From Co-Design To Co-Execution: A Knowledge Map Of Real-Time User Participation In Service Settings (2008-2024),
2026
Tongji University, China, People's Republic of
From Co-Design To Co-Execution: A Knowledge Map Of Real-Time User Participation In Service Settings (2008-2024), Yue Cao, Yihan Zhao
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This bibliometric study analyzes 236 articles from Web of Science (2008-2024) to map the intellectual structure of real-time user participation in service encounters (RUP-SE). The field has transitioned from exploration (2008-2013) to maturity, with post-2020 publications averaging 29.5 annually. Three core research clusters emerge: real-time co-creation and participation, digitally-driven service innovation, and value creation-destruction dynamics. Theoretically grounded in service-dominant logic and value co-creation frameworks, the field addresses how technological advancement and COVID-19 have accelerated the shift from co-design to co-execution. However, platform architectures introduce governance logics that render co-execution inherently asymmetrical, and value co-destruction in algorithmic contexts may be structurally …
Fine Observation And Material Care: An Interactionist Approach To Design Aesthetics,
2026
Aalto University, Finland;
Universidad de la República, Uruguay
Fine Observation And Material Care: An Interactionist Approach To Design Aesthetics, Washington Morales-Maciel
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper argues that the question “How does the awareness of material sustainability change perceptions of aesthetics?” requires an interactionist framework from philosophical aesthetics, against both eliminativist and formalist models. Without treating materials as morally valuable entities, there is no room to integrate the ethical dimension into aesthetic evaluation. However, the question can be inverted, since aesthetic perceptions also contribute to how we ethically treat materials. Central to the argument is the claim that aesthetic properties, by virtue of their affective character, are partly constitutive of the moral dimension of visual representations, not mere embellishments but active elements in shaping …
A Systemic Design Approach To Supporting Children With Different Language Parents,
2026
Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
A Systemic Design Approach To Supporting Children With Different Language Parents, Mitte Van Boxem, Maud Gruyters
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper describes a master’s thesis process in which systemic design was used to explore how children with a different home language than the national language can be supported. Using a systemic approach, this research maps the complex network surrounding these families and identifies key leverage points: valuing the home language, reducing pressure on the child, and strengthening family integration. Through interviews, cultural probes, and co-creation with professionals, insights were translated into a low-threshold product-service system (PSS) embedded in the children’s living environment. The PSS encourages family interaction and neighbourhood engagement through playful exploration. The findings underscore the potential of …
Balancing Aesthetics And Protection: How Digital Artists Navigate Structural Inequities Through Aesthetic Watermarking,
2026
School of Design, Hunan University, China
Balancing Aesthetics And Protection: How Digital Artists Navigate Structural Inequities Through Aesthetic Watermarking, Runqi Fang, Changjuan Ran, Shenglan Cui, Xiangyu Meng, Biyao Li, Fang Liu
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Online presentations of digital art place artists in an ongoing trade-off between gaining exposure and protecting copyright, one that current platforms inadequately support. As a result, artists often rely on aesthetic watermarks, yet how they manage this balance remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted a co-creation workshop with 18 digital artists and examined how they design aesthetic watermarks in practice. Analysis reveals three key concerns shaping their decisions: aesthetic integrity, semantic fidelity, and protective functionality. Participants struggled to manage the tension between protection and artistic completeness, while also expressing growing concerns about the security of their work, facing rapid …
Figurations As A Situated Counter-Device For Participatory Design: Exploring Time And Presence In Design Practice.,
2026
Independent researcher
Figurations As A Situated Counter-Device For Participatory Design: Exploring Time And Presence In Design Practice., Diana Maria Mahecha, Juan Alfonso De La Rosa, Juan Pablo Velasquez
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This article explores the notion of figurations as a theoretical and methodological concept to address tensions between time, presence, and practice in participatory design processes. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s and Rosi Braidotti’s work, we argue that figurations invite more situated practices that acknowledge the relational and material realities emerging in Global South contexts. Methodologically, the paper offers a situated ethnographic reading of participatory workshops conducted in Colombia, tracing the patterns and affections that shape collective action. We propose figurations as embodied, affective, and speculative counter-devices that foster political imagination and community agency in processes of social transformation. The paper contributes …
Grounding The Interspecies Playground: A More-Than-Human Framework For The Goccia Project,
2026
Department of Design - Politecnico di Milano
Grounding The Interspecies Playground: A More-Than-Human Framework For The Goccia Project, Francesco Vergani, Davide Fassi
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper describes and presents a workshop conducted with partners of a European research project that reinterprets a former industrial site – now a small urban forest – as an Interspecies Playground, a living lab of multispecies coexistence. Through systemic design, more-than-human perspectives, and transdisciplinary collaboration among scientists, experts, designers, the municipality, and local communities, the project introduces a theoretical framework of relational ecology that seeks to challenge anthropocentric urban models and promote a new conception of green urban areas. By showing the project framework – articulated along the three interconnected layers of agents, phenomena, and contexts – and the …
Historical Materials As Materials For Design,
2026
The University of Queensland, Australia
Historical Materials As Materials For Design, India Anderson, Skye Doherty, Ben Matthews
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Historical materials can support generative design work, however a tendency to focus on new and emerging technologies as design material mean the creative qualities of the past are underappreciated. This paper presents findings from four workshops that explore material and immaterial forms of history to better understand how the past might serve as material for design. Our findings illustrate how different material forms afford or limit relational connections to the present design context; that design references can hinder transformational experiences in practice; and how archival gaps and personal memory can also serve as design material. Our analysis underscores the need …
Sounding Territories: Dis/Identificatory Codings As Relational Worlding,
2026
Delft University of Technology
Sounding Territories: Dis/Identificatory Codings As Relational Worlding, Grace Turtle, Błażej Kotowski, Elisa Giaccardi, Roy Bendor
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper presents Sounding Territories, a sonic performance developed with Fundación Organizmo (Colombia) that explores dis/identificatory codings as a tactic for resisting and subverting algorithmic capture. Building on queer and more-than-human perspectives, the project reorients computational logics from stable classification toward relational and generative forms of identification. Through deep listening, embodied performance, and model training, datasets were composed as relational constellations: entanglements of sounds and situations (e.g., fire–conversation–bird–wind) that enact the liveliness of data beyond representational frames. Rather than seeking legibility within existing taxonomies, dis/identification becomes a methodological reorientation–a performance of politics–that disturbs predictive logics and embraces illegibility as generative …
The Atmospheric Jukebox - A Sonic Boundary Object For Multi-Sensory Exhibition Design,
2026
Kolding School of Design, Sonic College - UC SOUTH DENMARK
The Atmospheric Jukebox - A Sonic Boundary Object For Multi-Sensory Exhibition Design, Jonas Rasmussen Kirkegaard
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Museums increasingly aim to create multisensory, immersive experiences, yet exhibition design still tends to privilege visual-first ideation and communication, risking outcomes that are photogenic rather than atmospherically coherent for visitors. This paper introduces the Atmosphere Jukebox, an interactive soundscape playback device that enables heterogeneous teams of curators, designers, architects, historians, and educators, to listen to, discuss, and negotiate sonic atmospheres in the design process. In doing so, it supports multimodal attention and a shared imagination of the affective affordances that unfold across the visitor journey. The Atmosphere Jukebox is therefore proposed as a boundary object for atmospheric staging. The contribution …
Body Class, The Grand Museum And The Queer Archive,
2026
Royal College of Art
Body Class, The Grand Museum And The Queer Archive, Tadeas Riha
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Tělák, a Czech slang term for physical education (PE) that also echoes tělo - body, is a theatrical exhibition, developed by an interdisciplinary team of educators, activists, architects, and theatre professionals, introducing expressions of gender as a spectrum for teenage audiences. The exhibition unfolds across two layers. The first is a scenography evoking the familiar spaces of PE; corridors, changing rooms, bathrooms, gyms, reassembled within the museum’s own charged normative setting. The second is an archive of personal stories: fragments of experience retold by actors in sound, and others inscribed in situ by a local artist. This practice-based paper traces …
Co-Designing Co-Design Workshops With Adhd Adults,
2026
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Co-Designing Co-Design Workshops With Adhd Adults, Patrick Brundell, Emily Thorn, Teresa Castle-Green, Paul Tennent, Juan Martinez Avila, Sachiyo Ito-Jaeger
DRS Biennial Conference Series
The increased recognition that minoritised people should play a more significant role in the research and design of technologies aimed at them is welcomed. Though Interaction design research has begun to address the needs of neurodivergent people, the epistemic framing of the research aims, and practical co-construction of technologies are still infrequently from a lived-experience perspective. This work sought to address some of these concerns through a series of interaction co-design workshops with ADHD adults framed as technological design for wellbeing. This paper reflects on our adaptive use of Soma and Co-design workshop methodologies to account for and speak to …
Keeping It Real With Responsible Futuring: Reflecting On The Epistemic And Political Ambition Of A Transdisciplinary Approach For Societal Transitions,
2026
University of Twente, Netherlands, The
Keeping It Real With Responsible Futuring: Reflecting On The Epistemic And Political Ambition Of A Transdisciplinary Approach For Societal Transitions, Cristina Zaga, Julieta Matos Castaño, Mascha Van Der Voort
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Amidst the upheaval of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the threat of the Sixth Extinction, designers focus on approaches that help communities connect and imagine alternative, desirable futures. Transdisciplinary approaches promise more sustainable and just transitions by valuing and integrating diverse forms of knowledge to co-shape more equitable design interventions. However, these ambitions often fall short. Transdisciplinary practices may be reduced to justice-washing or corporate co-optation, frequently failing to achieve epistemic and social justice. This paper introduces Responsible Futuring, a transdisciplinary design-led approach that enables communities to actively shape their future trajectories, embracing collaboration and diverse perspectives as catalysts for …
Towards More-Than-Human Inclusion: Designing Artefacts That Cultivate Attentiveness For Engaging With More-Than-Human Worlds,
2026
University College London, United Kingdom
Towards More-Than-Human Inclusion: Designing Artefacts That Cultivate Attentiveness For Engaging With More-Than-Human Worlds, Jorge Luis Siesquén Deza
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This research explores how Inclusive design can be expanded to recognise nonhuman stakeholders by engaging perspectives from the More-than-Human turn. Using Research-through-Design, the study combines literature, semi-structured interviews, and case studies to identify barriers to designers’ responsible engagement with nonhuman entities. The findings reveal that while designers are open to widening inclusion, current practices remain centred on human empathy, usability, and evidence, leaving nonhuman concerns unaccounted for. Instead of expanding the repertoire of prescriptive tools, what is needed is the cultivation of attentiveness and care that enables designers to engage meaningfully with nonhuman agencies. This research offers two contributions: (1) …
Co-Speculating Future Design Research Opportunities In Community Sharing With Local Sharing Communities,
2026
Univerisity of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Co-Speculating Future Design Research Opportunities In Community Sharing With Local Sharing Communities, Haili Wu, Bettina Nissen, Susan Lechelt
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Sharing communities challenge traditional models of ownership by allowing their members to temporarily access resources such as DIY tools, workshop spaces, and musical instruments. Although designers and design researchers have previously involved sharing communities in design, there are additional opportunities to engage sharing communities in speculating about their possible futures. This study invited 13 participants from various local sharing communities in Scotland to collaboratively speculate on how developments in technology, infrastructure, the economy, politics, and social and cultural aspects might influence their community sharing practices in the long term. By examining their future scenarios, we gain insight into the possible …
Appropriating Edinburgh’S Dead: Exploring The Potential Of Edinburgh’S Historic Burial Grounds As Sites For Designerly Conversations About Grief And Loss,
2026
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Appropriating Edinburgh’S Dead: Exploring The Potential Of Edinburgh’S Historic Burial Grounds As Sites For Designerly Conversations About Grief And Loss, Richard Thompson, Diane Willis, Kirstie Jamieson
DRS Biennial Conference Series
There are five unique historic burial grounds within the proximity of Edinburgh’s city centre. Cross-sector consultations with police, heritage and council officials decry the decline of these spaces. Each is at risk; erosion, limited resources, and perceived anti-social behaviour obscure their value as social spaces apt to explore, share and process grief. The potential of these historic sites has been limited to imagining convivial and heritage-aligned uses of graveyards. This case study explores their potential as unique spaces to publicly discuss bereavement, mortality and grief through design workshops. It argues that designing provides an appropriate process to scaffold these conversations …
From Waste To Opportunity, Upcycling Innovation In The South African Context: The Case Of Clothes To Good,
2026
Glasgow Caledonian University, United Kingdom
From Waste To Opportunity, Upcycling Innovation In The South African Context: The Case Of Clothes To Good, Jennifer Murray, Lindsey Carey, Desiree Smal, Adelaide Sheik
DRS Biennial Conference Series
South Africa is a country which is facing significant textile waste problem. High volumes of second-hand products are entering the marketplace and represent an opportunity to SMEs and micro-businesses. Clothes to Good (CTG), a South African charitable organisation, are working to offset this challenge by creating upcycling programmes which repurpose these products through micro-business models designed to empower mothers of neurodivergent children. Neurodiversity is rising in South Africa and sensory stimuli products are an opportunity to repurpose second-hand clothing to products to support these consumers. This research represents the pilot study of a larger project investigating micro-business programmes creating weighted …
Bridging Macro Sustainability And Everyday Life: Developing A Meso–Micro Indicator Framework For Sustainable Design In Historic Districts, The Case Of Laomendong, Nanjing,
2026
School of design, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214100, China
Bridging Macro Sustainability And Everyday Life: Developing A Meso–Micro Indicator Framework For Sustainable Design In Historic Districts, The Case Of Laomendong, Nanjing, Chen Liu, Yuwei Wu, Weimin Guo
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper develops a multi-scalar indicator framework that bridges macro sustainability goals with the realities of historic district regeneration, focusing on the Laomendong Historic District in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. The study translates top-down policies into meso to micro level design indicators that capture the spatial, social, and cultural dimensions of sustainability. Using a mixed-methodology approach, it combines policy content analysis to identify macro-narratives with grounded theory-based social media analysis to reveal bottom-up perceptions and everyday experiences. The resulting framework demonstrates how sustainable design can move beyond macroeconomic and environmental metrics, embracing a broader range of considerations. Findings suggest that while …
Design, Territory And Gastronomy: Relational Practices In Local Transformation Processes,
2026
Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil
Design, Territory And Gastronomy: Relational Practices In Local Transformation Processes, Dafne Rivadeneira Griner, Laura De Souza Cota Carvalho Silva Pinto, Marcelo Silva Pinto
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Relational design practices, grounded in the collaboration among local producers, public institutions, and designers, have strengthened cultural identity and promoted new forms of economy based on values of sustainability and belonging. This article presents the development of a gastronomic festival as a living laboratory of transformation, carried out in the municipality of São Gonçalo do Rio Abaixo, Brazil, by the Design, Territory, and Gastronomy extension project of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Based on the theories of relational design and design for transitions, the study highlights how design mediates local tensions, overcomes institutional challenges, and helps the reconstruction …
From Discontent To Touchpoints: Analysing Art Festival Experience Design Through Participants’ Critical Feedback On Social Media,
2026
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China)
From Discontent To Touchpoints: Analysing Art Festival Experience Design Through Participants’ Critical Feedback On Social Media, Wanchun Ye, Kin Wai Michael Siu, Yijia Jiang, Izzy Yi Jian
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study examines critical feedback shared by arts festival participants on social media. These posts, as a unique form of reflective user experience data, can spark dialogue and spread widely, helping to identify potential needs and key service touchpoints in the design of cultural and creative activities. Using purposive sampling, 104 relevant posts were collected and analysed thematically based on Buchanan’s four orders of design as a framework. The findings indicate that participant discontent stems from overlapping conflicts across different design orders, characterised by a lack of authenticity, value conflicts, and service limitations. Furthermore, the study emphasises the pivotal mediating …
Careful Configurations: An Exploration Of Smart Technologies In More-Than-Human Innovation,
2026
New Design University, Austria;
Loughborough University London, United Kingdom
Careful Configurations: An Exploration Of Smart Technologies In More-Than-Human Innovation, Ruth Neubauer, Verena Fuchsberger
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Smart technologies promise efficiency and sustainability, yet their intelligence remains narrow – confined to optimising isolated human needs rather than nurturing the wider ecologies in which lives unfold. This paper explores how design may shift from smart technologies to more careful configurations: systems that participate in human–material–environmental relations rather than merely processing data. Drawing on Barad’s framework of intra-action, we reimagine technological innovation as distributed and relational. Through a series of eco-social prototypes – from modular heating and communal hydration to wooden fridges and moss bathrooms – the paper demonstrates how care, reciprocity and participation may re-enter the logic of …
