Transdisciplinarity In Practice: Challenges And Transformative Potentials Of Participatory Design In Sociobiodiversity Contexts,
2026
University of São Paulo, Brazil
Transdisciplinarity In Practice: Challenges And Transformative Potentials Of Participatory Design In Sociobiodiversity Contexts, Denise Dantas, Suzana M. R. Álvares, Laercio Marques Da Silva, Neide Araujo, Joel Leandro De Queiroga, Luiz Octavio Ramos Filho
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This article examines the epistemological, political, and practical challenges of transdisciplinarity in a participatory design project with agroforestry family farmers in São Paulo, Brazil, within the Design for Biodiversity initiative. By bringing together designers, scientists, and farmers, the project demonstrates how participatory design operates as a negotiation between institutional knowledge and vernacular expertise. Farmers’ experiential knowledge informed design decisions and interpretations of socioecological dynamics. Findings reveal tensions not only in interactions with farmers, requiring communication adapted to accessible language and local realities, but also within the academic team, due to differing worldviews and validation standards. Through a design-led action research …
Sounding Out Service: Explaining Representational Capacity Of Sound In Service Design,
2026
Linköping University, Department of Information and Computer Science, Linköping, Sweden
Sounding Out Service: Explaining Representational Capacity Of Sound In Service Design, Ana Kuštrak Korper, Vanessa Esperance Rodrigues
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Recent research has established the necessity to understand sound as a service design material since its unique qualities can enhance representational design methods and contribute to the understanding, communication, and collaboration in designing complex service situations. However, much is still unknown about the role sound plays in the service design process and how the nuances related to its representational capacity influence collaborative sensemaking. This paper explores these nuances by developing a framework that allows inclusion of sound in service design practices regardless of sound-related skill level. The framework was developed based on empirical input from a master level course in …
Design As A Distributed Capability For Organizational Strategies Of New Product Development,
2026
University of Pisa, DESTEC Department, Pisa, Italy
Design As A Distributed Capability For Organizational Strategies Of New Product Development, Caterina Dastoli, Gabriele Goretti
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study positions Design as a distributed capability for New Product Development through ecosystems knowledge. While the strategic role of Design in local productive systems is well established, new technology affordances often necessitate the design and implementation of organizational strategies—beyond traditional business strategies—across SMEs from diverse industrial clusters. Consequently, technological evolution calls for a system-level positioning of Design interventions and a clear articulation of Design capabilities within the organizational dimension of an ecosystem, where multiple actors participate in strategic and operational decision-making for New Product Development. By conceptualizing Design as an organizational intelligence, this research highlights its potential to enable …
Staging Dramaturgies: Supporting Urban Curators In Navigating Sustainability Transitions,
2026
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands, The
Staging Dramaturgies: Supporting Urban Curators In Navigating Sustainability Transitions, Cristina Ampatzidou, Martijn De Waal, Linda Vlassenrood
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Urban curators, citizen-professionals with creative backgrounds, who mobilise their skills to orchestrate positive local change, require tools that help building community, engaging institutions and establishing legitimacy within complex transition dynamics. This paper examines Huis van de Toekomst (HvdT), a community space in a Rotterdam district undergoing a shift from natural gas to district heating, where using a participatory design approach, we co-developed a digital community visualization prototype. Using dramaturgical analysis, the study shows how the setting and composition of participatory events, and how different actors are addressed, influence how community and institutional dynamics unfold. The prototype functioned as a boundary …
Rethinking Communication And Power Relations In A Collaboration Between Designers And Welfare Communites/Organisations,
2026
School of Design, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, The United Kingdom
Rethinking Communication And Power Relations In A Collaboration Between Designers And Welfare Communites/Organisations, Zhixin Zhang, Sarah Kettley, Agnese Sile
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper presents a disabled researcher’s reflection on communication and power relations experienced through direct participation in an Inclusive Design Workshop in Tokyo. It explores how designers collaborated with welfare facility communities to develop inclusive ideas and practices. The study conceptualises inclusion as a relational process that extends beyond accessibility compliance, shaped through communication, emotion, and care. Through a reflexive ethnography that combined participant observation and multimodal analysis, four key themes emerged: Communication Barriers, Effective Communication, Effective Operation of Design Decisions, and Responding to Communication Strategies. Insights suggest that institutional hierarchies and emotional asymmetries often acted to hinder participation but …
Exploring Relationality For Future Care Technology Design,
2026
IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Exploring Relationality For Future Care Technology Design, Kamila Anna Dzierzak, Erik Grönvall
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper explores and unpacks aspects of relationality by examining design engagements in a Swedish municipal care setting. Our exploration of relational perspectives on homecare is grounded in home care workers’ (HCWs) use of a workday scheduling and planning app. This paper presents empirical data generated through interviews and participatory observations, and identifies three themes: Manifesting relationality, Affectionating relationality and Tensioning relationality. Based on our understanding of relationality as it is developed in social care and design research, we discuss how relationality develops in everyday care, by juxtaposing this with real-life accounts of relational care. Then, we deliberate on the …
Nature-Centred Biodesign For Regeneration. Design Understandings In Europe.,
2026
ID+ Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Nature-Centred Biodesign For Regeneration. Design Understandings In Europe., Nina Costa, Pierre Oskam, Helen Charoupia, Fátima Pombo
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study explores how design researchers in Europe understand and enact nature-centred biodesign for regeneration: an emerging approach that bridges design, biology, and ecology to foster regenerative futures. It proposes an evolutionary framework of design agency, mapping the transition from imitation to co-evolution and from instrumental ethics to ecological justice. The framework highlights four paradigmatic quadrants: Anthropocentric Planning, Emerging Bioeconomy, Socio-Ecology, and Regenerative Biodesign that capture how ethical, ecological, and material orientations shape practice. In parallel, it employs a qualitative analysis of a questionnaire with 32 researchers from COST Action DESIGNAE (2025), which investigates how design operates between scientific, material, …
Making The Invisible Visible: Supporting Older Adults’ Expression Of Emotional Needs For Companion Robots Through Visual Co-Design Tools,
2026
Design School, Brunel University of London, United Kingdom
Making The Invisible Visible: Supporting Older Adults’ Expression Of Emotional Needs For Companion Robots Through Visual Co-Design Tools, Chuxuan Xu, Hua Dong, Mohammed Elsouri, Mingfeng Wang
DRS Biennial Conference Series
As populations age, companion robots are increasingly explored to support emotional well-being in later life. However, older adults often find it difficult to express abstract emotions or imagine interactions with unfamiliar technologies, limiting their participation in early-stage design. This study develops and validates a structured toolkit designed to support emotional articulation and co-design participation. The toolkit, consisting of companionship cards, robot role cards, and recording canvases, was refined through expert evaluation and user testing, and validated through comparative interviews with older adults (n=10). Results show that the toolkit supported richer emotional expression, smoother dialogue, and more sustained engagement, helping participants …
Aesthetics As A Driver For Inclusion: What Recycling Rooms Reveal About Participation In Everyday Society,
2026
Mid Sweden University, Sweden
Aesthetics As A Driver For Inclusion: What Recycling Rooms Reveal About Participation In Everyday Society, Anna-Sara Fagerholm, Henrik Haller, Anders Warell, Per-Olof Hedvall
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper examines how aesthetics can foster inclusion in everyday urban infrastructures, using recycling rooms in residential areas as a case study. Drawing on a design ethnographic study of 27 municipal recycling facilities, three interconnected dimensions – access aesthetics, communicative aesthetics, and spatial aesthetics – were identified. Environments that are neglected, dark, and smelly tend to exclude residents, while those designed with aesthetic considerations foster a sense of shared responsibility and well-being. By linking perceptions of aesthetics in recycling rooms to broader debates in universal design, this paper highlights how aesthetic qualities influence participation, social connection, and environmental practices. These …
Holding Paradoxes Together: Navigating Institutional Complexity In Public Design,
2026
School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
Holding Paradoxes Together: Navigating Institutional Complexity In Public Design, Luis Garcia, Geert Brinkman
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper explores the evolving practice of design in the public sector. To do so, we initiated a reading group that brought together academics and practitioners from around the globe to discuss how public design is understood and practiced in different contexts. The common thread across the six reading groups held so far was that public design is inherently paradoxical. Three core paradoxes appear to characterize its practice: the identity paradox (blending in to stand out), the enablement paradox (constraining design by enabling it), and the political paradox (designing apolitically while designing politically). These paradoxes highlight the need for strategic …
Fictionalized Affective Relations:Rethinking Wellbeing In Human–Ai Interaction From A Design Perspective,
2026
Tongji University, China, People's Republic of
Fictionalized Affective Relations:Rethinking Wellbeing In Human–Ai Interaction From A Design Perspective, Boyu Zhang, Li Zhang
DRS Biennial Conference Series
As AI increasingly enters everyday life in intimate roles of companionship and emotional support, established understandings of wellbeing in design research are being challenged. Conventional approaches tend to frame wellbeing as an optimizable experiential state, typically enhanced by means of emotional design. However, as AI becomes a medium for emotional engagement, wellbeing shifts toward a relational outcome that emerges from ongoing interactions.This paper introduces fictionalized affective relations to describe how users, despite knowing AI lacks genuine consciousness and emotion, nonetheless disclose vulnerability, invest affectively, and derive experiences of intimacy. It identifies three ethical tensions: emotional capitalization, loss of affective sovereignty, …
Educating Inclusive Human Augmentation By Design: A Triadic Definitional Framework And Pedagogical Validation,
2026
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China)
Educating Inclusive Human Augmentation By Design: A Triadic Definitional Framework And Pedagogical Validation, Keren Zhang, Huiyi Zhang, Ka Wing Tsang, Yijia Jiang, Shiyu Liu, Kin Wai Michael Siu
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Advances in AI, wearables, exoskeletons, and BCIs are driving human augmentation (HA) into everyday use, yet education lacks a design-focused definition, a practical positioning language, and awareness of ethics. This study asks: How should HA be defined for design, and how can a critical, inclusive approach be taught and validated? Based on systematic reviews, we propose a three-part toolkit: a Human–Machine–Environment paradigm that redefines objects and boundaries; a map of design possibilities (dimensions, categories, intervention levels); and ethical dimensions spanning the thing, the human, the environment, and society. We validated the toolkit through three 8–11 week speculative workshops (n=45). Four …
Enacting Micro-Utopias: Situated Pedagogies Of Collective Imagination In Design-Based Education,
2026
Häme University of Applied Sciences, Finland, Mondragon University, Spain
Enacting Micro-Utopias: Situated Pedagogies Of Collective Imagination In Design-Based Education, Ricardo García Galiot
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper explores a pedagogical intervention that leveraged speculative enactment as a portal to utopian futures. During a Blended Intensive Program, students were presented with a design challenge that addresses workplace inclusion by reimagining it as a “future otherwise.” The challenge was projected into a future temporality, allowing participants to respond to contemporary challenges with radical imagination. Drawing on Levitas’s (2013) utopia as method and Bloch’s (1986) notion of concrete utopias, this study investigates how engaging with these enacted visions as sensorial expression serves as a mechanism to unleash potentialities latent in the present. Situated at the intersection of Design …
Toward An Architectural Model Of Design Methods: Meta-Methods, Proto-Methods, And Method Building Blocks,
2026
Indiana University Bloomington, United States of America
Toward An Architectural Model Of Design Methods: Meta-Methods, Proto-Methods, And Method Building Blocks, Colin M. Gray, Shruthi Sai Chivukula, Abdul Moeed Asad
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Design methods have long occupied a central yet ambiguous role in design research. They are invoked as distillations of procedural knowledge and recipes for action but also function as placeholders for more complex performances. Yet the persistent assumption that methods are checklists—mechanical sequences of steps that can be validated or optimized—has obscured their performative and situated dimensions. This paper revisits the nature of methods through an architectural model that distinguishes between meta-methods, proto-methods, and method building blocks. Drawing from historical, theoretical, and empirical discussions, we argue that methods are best understood as assemblages of prescription and performance, whose coherence emerges …
How To Observe Design Practices,
2026
Université de Montréal, Canada
How To Observe Design Practices, Aurelien Catros
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Aside from design theories and design methods, the design research field has built numerous methods for observing design practices. Most of them can be classified into two categories: ethnographies, which consist of sharing the daily lives of designers, and experimental approaches, which reconstruct design situations in the controlled environment of a laboratory. This study retraces the history of these methods, that exist almost independently from one another creating silos within the design research field. Throughout their respective developments, both ethnographies and experimental approaches indicate the same blind spot: the study of material traces of processes that have already taken place. …
When Data Systems Meet Ecosystems: Tensions Between Ai Platforms And Vitality In Corporate Sustainability,
2026
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
When Data Systems Meet Ecosystems: Tensions Between Ai Platforms And Vitality In Corporate Sustainability, Michelle Westerlaken, Sonja Rattay
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Ecosystems are not computers. They are alive, endlessly complex, and deeply intriguing. What if the data systems used to better understand living worlds could embed this more-than-human vitality? This paper examines ecosystem data tools in corporate sustainability, where AI tools have become key mediators in sustainable transitions. Drawing on desk research and empirical data with biodiversity specialists at 13 large corporations, it identifies four tensions that reveal deeper mismatches between computational systems and ecological worlds. These arise between demands for certainty and the unstable dynamics of ecosystems; between the need for data as neutral evidence and as arguments towards managing …
Designing A Toolkit To Explore The Design Space Of Woven Textiles,
2026
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Designing A Toolkit To Explore The Design Space Of Woven Textiles, Milou Voorwinden, Savanne Klop, Holly Mcquillan
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Driven by the potential of smart textiles, shape-changing structures, living textiles, and sustainable manufacturing methods, designers seek to push the boundaries of weaving. However, most existing industrial technologies are designed for mass-producing simple, flat fabrics. This has narrowed the collective understanding of the design potential of woven textiles, thereby restricting the development of complex, three-dimensional, and animated textiles. We present a toolkit, developed through an exploratory workshop and focus group discussions with academic and industry-based designers, that enables exploration and expansion of the design space for woven textiles. The card deck and canvas provide a shared language to externalise and …
From Values To Metrics: A Methodological Framework For Early-Stage Design Of Rural Cultural Project,
2026
School of Engineering and Architecture, University of Zaragoza, Spain
From Values To Metrics: A Methodological Framework For Early-Stage Design Of Rural Cultural Project, Rosana Sanz Segura, Giordana Gallina, Eduardo Manchado Pérez, Ignacio López Forniés
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper presents the methodological framework of an ongoing design research project focused on cultural creation in rural contexts. It structures the design work that precede co-creation workshops, including the design of tools, participant criteria, session formats and preliminary analyses to understand community needs. Based on design research in rural regions of Aragón (Spain), the study integrates human-centred and community-based design to adapt participatory processes to low-density territories. Initial results include a mapping of key actors, a first set of metrics for evaluating participation and collaboration, and the identification of gaps that justify a specific methodological guide for rural cultural …
Design Through Co-Elaboration: Friction, Dysfunction, And More-Than-Human,
2026
École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL), France
Design Through Co-Elaboration: Friction, Dysfunction, And More-Than-Human, Corentin Loubet
DRS Biennial Conference Series
AI devices are structured by “seamless” and “emotional” design, which conceals many underlying mechanisms and algorithmic rules. By contrast, behavioral objects – through defamiliarization and misbehavior – prompt critical reflection on our relationship with technological artifacts and expose their inner workings. However, most behavioral objects, particularly in art contexts, are designed to ensure predictable outcomes and audience interactions, revealing an underlying desire to tightly control the discourse produced by the work. This paper contends that their critical significance can instead emerge from their material presence through a frictional, more-than-human approach in which dysfunction becomes a source of unpredictable expressivity and …
Degree Of Anisotropy: A Textile Epistemology Of Making,
2026
Rhode Island School of Design, United States of America
Degree Of Anisotropy: A Textile Epistemology Of Making, Sheetal Agrawal, Joy Ko
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This research demonstrates textiles as an analytical framework to encode forms of distributed intelligence inaccessible to computational modeling alone, challenging contemporary design's reliance on material homogeneity. Using 3D-printed Voronoi lattices on pre-stretched tulle substrates, we reconceptualize anisotropy (directional variation in material behavior) from engineering liability to design theory cornerstone. While conventional design favors isotropy for predictability, it has been long observed that biological textiles (skin, muscle tissue, tendons, spider silk, etc) have achieved adaptive functionality through engineered heterogeneity. By systematically varying infill patterns within Voronoi structures, we establish a methodology enabling textiles to hold contradictory mechanical states simultaneously and respond …
