The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2021–2022
MPAN's Hope Narratives distills 500 years of grief into 1.4 million combinable sentences
Over 500 years of lived experience, distilled into 145 modular phrases, let grieving families assemble 1.4M+ therapeutic sentences of their own.
MPAN (Missing Persons Advocacy Network)
What it had to solve
When someone goes missing, their family is left with unresolved grief and complicated feelings that ordinary language cannot carry, and they often believe they are alone in them. MPAN, which supports these families, wanted a way for people to describe their pain, find a way of coping, and reach a hopeful outlook.
How it works
When a person goes missing, their loved ones are left grieving without resolution: feelings too complicated for ordinary language, and a loneliness that makes them worse. MPAN, the Missing Persons Advocacy Network, wanted a way for people to describe that pain, find a way of coping, and reach a hopeful outlook.
The Hope Narratives answers by making the grief speakable. More than 100 hours of recorded audio and more than 500 written survey responses — together more than 500 collective years of lived experience — were distilled into 145 pieces of modular language. Users select and sequence these pieces, and the combinations assemble into more than 1.4 million possible Hope Narratives.
What each person composes is a therapeutic sentence: a description of their pain, a way of coping, and hope. Because the language comes from people who have lived through the same loss, it can say what the grieving person cannot yet say alone — and D&AD's awards archive carries the system as a designed language tool.
Why it lands
- The raw material is lived experience — over 100 hours of audio and 500+ survey responses — so the language rings true to the people it is built for.
- Modularity beats a fixed message: 145 pieces yield more than 1.4 million combinations, each assembled by the person it belongs to.
- It gives words to feelings that had none, so a grieving person can describe the pain, name a way of coping, and hold onto hope.
- As a designed system it scales beyond one campaign — the same building blocks can serve families and clinicians anywhere.
What it did
The archive records the deliverable in its own numbers: 145 modular pieces of language that join into more than 1.4 million possible Hope Narratives, each assembled by the grieving person rather than written for them. D&AD's awards archive carries the system, and whiteGREY's work on it won the media and marketing category of the AFR Most Innovative Companies awards in 2023.
What you can take
When an experience outruns ordinary language, harvest the words of people who lived it and make them modular — so each sufferer can assemble a sentence that is exactly theirs.
Since then
MPAN agreed to pursue the concept pitched by creative technology agency whiteGREY in mid-2021 and launched the Hope Narratives in mid-2022, developed with ambiguous loss researcher Dr Sarah Wayland. The system draws on hundreds of people with lived experience of a missing loved one and was already being translated into multiple languages for use beyond Australia. whiteGREY's work on the project won the media and marketing category of the AFR Most Innovative Companies awards in 2023, and the system remains in D&AD's awards archive.
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