The diagram portrays addiction not as a cycle or individual pathology, but as an intricate maze, an array of orbits connecting the pharmaceutical industry, poppy cultivation, the environmental conditions of users, health care resources, and local institutions—punitive and otherwise. As explained by the accompanying website and manifesto “The Declaration of Dependence,” there’s no single entry point to the labyrinth, no clear linear progression, and only one dead end: fatality after an overdose. Everything else is an endless feedback loop. Invited by Dharwadker onto campus for reviews in April, I was confronted by the intimidating vortex her students were tasked to defy.

But this diagram (assembled after weeks of research) allows students to intercede and disrupt these loops anywhere along the way. Their proposals, for example, offer design interventions that reorganize the cultivation of poppy plants used to make opioids, and provide new economic development opportunities for small towns reeling from the loss of manufacturing and mining jobs, in addition to landscapes with more direct paths to wellness through healing gardens and communion with nature.

The proposals are a humble vision of design’s agency to heal. ....