Person-centred care (PCC) is a perspective that aims to re-humanise care within healthcare systems that have progressively been burdened by institutional complexities, political demands, and weakened public financing. Human-centred design (HCD), with its range of methods and practices, has emerged as an important generative tool in the implementation of PCC, prompting in recent years a rapprochement between design and healthcare disciplines. HCD promises to mobilise designerly empathy and imagination to articulate and address human needs. However, HCD is no panacea, and its application must be undergirded by a participatory ethos that rejects tokenistic or lazy uses of empathy that reduce people being cared for to a list of needs. In the field of design, HCD has been criticised for its overemphasis on problem solving and shallow conceptualisation of empathy. What if, rather than problem solving, design is used to open conversations? What if, rather than taking them for granted, notions of “care” and “need” are jointly defined in conversation by all parties concerned? How can design help such conversations? This workshop aims to cut through HCD hype and engage participants in an exploration that elicits the heart of PCC, communication between the cared for and the cared by. The subject matter of the workshop will be “conversation starting” and the interactive component will consist of a hands-on activity in which participants will be tasked with making “conversation pieces” from a playful and designerly point of view. That is, this activity will depart from the tendency within design to provoke conversations using the production of materialisations, artefacts, and experiences – often for exhibition purposes. Participants will have the opportunity to collaboratively explore formgiving with run-of-the-mill materials (paper, pens, markers, sticks, tape, and other supplies) to evoke conversations together and coproduce “conversation pieces" ready for display. The workshop will end with a small-scale participant exhibition. The workshop will be structured as follows: introductory presentation (10 min), guided hands-on activity (35 min), mini-exhibition (15 min). Both workshop organisers will play the roles of presenters and facilitators.