Designing The Echo. Practices For Oral Heritage In The Digital Age,
2026
Politecnico di Milano, Department of Design
Designing The Echo. Practices For Oral Heritage In The Digital Age, Ilaria Bollati, Luisa Collina, Alice Biancardi
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Oral heritage is inherently unstable: unlike written records, it persists through repetition and reinterpretation rather than through the conservation of a stable object. In post-digital cultural heritage contexts, safeguarding oral memories therefore cannot be reduced to storing audio files; it requires the socio-technical conditions to be designed that make voices interpretable, discoverable, and reactivatable. This paper develops and applies a three-phase framework ̶ Listening / Composing / Amplifying ̶ as an analytical and methodological lens for tracing how oral material is collected, translated into an questionable structure, and returned to the public through differentiated formats. The paper grounds the framework …
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 …
Queering Empathy In/For/With/By Design,
2026
DePaul University, United States of America
Queering Empathy In/For/With/By Design, Jessica Meharry
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Empathy is widely used as the initial stage of the design process to understand users and meet their needs and desires. Recently these methods have been critiqued for commodifying empathy in commercial practice, centering the designer instead of the user, and failing to account for power dynamics. Empathy is also under attack in political spheres, increasing the dehumanization of others. To address these criticisms, we explore the value of empathy in design processes and examine how queer theory and queering methodologies can help designers move past “walking in someone else’s shoes” towards intersectional design processes rooted in political responsibility. Synthesizing …
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 …
Ddenso: An Evaluation-Driven Methodology For Information Visualisations,
2026
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Ddenso: An Evaluation-Driven Methodology For Information Visualisations, Michele Mauri, Elena Aversa, Anna Cattaneo, María De Los Ángeles Briones Rojas
DRS Biennial Conference Series
When designing Information Visualisations for Media and Information Literacy (MIL) initiatives, a significant challenge lies in ensuring that they effectively transmit and consolidate knowledge, particularly when the Information Visualisation literacy of the audience is unknown. Applying a Research through Design approach, this article describes a meta-process: the reflective and iterative path that led to the definition of DDENSO, a replicable design methodology for creating and evaluating Information Visualisations that allow for knowledge retention. Grounded in prior theoretical and practical experience in Information Design, DDENSO emerged through the development of the artefacts for a MIL exhibition exploring the social implications of …
More-Than-Human Oversight: Designing A Somaesthetic Space For High-Risk Ai Systems,
2026
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria
More-Than-Human Oversight: Designing A Somaesthetic Space For High-Risk Ai Systems, Mariana Morais, Joaquin Santuber, Kristina Tica, Pablo Hermansen, Marcos Chilet
DRS Biennial Conference Series
European AI regulation (EU AI Act) has assumed that humans will remain in control of AI systems, thanks to human-machine interfaces and a stop button (Art. 14 of the EU AI Act) as two separate static entities. This ontological blindness in legal institutions leads to a problem of making illusory mechanisms through which people relate to the more-than-human agency of AI systems, foreclosing any possibility of coexistence. Against this context, somaesthetic and affective interaction design practices can offer new possibilities of inter-relations between the more-than-human AI-data operations and the human and social institutions’ fixations on representations. This paper provides an …
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, …
From Conflict To Care: A Design Learning Experiment On Food Justice In Rio De Janeiro,
2026
Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
From Conflict To Care: A Design Learning Experiment On Food Justice In Rio De Janeiro, Laura Cipriani, Claudio Magalhães, Stefano Maffei
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper discusses the Design for Peace Ecosystem: Urban Conflict and Food Justice course as a situated experiment in transformative design education. Conducted in Rio de Janeiro, the course combined participatory mapping, desk research, and fieldwork to explore how design can reveal and reframe tensions and hidden structural injustices within urban Food Systems. Students first developed urban food conflict maps to visualise inequalities in access, labour, and cultural recognition. Through desk research, they identified local “food care” initiatives that address food conflicts and promote the right to an adequate food culture. Using ethnographic diaries and ethnography techniques, they engaged with …
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 …
Making Worlds Thinkable: Design As Diffractive Sensemaking.,
2026
Universidad de Navarra, Spain
Making Worlds Thinkable: Design As Diffractive Sensemaking., Joan Vellvé Rafecas
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Across contemporary design practice, an attitude has been consolidating design as diffractive sensemaking. It is not method- or outcome-oriented, nor even necessarily a discipline, but a habit of attention in which fragments, measures and memories, timings and routines, infrastructures and more-than-human traces are placed so they read through one another to develop conscious, situated practices. Often grounded in research practice, these approaches lead to diverse outcomes. In all of them, an ecosophic orientation keeps environmental, social and mental ecologies mutually in play without collapsing them into a single index or metric. In such practices, care appears as activism: framing, positioning, …
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 The Playing Machine: Stage Design As Play Catalyst,
2026
National University of Theatre and Film "I.L. Caragiale", Romania
Designing The Playing Machine: Stage Design As Play Catalyst, Maria Mandea
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This article presents practice-led research where stage design is understood as an active, agential collaborator in theatrical performance, similar to how toys, playgrounds and material games are used as catalysts for play. Addressing the limitation of static, representational design, we develop a design for play methodology drawing from Constructivist theatre’s concept of the “acting apparatus.” This research explores the agency of material design within the performative space through two complementary case studies: an analogue, embodied board game system and a tech-driven, automated environment where pre-programmed robots act as performers. The playing machine concept is proposed as a design method that …
Bridging Awareness And Action: Visual Communication Strategies For Sustainable Consumption In Fast Fashion,
2026
TU Delft, Netherlands, The
Bridging Awareness And Action: Visual Communication Strategies For Sustainable Consumption In Fast Fashion, Alice Biolchini
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Fast fashion accounts for continuous labor exploitation and 8-10% of global carbon emissions, perpetuating environmental degradation. Yet consumer awareness alone often fails to drive sustainable behavior. This systematic literature review aimed to understand how psychological and communication elements can be used to design an intervention capable of changing consumption behavior. Following PRISMA 2020 methodology, 103 peer-reviewed studies were analyzed from 1,384 papers retrieved across six academic databases. Three thematic strands emerged: sustainable consumer behavior and decision-making, visual and aesthetic influence on awareness, and artificial intelligence in engagement contexts. Findings reveal that consciousness alone is insufficient; interventions are suggested to combine …
Mapping Circular Design Pathways For Wearables: An Annotated Portfolio At The Intersection Of Material-Driven Design And Bio-Hci,
2026
Design Department, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Mapping Circular Design Pathways For Wearables: An Annotated Portfolio At The Intersection Of Material-Driven Design And Bio-Hci, Nicla Guarino, Venere Ferraro, Valentina Rognoli
DRS Biennial Conference Series
As the environmental impacts of wearable technologies intensify, exploring how material choices can enable circularity in such a waste-intensive sector has become critical for design research. In response to this challenge, materials are recognised as pivotal in emerging wearable alternatives, yet how they can actively support circular practices remains underexplored. The study addresses this gap through an annotated portfolio of 40 case studies situated in or informing the wearable domain at the intersection of Material-Driven Design and Bio-HCI. By foregrounding recurring materials, methods, and tools, the analysis aims to reveal how matter can act as a transformative agent in shaping …
Territorial Design As Frictional Landscapes: Reframing Urban-Landscape Discourse And Practice Into Multi-Scalar Governance,
2026
L'École de design Nantes Atlantique, France
Territorial Design As Frictional Landscapes: Reframing Urban-Landscape Discourse And Practice Into Multi-Scalar Governance, Sophie Eberhardt
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper traces the emergence of territorial design as a distinct discourse and practice that repositions urban-landscape design from site-based form-making toward socio-ecological governance across scales. Drawing on a systematic review of scholarly literature (1960-2025), a practice survey (42 questionnaires with designers working in France), and three comparative case studies - Room for the River, Medellín’s social urbanism, and riverfront renaturation projects in Paris and Lyon - we show how ecological planning, landscape urbanism, and territorialist thought converge into methods that couple territorial diagnosis, morphological and biophysical patterning, and participatory co-design. The analysis foregrounds two fertile frictions: replicability vs. situatedness, …
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 …
Designing For Dignity: A Method To Explore Emotional Lived Experiences Of Stigma And Dignity In Perinatal Mental Health Environments,
2026
University of Twente, Faculty of Engineering Technology, Netherlands, The
Designing For Dignity: A Method To Explore Emotional Lived Experiences Of Stigma And Dignity In Perinatal Mental Health Environments, Carmen Heuvelmans, Aslı Günay, Geke Ludden, Jodi Sturge
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Psychiatric care environments are intended to heal, yet their design is often experienced as stigmatizing. This paper presents the Uncovering and Designing for Dignity through Emotions (UDDE) method, a participatory approach designed to uncover the meaning of dignity for perinatal women in psychiatric care, explore lived experiences of stigma and dignity, and identify how care features can be re-designed to uphold dignity. While dignity is often defined as an inherent worth every person possesses, in everyday life dignity is experienced as a lived value shaped by interactions with others and the environment. Emotions act as biological signals that can reveal …
