Integrating Attachment And Social Identity Theories In The Co-Design Of A Hokkien Nursery Rhymes App,
2026
Griffith University, Australia
Integrating Attachment And Social Identity Theories In The Co-Design Of A Hokkien Nursery Rhymes App, Kaiqing Chen
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study presents the co-design of Hokkien Nursery Rhymes, an educational app supporting intergenerational language learning and cultural transmission. Grounded in Attachment Theory, the design promotes parent–child co-use to strengthen emotional bonds and create a secure, trusting learning atmosphere. Social Identity Theory informs the app’s cultural framing, reinforcing children’s sense of belonging to their linguistic and cultural heritage. Using participatory methods creative workshops with children and interviews with families from diverse sociocultural backgrounds—the study translated insights into tangible design features: emotionally responsive virtual companions, collaborative parent–child tasks, culturally meaningful narratives, reward mechanisms, and personalized audio from caregivers. These elements foster …
A Study On The Transfer Signage System In The Seoul Subway Network: Focusing On Persons With Reduced Mobility (Prm),
2026
Hongik University, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)
A Study On The Transfer Signage System In The Seoul Subway Network: Focusing On Persons With Reduced Mobility (Prm), Kyulim Kim, Injeong Kim, Yujin Bae, Younjoon Lee
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study addresses the inadequate wayfinding signage system in the Seoul subway, which causes significant delays for people with reduced mobility (PRM), particularly wheelchair users, during transfers. We examined the information structure and visual accessibility of transfer signage from the PRM perspective. Using a shadowing method, we observed the movement of 30 unfamiliar wheelchair users across 10 transfer stations. The evaluation focused on information continuity, visual accessibility, location identifiability, and information hierarchy. Results indicated frequent information gaps and unrecognised signage due to structural obstructions and visual clutter. Crucially, inconsistencies and confusion surrounding lift locations were repeatedly observed. Based on these …
Agency In The In-Between: A Reflexive Civic Design Inquiry Into Agency Drift,
2026
Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Netherlands, The
Agency In The In-Between: A Reflexive Civic Design Inquiry Into Agency Drift, Saskia Pouwels, Koen Van Turnhout, Gabriele Ferri
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Citizen participation initiatives often struggle to engage diverse communities meaningfully. 'In-between' spaces are celebrated as sites where power asymmetries can be renegotiated, yet this spatial metaphor obscures critical temporal dynamics. Through reflexive analysis of a ten-month design justice collaboration with Amsterdam's Stedelijk Team Participatie, this paper examines how temporal positioning shapes agency strategies within participatory processes. Applying temporal-relational agency theory, we identify a phenomenon we term "agency drift", the multidirectional movement across agency strategies as participants navigate institutional and community temporal orientations. Our findings show that making these temporal dynamics visible transforms in-between spaces from sites where drift simply happens …
Living With Multimorbidity: How Design Might Support Older Adults Use Of Health Technology For Self-Management.,
2026
Loughborough University, United Kingdom
Living With Multimorbidity: How Design Might Support Older Adults Use Of Health Technology For Self-Management., Zhuoning Fu, Emilene Zitkus, Sharon Cook, Luke Harmer
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Older adults face complex challenges in managing multimorbidity. As the ageing population increases, digital health technology (DHT) offers significant potential to address these challenges while supporting independent living. However, current research remains largely condition-specific and technology-driven, providing limited insight into how digital health can support older adults with multimorbidity (OAwM) in self-management for independent living. This study investigates how digital health technologies can be inclusively designed to support older adults living with multiple and complex health conditions. Drawing on qualitative inquiries into older adults’ self-management practices, it develops an understanding of the challenges existing in multimorbidity management within independent living …
Designing For The Working Body: Challenges In The Development Of Occupational Exoskeletons,
2026
Chair of Industrial Design Engineering | Dresden University of Technology
Designing For The Working Body: Challenges In The Development Of Occupational Exoskeletons, Emese Papp-Schmitt, Christian Wölfel, Torben Söker, Jens Krzywinski
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Exoskeletons exemplify intimate body-technology entanglements, where user experience is inherently corporeal. Despite their increasing presence in industrial and emerging consumer markets, current development methods often neglect the embodied dimensions of these devices. This paper explores what it means to design for the working body in the context of occupational exoskeletons. Drawing from our design practice and qualitative interviews in automotive and logistics, we identify tensions across three areas: (1) user and context research, inclusive and (2) body-sensitive development processes, and (3) the semiotics and social meaning of exoskeletons. We highlight challenges such as normalized risk and harm, limited attention to …
Human And Nonhuman Collaborators: Written Information And People In The Process Of Detailed Design For Early Career Architects.,
2026
Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom
Human And Nonhuman Collaborators: Written Information And People In The Process Of Detailed Design For Early Career Architects., Jim Sloan
DRS Biennial Conference Series
In research published in 1982, Mackinder & Marvin put forward their ‘continuum between written information and experience’ model for decision making in architectural practice. As part of a new research project, ethnographic methods were used to collect data on the detailed design processes adopted by early career architects in two medium sized UK architectural practices. This new data reveals that ‘The Continuum’ model still has relevance four decades later but, to reflect the specifics of detailed design, a wider range of actors need to be acknowledged. This network is established on a project-by-project basis with collaborators enrolled in an ad …
“Even If I Do It, I Cannot See Any Differences”: Designing Strategies To Facilitate Adolescents’ Low-Carbon Behavior,
2026
Southern University of Science and Technology, China, People's Republic of
“Even If I Do It, I Cannot See Any Differences”: Designing Strategies To Facilitate Adolescents’ Low-Carbon Behavior, Rui Shan, Wenhao Zhou, Huanshu Jiang, Wanlin Zhang
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Climate change, an urgent threat to millions of lives, requires collective efforts to advance a low-carbon transition. In particular, as future citizens, adolescents play a key role in shaping a low-carbon future. To understand how their potential can be supported, this study examines how design, particularly through human-computer interaction as a technology-mediated approach, can encourage adolescents to adopt low-carbon behavior. To do so, a formative study was conducted. First, we conducted a survey to understand adolescents’ cognitive levels and behavioral characteristics. Findings from this stage reveal that adolescents’ low-carbon behavior can be cultivated before a conscious understanding is established. Building …
Beyond Ephemerality: Boundary Objects And The Plasticity Of Listening In Collaborative Design,
2026
Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, France
Beyond Ephemerality: Boundary Objects And The Plasticity Of Listening In Collaborative Design, Stefano Delle Monache, Dave Murray-Rust, Elif Özcan, Nicolas Misdariis
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Sound-driven design requires shared objects to bridge disciplinary divides and support collaboration between diverse expertise. Boundary Objects and Intermediary Objects typically fulfil this need, yet the ephemerality of sound is in apparent conflict with the stability needed for this boundary work. However, we argue for extending the object beyond the ephemeral sound wave to encompass tools, user interfaces, methods, and lexicons that provide material persistence. To support this we develop an analytical framework combining BO and IO properties and apply it to a selection of sound design tools in the literature. We argue that the required interpretive flexibility and perceived …
Designing Social Inclusion In Circular Transitions: A Participatory Study Of Repair Initiatives In Germany,
2026
Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Designing Social Inclusion In Circular Transitions: A Participatory Study Of Repair Initiatives In Germany, Antje Burckhardt, Lenard Opeskin, Andrea Augsten
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Repair initiatives are promoted as policy instruments to foster sustainable consumption practices within circular economy agendas. However, recent studies question their ability to achieve broader societal impact, noting that social inclusion remains limited. The study addresses this challenge by employing a participatory design approach to actively explore fields of action to enhance social inclusion in repair initiatives in Germany. Drawing on a literature review, we first conducted five expert interviews with repair initiative representatives, as well as 53 short interviews with visitors and people who had not previously visited a repair initiative, identifying barriers and opportunities for improvement. Second, we …
Investigating Context In Sonic Interaction Design For Sleep: Bridging Users And Designers Through Participatory And Ideation Workshops,
2026
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Investigating Context In Sonic Interaction Design For Sleep: Bridging Users And Designers Through Participatory And Ideation Workshops, Abhishek Choubey, Tinke Van Buijtene, Sandra Pauletto
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Sleep is fundamental to health and well-being, yet sleep problems have risen sharply in recent years. These problems often arise from individual and contextual factors, some of which are modifiable through behaviour or design. Research examining sleep’s contextual factors and how they can inform design interventions remains limited. This article presents two connected workshops exploring these aspects of sleep using participatory and speculative design methods. The first workshop invited participants to map contextual aspects of sleep through empathy maps and speculative exercises revealing three themes affecting sleep: safety, sleep routines, and stress or anxiety. The second focused on ideation asking …
Public Sector’S Climate Commoning And Infrastructural Care,
2026
Malmö university, Sweden
Public Sector’S Climate Commoning And Infrastructural Care, Alicia Smedberg, Per Linde, Anders Melin, Joakim Nordqvist
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Local urban governments struggle to approach environmental goals in the global climate crisis. An understanding on the necessitiy to increase fair citizen engagement in governmental sustainability initiatives has become fundamental, the challenge emerge on how processes can become resilient beyond specific project initiatives. The concept of infrastructruring, here understood as a situated effort to hold together socio-material constellations that enable certain ways of acting, provides a foundation for long-term interaction between the public sector and citizens. But as the participatory design community is strong on providing ”points of entry” for citizen participation it remains less clear how one cares for …
More Than Concrete: The Tacit Knowledge Of Construction Workers Through Material Cognition And Embodied Experiences,
2026
Southern University of Science and Technology, China, People's Republic of
More Than Concrete: The Tacit Knowledge Of Construction Workers Through Material Cognition And Embodied Experiences, Enza Migliore, Mirna Zordan, Peiyue Lin
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Concrete builds the assets and aesthetics of contemporary cities. This research suggests that concrete also shapes emotions and cognition, generating a tacit body of valuable experience. Construction workers, who engage with this material daily, embody expertise through their bodily practices. Yet their insights remain unheard and underrepresented in the design discourse. This study adopts a material engagement approach, using concrete samples as probes and conducting semi-structured on-site interviews with 14 workers in Shenzhen, China. Analysing 280 minutes of video and audio data thematically, the research reveals that workers and materials mutually shape each other. Workers develop their understanding of concrete …
Three-Eyed Seeing: A Framework For Regenerative Ecological Design,
2026
LUT Business School, LUT University, Lappeenranta, Finland;
School of Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Three-Eyed Seeing: A Framework For Regenerative Ecological Design, Korey Wetherell, Chris Speed, Laura Albareda
DRS Biennial Conference Series
The design field is increasingly engaging with the challenge of regenerating Earth systems within planetary boundaries, yet the epistemic foundations of regenerative ecological design remain diffuse. This paper introduces Three-Eyed Seeing as a design framework that brings Western empirical methods, Indigenous relational knowledge, and futural imaginaries into accountable dialogue. The framework supports plural ways of knowing without collapsing them into a single worldview and positions designers as mediators across multiple ontological commitments. Drawing on an autoethnographic field encounter with pollinators at Kaʻena Point in Hawaiʻi alongside ecological systems-oriented design research, the study explores how these distinct ways of knowing can …
Playing Future Places Together,
2026
RMIT University, Australia
Playing Future Places Together, Troy Innocent, Carolyn Briggs, Ashleigh Dharma, Carlo Tolentino
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Cities are physical manifestations of how we live together in urgent need of redesign to adapt and respond to impacts of climate change. Place-based methods offer critical and imaginative ways to work with neighbourhoods as living labs for regenerative futures and planetary civics. Reworlding explores urban play as method in co-governance of the green transition of neighbourhoods. It works with posthuman methods to give nature a voice, supporting more-than-human approaches, and addressing climate, biodiversity, and pollution challenges. Play and democracy balance interests, power, and knowledge asymmetries among neighbourhood actors by engaging cultural actors and use local, indigenous, or marginalised knowledge …
The Black Box In Spatial Planning: Visualizations Of Indeterminacy In Cybernetics And Model Theory,
2026
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China)
The Black Box In Spatial Planning: Visualizations Of Indeterminacy In Cybernetics And Model Theory, Marlon J. Brownsword, Adam Jasper, Christiane M. Herr, Thomas Fischer
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper traces the historical and conceptual role of the black box as a diagrammatic figure in planning theory. Emerging from pre-war radio circuit jargon, and first theorized in cybernetics, the black box articulated a productive tension: it acknowledged the indeterminacy of future contingencies whilst concealing moments of executive discretion. Alongside cybernetics, the black box became an omnipresent yet elusive figure in 1960s and 70s spatial planning. Against the backdrop of contemporary debates on explainable AI (XAI), this history has acquired renewed significance for designers. Examining a corpus of planning diagrams produced over fifty years ago, the paper shows how …
Shifting From Creativity To Sympoiesis: A Site-Oriented Design Inquiry Of More-Than-Human Creative Ai,
2026
Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Shifting From Creativity To Sympoiesis: A Site-Oriented Design Inquiry Of More-Than-Human Creative Ai, Petra Jääskeläinen, Lisa Boulton, Ron Wakkary, Gillian Russell
DRS Biennial Conference Series
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Cob Club: Co-Exploratory Earth Building Experiments, Foolish In Technique And Form,
2026
The University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom
Cob Club: Co-Exploratory Earth Building Experiments, Foolish In Technique And Form, Tavs Jorgensen, James Burch, Nina Shoulder, Toni Amato
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper presents the design and building of an experimental pavilion using a novel technique of extruded cob manufacture. Design Research is presented as the co-exploration of a sequence of semi-controlled variables by a shifting body of researchers, facilitators, students, and makers where authorship becomes suffused amongst these collaborators. This co-created knowledge is rightly presented as a paper co-authored by the student interns and academics involved. Phases of architectural design, material investigation, manufacture, and construction are discussed as an episodic series of inter-connected prototyping dialogues between human, machine, and material actors; and as emergent making where embodied knowledge is inherent …
How Sound Knowledge And Education Can Support Designers In Creating Museum Experiences: Insights From Semi-Structured Interviews With Experts In Acoustics/Sound,
2026
Beijing institute of technology, China;
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
How Sound Knowledge And Education Can Support Designers In Creating Museum Experiences: Insights From Semi-Structured Interviews With Experts In Acoustics/Sound, Yi Zhang
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Today, the growing demand for sound in shaping multisensory museum experiences requires exhibition designers to acquire relevant sound knowledge. However, designers often find it difficult to identify applicable insights across the vast and interdisciplinary fields of acoustics and sound studies. Thus, this paper conducts twelve semi-structured interviews with experts in acoustics and sound-related disciplines. The findings establish a basic sound knowledge framework comprising four thematic areas with related concepts: fundamentals of acoustics, sound and space, sound and audience experience, and sound control and technology. In addition, the paper explores interdisciplinary communication and collaboration in sound design practices within exhibition productions. …
Decolonizing Care In Design Research: Familiness And Relational Practices From Creative Ageing In Thailand,
2026
Bangkok University, Thailand
Decolonizing Care In Design Research: Familiness And Relational Practices From Creative Ageing In Thailand, Khemmiga Teerapong, Boonanan Natakun
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper advances a decolonised understanding of care within design research by examining how relational and culturally grounded practices shape engagements with older adults in Thailand’s rapidly aging society. Drawing on the Monday Museum creative ageing initiative in Bangkok’s Khlong Bang Luang neighbourhood, the study critiques Western-centric framings of care that privilege clinical, individualised, or outcome-driven approaches. Fieldwork and co-design activities with elderly residents reveal that care emerges as a relational practice embedded in local cultural norms, expressed through attentiveness, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. The paper introduces “Familiness” as a Thai, culturally situated framework that embodies warmth, flexibility, and family-like …
Participatory Design As An Epistemic Practice: Designing For Institutional Responsiveness In The Scottish Parliament,
2026
The Glasgow School of Art, United Kingdom
Participatory Design As An Epistemic Practice: Designing For Institutional Responsiveness In The Scottish Parliament, Cara Broadley
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper examines Participatory Design (PD) as an epistemic practice that can strengthen how democratic institutions listen and respond to diverse forms of knowledge. Drawing on the PARliament Engagement project, it explores how creative approaches can reveal and reshape the interpretive practices that govern what counts as evidence in parliamentary scrutiny. The research was conducted through a participatory action research process involving ethnographic shadowing, interviews, and co-design workshops with parliamentary staff, creating opportunities for shared reflection on how knowledge is generated, interpreted, and used across scrutiny work. The paper develops the concept of institutional responsiveness to describe how PD can …
