Between Holding On and Letting Go

A small introduction (for people new to the project)

Treasured Moments: the original project

Treasured Moments began as my graduation project at TU Delft, exploring how families might use play and storytelling to support children through grief and loss.

It started as a physical, wooden treasure chest but now, over time, through conversations with therapists and caregivers, it has slowly transformed into something more fluid, accessible, and still evolving. If you would like to check out the original project, you can take a look here: Treasured Moments

Where it started

During my thesis, I felt a strong sense of clarity. I was working in a space I deeply cared about while also finally getting to explore play as a design language.

It felt like I had found a very specific intersection I wanted to stay in.

I designed Treasured Moments around memory tiles and shared interactions between families. At the time, I was proud of it, but also slightly unaware of what would come after.

When the project left University

After my thesis, I continued talking about the project to people.

Very quickly, one practical concern kept coming up: the wooden form factor would be expensive and difficult to produce at scale.

This was something I had not fully considered during the intensity of making it.

The question — how would this actually reach families? slowly started shifting everything.

Because if accessibility mattered, then maybe the project could not remain tied so strongly to a carefully crafted object.

Prompt Cards

The first response was small: extracting parts of the system into printable prompt cards.

At first, it felt like a compromise, all the elements of play were missing. Like I was only taking the “easiest” part of the project forward.

But over time, it revealed something important:the core of the experience was not really the object itself, but the interactions between people.

The conversations. The shared remembering. The moments that emerged around it.

The pause, and the return

Like many projects after graduation, this one paused for a while.

Other work came in, life moved forward, and the project slowly moved into the background.

But it never fully disappeared.

Every now and then, I would return to it with a slightly different question.

If this can be printed… why not rethink everything?

And eventually another question followed: But how will people even find it?

I think that question led me somewhere unexpected.

I began writing a short book.

Not as a replacement for the project, but as a gentler way into conversations around grief and loss.

It became a story about Zoe, a character from the original project but now without the object, focusing instead on emotional familiarity and shared reading.

The book stayed with me longer than I expected, quietly waiting in the background while the rest of the project continued shifting shape.

Conversations that changed the project

Earlier this year, at Spielwarenmesse, I met people who eventually connected me to a therapist based in Delft.

Reaching out to her changed the trajectory of the project.

She responded with openness, curiosity, and care, and most importantly, she immediately saw potential in the work.

She offered to translate the book into Dutch and also connected me to others in her network.

And suddenly, the project was no longer just mine.

Until then, Treasured Moments had mostly existed within the context of my thesis and my own reflections around it. Hearing practitioners respond to it shifted something.

Through conversations with therapists, something became clearer.

Each of them seemed to respond to a different part of the project.

Some connected strongly with the book and the shared reading experience.

Others felt the prompts were more approachable and usable than many existing grief resources currently available to families.

And some were especially interested in the active, game-like structure itself.

One therapist compared it to the pamphlets she currently gives families and said this felt significantly more usable.

Another mentioned she had rarely encountered active play-based mechanisms used in this context.

Where the project is now

This is where Treasured Moments currently stands.

I have redesigned it into a fully printable, open-access resource:a set of memory packets, prompt cards, and simple family games that can be used in different ways depending on context.

It is not meant to replace the original wooden version.

It simply feels like the same ideas taking on a different form.

Check out the resource here-

Resource

A personal reflection

Sometimes I wonder if I am holding on to an old project instead of moving forward.

But every time I speak to a therapist or someone working directly with families, the sense of direction returns.

The project doesn’t feel finished.It feels like it is still finding its form.

And maybe that is what it has always been doing.

I still don’t know exactly where Treasured Moments will end up.

But the conversations around it keep opening doors I did not expect.

And for now, I am trying to follow that quietly, one conversation at a time.