Home

Carrying Home explores home not as a fixed location, but as an evolving emotional and sensory condition shaped by memory, migration, ritual, and repetition. Rooted in personal experience and auto-ethnographic research, this thesis examines how belonging persists when physical return becomes uncertain or impossible. Moving between India and the United States, I began questioning what remains when home can no longer exist as a stable geography. Through this inquiry, the project shifts from understanding home as an archive of preserved memories to recognizing it as a performative and embodied practice sustained through everyday gestures, objects, and acts of care. Using communication design as both method and framework, the thesis investigates how sequencing, material layering, fragmentation, and spatial arrangement can translate emotional memory into visual and tactile systems. Personal artifacts such as photographs, textiles, domestic objects, and rituals become “memory containers” that carry emotional continuity across displacement. Influenced by theories of belonging, sensory memory, ritual, and diasporic identity, the work positions nostalgia not as passive longing, but as an active process of reconstruction. Rather than attempting to recreate a lost home, Carrying Home proposes that home is continually assembled through repetition, sensation, and attention. The project ultimately argues that communication design can function as a portable framework for belonging — one that preserves emotional residue while allowing identity to evolve across changing spaces, cultures, and time. Home, therefore, is not something permanently found or fully recoverable, but something carried, maintained, and rebuilt through lived experience.

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