Reclaiming ‘Autonomía(S)’: Governance Through Design,
2025
Umeå Institute of Design
Reclaiming ‘Autonomía(S)’: Governance Through Design, Pamela Gil-Salas
Nordes Conference Series
Data has become a central resource shaping political economies, extracted through digital infrastructures that operate across borders and often reinforce existing inequalities. This paper examines the fragmented nature of data governance across multiple levels and argues for centering governance on data itself rather than solely focusing on platforms, algorithms, or industry compliance. To ground this analysis, the paper frames data governance within the context of data colonialism—that is, as a continuation of extractive practices that commodify human life. It then introduces 'autonomía(s)', or collective agencies, as both a counter-narrative to dominant data regimes and a praxis for 'comunalidad', or communal …
Human-To-Human Interaction Design: Choreographing Relational Practices,
2025
Oregon State University
Human-To-Human Interaction Design: Choreographing Relational Practices, Erica Dorn, Kera Nelson
Nordes Conference Series
This paper explores Relational Design as a choreography of practices that cultivate the skills necessary to navigate differences and build community within design processes. It promotes a design practice that sees relationship-building as a core function of creating long-term stewardship in participatory worldmaking. The relational practices presented here emerge from outside traditional design disciplines, drawing primarily from community organizing, with an understanding that change occurs through networks of interdependent relationships. The paper outlines a trans-experiential set of practices: honoring place as kin, revealing and redistributing power, cultivating a culture of accountability, facilitating dialogue, and hosting belonging and celebration. These practices …
The Relationship Between Maker, Machine And Material: Creative Investigation Of Geopolymer Extrusion 3d Printing,
2025
Aalto University
The Relationship Between Maker, Machine And Material: Creative Investigation Of Geopolymer Extrusion 3d Printing, Lennart Engels, Priska Falin, Luis Huaman, Johannes Kaarakainen, Maarit Mäkelä, Jussi Leveinen
Nordes Conference Series
The use of geopolymers in creative practices, encompassing the fields of art, craft, and design, is still relatively unexplored. This paper introduces early explorations focused on geopolymer extrusion 3D printing in a creative studio context. The closer focus is on the context-bound connections of the maker, machine and material during creative practice. As an outcome of experimentation and creative problem-solving, this paper presents original and innovative extrusion printing methods that create a new fabrication aesthetic that acknowledges and emphasises the coiled aesthetic generated by this process. The three perspectives of maker, machine and material are discussed individually and together; opening …
The Bread Without Form: Attuning To Relational Ways Of Making Through Convivial Baking Practice,
2025
Aalto University
The Bread Without Form: Attuning To Relational Ways Of Making Through Convivial Baking Practice, Gianluca Giabardo, Luis Vega, Maarit Mäkelä
Nordes Conference Series
This paper investigates the notion of form as a relational process rather than a fixed attribute of things. Through the lenses of contemporary design theory and symbiotic conviviality, we present a snapshot of the first author’s bakery practice, where the ever-emerging form of sourdough bread is used to discuss ways of attuning differently to dominant understandings of design, making, and materiality. The case presented here follows a practice-led research approach, with different sources of data captured through documentation and reflection. Our findings illustrate the methodological potential of baking to explore form-making as a convivial and symbiotic process. We conclude by …
Imagining A Soft And Relational Smart Home,
2025
IT University of Copenhagen
Imagining A Soft And Relational Smart Home, Tom Jenkins, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Stina Hasse Jørgensen
Nordes Conference Series
This paper presents three scenario-based speculations accompanied by material explorations of soft IoT for smart homes based on humidity data. Cycle Lines tracks and displays weekly patterns of humidity levels shown as colored lines in a woven display, Relationscape, a real-time tracker and knitted display of humidity showing the relation between two different households, and Eco-collective, embroidery IoT that changes color depending on the humidity levels of different objects in the household. Based on first-person engagements with humidity sensors placed in the authors’ homes, they imagine new types of soft IoT devices that sense and display relations to humidity data, …
Transforming Complex Environments: Applying Systems-Oriented Service Design In Complex Built And Digital Environments,
2025
University of Lapland
Transforming Complex Environments: Applying Systems-Oriented Service Design In Complex Built And Digital Environments, Sari Kotaniemi, Mari Suoheimo, Satu Miettinen, Birger Sevaldson
Nordes Conference Series
The built environment includes all man-made spaces for activities like living and urban development, organised via zoning and land use planning. To enhance sustainability, Finland's environmental administration launched the Ryhti project to centralise data systems, optimising the accessibility and consistency of land use and construction information. This research investigates how systems-oriented service design, specifically gigamapping, supports the strategic implementation of complex digital built environments. Through literature review and a case study, it showcases gigamapping’s role in the strategic-tactical spectrum of organisational decision making, applying the four levels of design management and the iceberg model of design problems to contextualise decision …
Intentional Action At The Margins: Unpacking Agency In Public Service Ecosystem Design,
2025
Aalto University
Intentional Action At The Margins: Unpacking Agency In Public Service Ecosystem Design, Nicole Hußmann, Annukka Svanda, Martina Čaić
Nordes Conference Series
This paper examines how public service ecosystems shape the agency of marginalized residents, focusing on immigrant job seekers. While ecosystem perspectives in service design have highlighted marginalization and actor interconnectedness, the role and intricacies of agency remain underexplored. To address this gap, we draw on a service design project in the City of Espoo aimed at improving an employment service for immigrants. Our findings reveal that immigrant job seekers’ agency is affected by (i) limited psychological, financial, and temporal resources, (ii) distorted information flows, (iii) the dependence on community support, (iv) biased attitudes of service staff and managers, and (v) …
In Concert With Molten Glass: Social And Material Actors In Glassblowing Practice,
2025
Aalto University
In Concert With Molten Glass: Social And Material Actors In Glassblowing Practice, Sara Hulkkonen, Maarit Mäkelä, Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen
Nordes Conference Series
The practice-led case study presented in this paper explores entanglements of social and material actors in a glassblowing practice. To understand the relationality of these actors, this study discusses how the models of reflection and diffraction can help in analysing a collective process of doing. In this study, video documentation was used as a method to accumulate information on the glassblowing process under scrutiny. The result, a multiscreen video, was analysed to identify social and material actors affecting the process, and to understand the sociomaterial doings of the practice. This study suggests that appreciating the sociomaterial constituents of glassblowing practice …
We Are All Old: Decentralising Visions,
2025
RISE AB
We Are All Old: Decentralising Visions, Hayley Ho, Elsa Vaara
Nordes Conference Series
This paper seeks to understand how a mixed methodology of speculation, design practices, and artistic practices can help design researchers understand how people of different ages and backgrounds may distribute their visions about being old. Our overall motivation for the research is that countries in the world are struggling to shape good societies while the pace of population aging is accelerating faster than in the past. The world’s problems are often perceived as complex, leading some to lose faith in their ability to effect change. Every person is a piece of the larger puzzle, and we argue that when individuals …
Exploring Design Fieldwork Dilemmas In Mental Healthcare Through Foucaultian Mechanisms Of Power,
2025
Estonian Academy of Arts
Exploring Design Fieldwork Dilemmas In Mental Healthcare Through Foucaultian Mechanisms Of Power, Eva Liisa Kubinyi, Jeanne Sintic
Nordes Conference Series
Design scholars are advocating for building a deeper and more nuanced power literacy when applying participatory approaches in mental healthcare. Although actionable frameworks have been developed to identify risks, these approaches rely heavily on designers’ analytical skills and do not offer ways to understand power through multiple scales that simultaneously influence individuals and populations. If this concern is not addressed, designers might inadvertently reproduce harmful power structures. Therefore, this paper builds a Foucaultian lens of disciplinary and bio-power to reflexively analyze design fieldwork dilemmas in mental healthcare contexts from France and Estonia. It contributes to deepening designers’ power literacy by …
Poetic Engagements With Technology: An Alternative Design Space For Embracing Vulnerable Human Nature,
2025
Umeå Institute of Design
Poetic Engagements With Technology: An Alternative Design Space For Embracing Vulnerable Human Nature, Young Suk Lee
Nordes Conference Series
If sensitive and fraught aspects of human experience are to be brought into design, an alternative design space is needed to build human-technology relations beyond problem-solving approaches. This paper describes a series of research through design projects embracing vulnerable human nature, arriving at an articulation of what poetic engagements with technology can be like. Through unfolding a more than decade-long design experimentation, this work aims at reimagining our current technologies and how we engage with them. Each design exploration mediates poetic interaction possibilities through expressiveness, feltness, and mediativeness in designing technology. These poetic qualities encourage people to rediscover their humanity, …
Tangible Theory As Tool For Attuning To Non-Human Voices In Domestic Gardens,
2025
University of Southen Denmark
Tangible Theory As Tool For Attuning To Non-Human Voices In Domestic Gardens, Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard, Tau Lenskjold, Mathilde Buskbjerg Madsen, Asbjørn Krüger Mønster, Giocchino Matteo Maniscalco
Nordes Conference Series
This paper introduces a design research tool that integrates anthropological perspectives on non-human agency to reimagine biodiversity in garden design. While gardens comprise a minor portion of global biomass, they are critical sites for urban biodiversity and multispecies interaction. A central challenge lies in learning to attune to non-human actors. Building on theories of ecological inter-dependence in the Anthropocene, we ask how such perspectives can be operationalised in design practice. Grounded in the "Patchy Anthropocene" framework (Tsing et al., 2019), the tool translates theoretical insights into an actionable prototype. Drawing on interviews with garden owners in six European countries, it …
Designing Relations All The Way Down: Hyperlocal Eco-Social Arcs Of Care And Roleplay,
2025
University of Sussex/Malmö University
Designing Relations All The Way Down: Hyperlocal Eco-Social Arcs Of Care And Roleplay, Ann Light, Ruth Catlow
Nordes Conference Series
We use the relational as a lens to examine how a workshop, created to inspire sensitivity to the interdependent nature of all life, is itself a nest of relations—shaped by intentions, co-created content, and outcomes beyond organisers’ influence. With a practical mission to decentre humans and acknowledge interdependencies – in a turn to more-than-human ethics and a commitment to the hyperlocal eco-social – the workshop employs live action roleplay (LARP) to engage a small English town in facing future uncertainties. We explore the place of care, solidarity and collective agency in confronting readiness to deal with coming challenges. Linking theories …
Poetic Layers: Exploring The Aesthetics Of Bias,
2025
Umeå Institute of Design
Poetic Layers: Exploring The Aesthetics Of Bias, Young Suk Lee, Johan Redstöm
Nordes Conference Series
As new technologies enter everyday life, designs have to address new interactions between ethics and aesthetics as new possibilities also come with new consequences. A current example concerns Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the issues of bias that seem to come with its predictive and generative capacities. To explore bias further, we start with the question that if bias is present (and perhaps cannot be completely eliminated), what could it be like to instead work with its expressions? And could exploring an ‘aesthetics of bias’ allow us to come closer to where bias comes from in the first place, in how …
Activating Aesthetics - Explorations For Shifting Design Practices,
2025
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO)
Activating Aesthetics - Explorations For Shifting Design Practices, Felicia Nilsson, Lise Amy Hansen, Maria Göransdotter
Nordes Conference Series
Aesthetics is essential in design practice, yet simultaneously taken for granted and under researched. In light of the expanding design space designers find themselves in due to digital technology’s pervasiveness in everyday things and environments, designers need new ways of grappling with the issue of aesthetics. There is recognition that design ideals and practices honed in different times and contexts, lead to reproducing ideas of how things are made, and how things could or should be presented for use. This paper examines notions and practices of aesthetics in digital design through conversations with practicing designers, design literature, and design experiments. …
Designing For Relay-Tional Co-Becoming,
2025
Kolding School of Design, Lab for Sustainability and Design
Designing For Relay-Tional Co-Becoming, Alexandra Harder Lindek, Mathias Poulsen
Nordes Conference Series
This paper explores how the relay conversation approach can facilitate designerly co-becoming in rural communities working towards emerging futures. Building on relational perspectives in design research, we engage with the idea that participation in design is not merely about including diverse voices but about fostering conditions for mutual becoming. We examine how this approach unfolds through ongoing engagements and situated moments, where designers and communities navigate uncertainty and collectively shape new potentials. Rather than treating design as a predefined problem-solving activity, the relay conversation approach works with the evolving dynamics of place, social relations, and ecological entanglements. Through autoethnographic reflections, …
Designing Relational Space: Towards Adaptive And Interactive Learning Environments,
2025
New Practice in Art and Technology, University of the Arts Berlin & Technical University Berlin
Designing Relational Space: Towards Adaptive And Interactive Learning Environments, Johannes Pointner, Albert Lang
Nordes Conference Series
This paper investigates relational and interactive principles in spatial design. Drawing from Relational Theory of Space, Actor-Network Theory, and embodied interactivity, it examines space as a dynamic and interactive system rather than a static framework. Using the New Practice Co-Lab as a case study, the paper examines modular architectural frameworks, technological integrations, and participatory design processes that create flexible, multifunctional environments for learning and collaboration. It further explores the ambiguities of relational spatial design, highlighting its challenges and opportunities. Rather than proposing a universal blueprint, this research presents scalable principles for designing situated spaces as emergent, user-driven systems.
The Relational Becoming Of A Participatory Design Commoner,
2025
IT University of Copenhagen
The Relational Becoming Of A Participatory Design Commoner, Sanna Marttila, Frederick Van Amstel, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero, Giacomo Poderi, Maurizio Teli, P.D. Commoner
Nordes Conference Series
This research expands the understanding of the collective designer behind Scandinavian Participatory Design with the Latin American notion of relational ontology, which posits a worldview where everything and everyone are mutually constituted through evolving relationships. Drawing from three thematic workshops with design practitioners and scholars that explored intersections between commoning and designing, this research unveils the relational becoming of a participatory design commoner. This includes the production of a shared subjectivity—the collective designer—as integral to commoning design and designing commons. Specifically, we explore the role of participatory designers in commoning through their subjectivity in their infrastructuring actions and affective engagements …
Cultural Sovereignty And The Future Of Indigenous Digital Storytelling,
2025
University of Lapland
Cultural Sovereignty And The Future Of Indigenous Digital Storytelling, Amna Qureshi, Jonna Häkkilä, Pigga Keskitalo, Inker-Anni Linkola-Aikio
Nordes Conference Series
Indigenous digital storytelling extends beyond sharing narratives—it is a practice of cultural sovereignty, self-determination, and knowledge stewardship. Digital storytelling aligns with Indigenous research methodologies, emphasising relationality, oral traditions, and community-centred knowledge production, ensuring that these stories remain rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. While digital media provides opportunities for Indigenous communities to share their narratives, it also poses risks of appropriation, misrepresentation, and external control. This study examines how relational design and participatory methodologies can support Indigenous digital storytelling while respecting cultural protocols and reinforcing community governance. By critically analysing existing storytelling frameworks, we explore whether participatory design …
Journeying With Kala: Exploring Interdependencies Of Material, Land, And Maker In Shaping Textile Practices,
2025
Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture
Journeying With Kala: Exploring Interdependencies Of Material, Land, And Maker In Shaping Textile Practices, Mithila Amy Mohan
Nordes Conference Series
Accompanied by Kala, an indigenous cotton from Kutch, India, this study examines the interdependencies of land, material, and maker that are fostered in textile practices. It explores materials as companions in practice, shaping the trajectory of making through their processual entanglements with human and more-than-human environments. The research employs a practice-led methodology integrating historical review of cotton in India, ethnographic inquiry into practices related to Kala in Kutch, and hands-on weaving experiments. The weaving explorations with Kala, seen as a process of correspondence, detail the role of materials in making, where environmental conditions, material properties, and practitioner interactions shape the …
