community leaders to explore the intersections of art, wellbeing, and social impact.The forum invites reflection on how sensory experience, storytelling, and cultural design can nurture emotional resilience in our collective future.
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