"It's Going To Be A Really Good Place To Hang Out": Supporting Diversity In Community Indoor Environments By Eliciting Autistic Adults’ Preferences,
2026
Keio University, Japan
"It's Going To Be A Really Good Place To Hang Out": Supporting Diversity In Community Indoor Environments By Eliciting Autistic Adults’ Preferences, Asako Osedo, Stella Boess
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study investigates how indoor environments, for example of schools or workplaces, can actively support the diversity of communities, by considering the case of autistic adults’ preferences for them. Employing a participatory design approach, we engaged autistic individuals to understand their lived experiences, preferences for meaningful in-person social interactions, and their strategies to engage in social settings. Key findings highlight the importance of sensory regulation, vibrant and engaging spaces that mitigate awkwardness and promote authentic interactions, and the role of predictability and autonomy in reducing unnecessary stresses. We show how autistic adults can be supported in managing their regulation to …
Grounding Artificial Intelligence: Terrestrial Cartography And Rare Earths In Chile,
2026
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
Grounding Artificial Intelligence: Terrestrial Cartography And Rare Earths In Chile, Martín Tironi, Manuela Garretón
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This article argues for planetarizing artificial intelligence (AI) by re-situating its development within the terrestrial ecologies that sustain it. While dominant imaginaries frame AI as an immaterial and global technology, its infrastructures depend on geological, energetic, and social processes rooted in specific territories. Drawing on fieldwork in Penco, southern Chile—where a rare-earth mining project has sparked a complex socio-environmental controversy—we present Bajo nuestros pies, a research-creation project that develops a terrestrial cartography of AI. We propose two core operations for grounding AI: diplomacy, understood as cultivating sensitive encounters between heterogeneous temporalities and more-than-human agencies; and relationality, which interweaves geological, industrial, …
Learnings From Peruvian Gastronomy For The Transculturalization Of Design Practices,
2026
Socionatural, Peru
Learnings From Peruvian Gastronomy For The Transculturalization Of Design Practices, Laura Salcedo Miranda, Juan Montalván Lume
DRS Biennial Conference Series
In recent decades, Peruvian gastronomy has experienced a higher exposure and production of culinary creations manifesting practices of transcultural mixture entangling diverse cultural influences. Nevertheless, there still remains a need for studies that discuss such cultural amalgamations, which could also inform strategies for transculturalization in other culturally sensitive practices like design. This paper analyses multiple variations of well-known Peruvian dishes to understand the historical and contemporary processes of cultural mixture that have fostered the current landscape. For this, a conceptual framework that draws from Latin American Transcultural Design Studies and Gastronomic Theory is proposed to enable transdisciplinary learnings entangling both …
Toward A Culturally Situated Perspective: Rethinking The Role Of Ai In Intangible Cultural Heritage Pattern Creation,
2026
School of Design, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, China
Toward A Culturally Situated Perspective: Rethinking The Role Of Ai In Intangible Cultural Heritage Pattern Creation, Xiaojing Yuan, Xiang Yuan, Sanyi Wang, Hao Li, Mengzhi He, Duoduo Zhang, Nick Bryan-Kinns
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Research on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in cultural design has primarily focused on generative control and creative efficiency, often overlooking the misalignment between AI task definition and cultural creation. This study explores how GenAI can be culturally adapted within traditional pattern-making practices. Using an ethnographically informed generative probe, field experiments were conducted in the Huayao cross-stitch community, which practices a form of Chinese intangible cultural heritage. The findings reveal how cultural practitioners negotiate creative logic and cultural judgment when collaborating with AI, identifying four key orientations: liveliness, locality, creation-in-progress, and community creativity. Building on these insights, the paper redefines AI’s …
Dropping Pebbles: The Ripple Effect Of Designerly Co-Creation In Steering Sustainability Transitions In Hospitals,
2026
Delft University of Technology
Dropping Pebbles: The Ripple Effect Of Designerly Co-Creation In Steering Sustainability Transitions In Hospitals, Ayşegül Özçelik, Jotte De Koning, Nicole Hunfeld, Jan-Carel Diehl
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Steering sustainability transitions in complex organizations, such as hospitals, may benefit from iterative, situated, and participatory experimentation. Co-creation holds particular promise in this regard, acting as a “pebble” in the system that generates ripple effects towards sustainable change. However, its implications and methodologies within hospital systems, especially those grounded in design practice, remain underexplored. This paper investigates designerly co-creation through seven medical device design projects conducted by master’s students in collaboration with healthcare professionals. Drawing on observations of co-creation processes and 14 interviews, the study identifies designerly co-creation as both an “incubation space” for sustainability innovations and a potential “catalyst …
Disrupting And Reimagining Women’S Identities: A Feminist Design Methodology Inspired By The Self-Combing Women’S “Goddess Fictual” Practice,
2026
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Disrupting And Reimagining Women’S Identities: A Feminist Design Methodology Inspired By The Self-Combing Women’S “Goddess Fictual” Practice, Lu Li, Catherine Caudwell, Rosie Scott
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper investigates the feminist identity transformation strategies of "self-combing" women in late nineteenth-century China, who resisted patriarchal marriage identity by enacting alternative female identities through "Goddess Fictual" practice (goddess fiction belief and ritual performance). Through fieldwork of the historical residences and spiritual spaces of self-combing women, this paper identifies the goddess shrine as their new female identity performative site. It was within this specific site that spiritual goddess belief and identity ritual performance converged to support these women’s identities. Inspired by this historical experience, we translate this feminist practice into a new design methodology. It demonstrates how this historical …
Epimethean Design In Practice: Infrastructuring Reproductive Labour In The Maternity Ward,
2026
The Royal Danish Academy, Architecture, Design, Conservation, Denmark
Epimethean Design In Practice: Infrastructuring Reproductive Labour In The Maternity Ward, Sissel Olander, Tau Lenskjold
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper proposes an Epimethean mode of design that works with reproductive labour as a counterpoint to Anthropocenic narratives of progress. Rather than innovating new futures, design is approached as a practice of aftercare, sustaining endangered forms of life-making within existing institutions. Drawing on a long-term participatory design project at a large hospital maternity ward, the paper theorizes Epimethean design as a mode of infrastructuring that resists the translation of care into productivity and reclaims reproduction as a site of ontological and political contestation. At the same time, it argues that confronting reductionist ideas of productivity requires a double movement: …
Bodystorming Through Disruption: Ai-Assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy,
2026
Tsinghua University, China, People's Republic of
Bodystorming Through Disruption: Ai-Assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy, Jiawei Li, Jiayue Wang, Lin Zhu, Jiaxuan Xu, Changran Zhao, Zhiyong Fu
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study presents an AI-assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy integrating artificial intelligence with bodystorming in space design education. Built on a three-dimensional framework—Embodiment, Enactment, and Improvisation—an AI system was developed using Coze to generate emergent scenarios and guide improvisational performance. Validated over three semesters with 16 undergraduate students tackling extreme environment challenges, the system employed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to deliver context-rich, adaptive prompts. Results showed strong correlation between AI support and enhanced improvisational creativity (r = 0.48), especially in spontaneous adaptability. Students often underrated their own performances, with significant gaps in Improvisation (p < 0.01). Material types influenced outcomes, with sound-based tasks producing the largest evaluation discrepancies. Findings highlight AI’s evolving role from tool to creative collaborator, offering a novel pedagogical model that merges embodied cognition, reflective practice, and AI to foster design thinking under constraints.
The In-Situ Ai Pattern Merchant: A Speculative Intervention In Huayao Embroidery Futures,
2026
Hunan University, China, People's Republic of
The In-Situ Ai Pattern Merchant: A Speculative Intervention In Huayao Embroidery Futures, Hao Li, Duoduo Zhang, Siqi Chen, Nick Bryan-Kinns
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Research on AI and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) often reflects a static, object-centered perspective. This paper instead explores how generative AI can be embedded in the living practices of ICH. Through a speculative intervention in a Huayao embroidery community in Hunan, China, we reframe AI not as a tool for content generation, but as a social mediator within local craft networks. By performing as an “AI Cross-stitch Pattern Merchant” during the local festival, the study reveals how AI’s creative empowerment of young women sparked intergenerational tensions around legitimacy, labor, and authority. While youth embraced GenAI for playful self-expression, elder embroiderers …
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, …
Time Travelers: Bridging Generations In Boston’S Seaport,
2026
Northeastern University, United States of America
Time Travelers: Bridging Generations In Boston’S Seaport, Robiya Sahibnazarova, Annika Kim
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This qualitative study examines social isolation among Boston's elders aged 65 and older. We explored ways to employ service design and interactive encounters to connect different generations around history. Our focus was on Boston’s Seaport—a district shaped by redevelopment and technology. This study involved four interviews with museum professionals, elders, and locals to understand how memories influence community connections. The Time Travelers app features an Interactive Memory Map of stories along with guided walks and collaborative memory threads that encourage intergenerational exchange. Complementing the app, a Seaport boardwalk installation features televisions from different decades displaying memories from each era. Visitors …
Affective Epistemologies: Textile Teaching At University Of Chile, 1930-2000,
2026
Pontificia Universidad Católica, Chile
Affective Epistemologies: Textile Teaching At University Of Chile, 1930-2000, Camila Vicencio-Pérez, Magdalena Cattan-Lavin
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study analyses textile teaching at Universidad de Chile (1930-2000), the first institution to incorporate it as an academic discipline in the country, as a case of theory-making through practice. Drawing on archives, oral testimonies, and material objects (looms, notebooks, works), we reconstruct how textiles operated simultaneously as technical knowledge, affective space, and pedagogical practice. In dialogue with Catherine Dormor, we approach weaving as material thinking and "theory-making" through making; following Elvira Espejo, we situate it as a matrix of relational knowledges. This case inscribes itself within institutionalization of textiles in 20th-century art and design schools, with influence from foreign …
Information Hierarchies For Better Health Communication: Mapping Expert-User Differences For Drug Instruction Design,
2026
Hunan University, China, People's Republic of
Information Hierarchies For Better Health Communication: Mapping Expert-User Differences For Drug Instruction Design, Hengyi Shi, Hao Wang, Zhilong Luan, Chunxi Huang
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Designing drug instructions that communicate effectively to both experts and lay users requires understanding of their different information needs. This study examines how healthcare professionals and the public differ in their priorities and cognitive focus when interpreting drug instructions, offering design guidance for future instructions and labeling system. Using a two-stage approach, we conducted a survey of 111 professionals and 123 public participants to assess their perceived importance of 22 information items, followed by focus groups exploring perceptual and structural expectations. Professionals prioritized procedural accuracy and detailed guidance, while public users emphasized clarity and safety. Despite these differences, both groups …
The Invisible Playground For Taboos: A Framework For Recognising And Designing For Inner Play To Engage With Death And Anticipatory Grief,
2026
Independent Researcher, Portugal
The Invisible Playground For Taboos: A Framework For Recognising And Designing For Inner Play To Engage With Death And Anticipatory Grief, Manuela Melo, Sofie Kinch, Andrew Tibbles, Allan Køster
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Death and Anticipatory Grief remain culturally taboo, limiting opportunities for open dialogue and emotional preparedness. This paper explores how design can facilitate such conversations through play. Inner Play is a form of imaginative and introspective play that aids engagement with taboos in an empathic way, but lacks ways to understand and evaluate how to design for it. Employing a Research-through-Design approach, the papers presents a speculative design project that mediates communication between the bereaved and the deceased with a game kit resulting in a shared grief artefact. Ten participants in five workshops engaged in an iterative prototyping process, which resulted …
Designing With And Through Care: From Empathy To Relational Accountability,
2026
Università della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Italy
Designing With And Through Care: From Empathy To Relational Accountability, Ibtissam Jayed, Valentina Sorvillo
DRS Biennial Conference Series
In contemporary design practice, care risks becoming an imperative that obscures asymmetric power relations. This paper interrogates the relationship between design and care, asking: how can design shift from producing solutions to cultivating relations of care without reproducing paternalistic logics? Through a comparative analysis of case studies through the lenses of knowing, making, and defining with care, we treat caring about, caring for, and caring with as simultaneous and co-present dimensions to examine how care operates within design processes. The analysis identifies a structural pattern: while caring about and caring for are compatible with existing design logics, caring with encounters …
Practice-As-Paradigm: Towards Ethical And Affective Methodologies In Participatory Architectural Research,
2026
University of Reading, United Kingdom
Practice-As-Paradigm: Towards Ethical And Affective Methodologies In Participatory Architectural Research, Tom Harvey
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This practice-based and interdisciplinary doctoral research develops methods for participatory and ethically engaged architectural research. Drawing on over a decade of architectural practice, it proposes practice-as-paradigm: a mode of knowledge production grounded in making, relation, and reflection. Centred on the Southampton Way estate in south-east London, the research develops a reflexive and diffractive methodology attentive to affective-knowing—tacit, embodied, and emotional knowledge—alongside technical expertise. Drawing on radical democratic theory, it treats participation as performative and political, where care and conflict co-produce insight. Models, prototypes, and installations operate as heuristic and epistemic artefacts through which collaboration, negotiation, and play generate situated understanding. …
Between Worlds: Play Materials As Mediators Of The Lived And The Ludic,
2026
KLEST Lab, Bengaluru, India;
BITS Design School, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani
Between Worlds: Play Materials As Mediators Of The Lived And The Ludic, Lakshmi Srinivasan, Khushboo Jogani
DRS Biennial Conference Series
The ludic space exists both within and beyond reality as a parallel world. While play design has been explored through rules, experiences, and systems, the role of play materials as mediators between lived and ludic space remains under-discussed. This paper examines how play materials invite players into, operate within, and emerge from the ludic space, shaping gameplay and learning. Using a practice-based approach, the Between Worlds (BW) framework was developed and empirically grounded through classroom projects involving over 130 undergraduate students at BITS Design School. The framework identifies four qualities of play materials that enable transitions between lived and ludic …
Unlearning To Rest: Machine Unlearning As A Method Of Mitigating Design Fixation In Human-Ai Creative Collaboration,
2026
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Unlearning To Rest: Machine Unlearning As A Method Of Mitigating Design Fixation In Human-Ai Creative Collaboration, Martin Disley, Murad Khan
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Design fixation - the unconscious adherence to familiar design patterns that limit creative exploration - remains a challenge for creative practitioners despite advances in the development of creativity support tools. While recent work in design research has explored how large language models can augment human creativity, evidence suggests these systems may exacerbate fixation. We propose machine unlearning as a novel approach to mitigating fixation in human-AI creative collaboration. Unlike fine-tuning methods that expand a model's knowledge base, unlearning removes specific concepts to create productive gaps in the model's representational space. Responding to findings that semantic constraints on prompt composition alleviate …
Design Philosophy: Amplifying The Unheard,
2026
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Design Philosophy: Amplifying The Unheard, Fernando Secomandi, Daniel Portugal, Virginia Tassinari, Philippe D'Anjou
DRS Biennial Conference Series
At a time of intersecting planetary, social, and epistemic crises, design philosophy must confront a central question: whose investigative ideas and knowledge count? This theme track, Amplifying the unheard, challenges the consolidation of design philosophy into predominantly North Atlantic and Anglophone frameworks. Rather than stabilising the field, it seeks to reconfigure it as a plural, contested, and situated space shaped by diverse cosmologies, practices, and epistemologies. The contributions gathered here move beyond inclusion toward transformation, foregrounding Indigenous, decolonial, posthuman, and practice-based approaches that reconfigure design’s conceptual and ethical conditions. Together, they demonstrate that amplifying unheard voices is not merely additive, …
Democratizing The Newsroom: A Participatory Design Approach To Empower Citizen-Participatory Journalism And Civic Knowledge,
2026
Department of Design, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Republic of Korea
Democratizing The Newsroom: A Participatory Design Approach To Empower Citizen-Participatory Journalism And Civic Knowledge, Sangyun Lee, Kyungho Lee
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Local news sustains democratic life by connecting citizens to community issues and fostering public deliberation. Yet the global phenomenon of Local News Desertification—the decline of trustworthy local media—has weakened civic discourse, civic knowledge, and collective belonging in local areas. Citizen-participatory journalism enables citizens to report and interpret local issues; however, conventional newsroom hierarchies and insufficient support for community participants without formal journalistic training hinder its democratic potential. This study frames that tension as a Participatory Design (PD) problem concerning power and imbalanced agency in sociotechnical news systems. Through a PD process, the study develops a citizen–AI participatory journalism model that …
