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Articles 31 - 60 of 2953
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
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. …
From Passive List To Active Script: Menu Design As A Strategic Agent For Restaurant Sustainability Transformation, Huiyi Zhang, Keren Zhang, Yijia Jiang, Kin Wai Michael Siu
From Passive List To Active Script: Menu Design As A Strategic Agent For Restaurant Sustainability Transformation, Huiyi Zhang, Keren Zhang, Yijia Jiang, Kin Wai Michael Siu
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Restaurants face the challenge of lacking systematic integration pathways in their sustainability transition (ST), struggling to fully incorporate sustainable principles throughout their operational systems. In this context, menu design demonstrates significant potential as a strategic tool to drive comprehensive ST. This study employs Goffman's dramaturgical theory to conceptualize restaurants as "social theaters," examining how menus function as "scripts" to systematically drive ST. Through analysis of eight representative cases, the research: 1) develops an integrated framework comprising three strategic dimensions, including nine key design intervention tactics that provide concrete implementation pathways for restaurant ST; 2) reveals three agency mechanisms of menus, …
Care-Full Co-Production — An Aotearoa Case Study, Anjuli Clare, Anna Brown
Care-Full Co-Production — An Aotearoa Case Study, Anjuli Clare, Anna Brown
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Embedding an ‘ethics of care’ into relational and collaborative design research practices benefits from a reflexive and reflective iterative approach. Through this process new ways of elevating multiple forms of knowing are developed, power asymmetries are disrupted, and inclusivity can be expanded. While care may often be included in our mindsets and principles for design research, care itself is often invisible or under talked about. Using the example of our project — Care-full Co-production — a practical perspective on co-producing research is taken. Through a case study of women’s health in Aotearoa New Zealand, this perspective highlights the everyday acts …
Research Through Game Design, Oliver Bates, Ben Kirman, Marcia Tavares Smith, David Philip Green
Research Through Game Design, Oliver Bates, Ben Kirman, Marcia Tavares Smith, David Philip Green
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Games are common artefacts and systems for design research, appearing as engagement tools with publics or specific audiences, expressions of ideas, and as tools for speculation. Games have proven value as instruments or outputs supporting this work, but the process of designing games is rarely centered as a moment of production of new knowledge and understanding. Taking inspiration from Research through Design more broadly, we position Research through Game Design as an approach that delineates space to challenge systems, break from norms, provoke, critique, explore, experiment, critically design, and reflect on the frictions and boundaries of ideas, artefacts, and systems. …
The Environmental Citizen’S Playbook: A Catalogue Of Playful Participation For Environmental Action, Savannah Vize, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, İdil Gaziulusoy
The Environmental Citizen’S Playbook: A Catalogue Of Playful Participation For Environmental Action, Savannah Vize, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, İdil Gaziulusoy
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Sustainability problems are complex and overwhelming, with terms like eco-anxiety now commonplace. Sustaining engagement therefore requires attention beyond systemic levers towards relational, social, and emotional dimensions. This paper explores play as a participatory tool to foster wellbeing, maintain engagement and reframe environmental action. Play is known to support healthy development, reduce stress, and connect socially as an antidote to fatiguing emotions. Research has additionally explored play’s transformative potential to disrupt existing structures and imaginaries. This study examines how play can be leveraged to support more inclusive and emotionally sustainable engagement with environmental action. Using a participatory research-through-design process (Situated Play …
Attuned Design Practice: Embodied Knowledge As A Design Vocabulary At The Intersection Of Artistic And Scientific Inquiry., Anne Marleen Olthof, Jouke Verlinden, Somaya Ben Allouch
Attuned Design Practice: Embodied Knowledge As A Design Vocabulary At The Intersection Of Artistic And Scientific Inquiry., Anne Marleen Olthof, Jouke Verlinden, Somaya Ben Allouch
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This article introduces Attuned Design Practice (ADP) as an umbrella term for studying embodied knowledge at the intersection of artistic and scientific inquiry. It addresses an epistemological gap across design and human–computer interaction, dance and somatics, and disability studies. Building on an existing framework of embodied knowing, we examine domain-specific traditions and expose the threshold between these knowledge domains. We propose Open Rehearsals as experimental settings for co-performance among human and non-human actors. Within this context, attunement is introduced as a performative materiality that enables relational, situated, and operational forms of understanding across disciplines. An eighteen-month field study in design, …
Exploring Design Thinking In Entrepreneurship Education: A Pre-Accelerator Programme For The Creative Industries, Billy Franks, Melissa Terras, James Newbery, Susan Lechelt
Exploring Design Thinking In Entrepreneurship Education: A Pre-Accelerator Programme For The Creative Industries, Billy Franks, Melissa Terras, James Newbery, Susan Lechelt
DRS Biennial Conference Series
For many years, design thinking has been recognised as an important process in creating and commercialising new digital products and services. Increasingly, design researchers are attending to design thinking applied in real-world, interdisciplinary settings for entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we surface and interpret examples of design thinking in the setup and delivery of a multi-cohort education programme connecting Edinburgh’s creative industries with local expertise in digital product innovation and entrepreneurship. Through a thematic analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with programme educators and participants, we explore the role of design thinking in bridging siloed industries and ecosystems. We interpret design …
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
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 …
Bodystorming Through Disruption: Ai-Assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy, Jiawei Li, Jiayue Wang, Lin Zhu, Jiaxuan Xu, Changran Zhao, Zhiyong Fu
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.
Designing The Echo. Practices For Oral Heritage In The Digital Age, Ilaria Bollati, Luisa Collina, Alice Biancardi
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 …
Designing The Playing Machine: Stage Design As Play Catalyst, Maria Mandea
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 …
Design Through Co-Elaboration: Friction, Dysfunction, And More-Than-Human, Corentin Loubet
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 With Country: Relational Infrastructuring Beyond Technocratic Urbanism, Kimberley Harding, Jennifer Seevinck, Marcus Foth
Designing With Country: Relational Infrastructuring Beyond Technocratic Urbanism, Kimberley Harding, Jennifer Seevinck, Marcus Foth
DRS Biennial Conference Series
The design of both physical and digital layers of the built environment is increasingly shaped by the pursuit of “smartness,” often privileging efficiency and control over the cultural, ecological, and ethical dimensions that sustain life in cities. Resisting this technocratic urbanism and reimagining infrastructuring through Australian Aboriginal principles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) – including relationality, responsibility, and reciprocity – offers ethical and sustainable directions for design. This paper proposes relational infrastructuring as a situated design practice that enacts and sustains cultural and ecological relations rather than merely delivering technical functions. Drawing on design scholarship, Indigenous knowledges, and urban studies, …
Disrupting Walking: Rethinking The Practice Through A Podal Extension, Zeynep Gul Bagan, Yaren Hazal Erman, Gulten Nur Bilgic
Disrupting Walking: Rethinking The Practice Through A Podal Extension, Zeynep Gul Bagan, Yaren Hazal Erman, Gulten Nur Bilgic
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Walking is approached not merely as a bodily act but as a phenomenon shaped by its historical, cultural, and spatial meanings, along with its relationship to the ground. Its historical continuity has made walking a constitutive element of social norms and bodily behavior patterns. The study seeks to reconceptualize walking not as rhythmic, standardized motion but as a relational experience, foregrounded through its intentional disruption. Such disruption prompts a questioning of biological and cultural codes, as the body becomes fragile when departing from the habitual. The first phase, conducted in Istanbul, explored the disruption of walking through body-movement experiments using …
Game Design As An Educational Method, Adeline Hvidsten, Evan Barba, Sarit Youdelevich, Rebecca Rouse
Game Design As An Educational Method, Adeline Hvidsten, Evan Barba, Sarit Youdelevich, Rebecca Rouse
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Design is playing an increasingly important role in the liberal arts and in general education at various grade levels. Integrating design into a curriculum can take many forms, from teaching general design literacy to specific disciplinary practices and using design methods to support topical learning. Over decades of teaching game design in various contexts, we have observed how students gain a deep and systemic understanding of topics when designing games on them. Synthesizing our experiences from higher education, we expand on Hanghøj’s model for game-based teaching to include teaching through game design as a pedagogical method. We argue that to …
How Does Costume Illustration Sketching Mediate Between Visual Development Concept Art And The Practical Construction Of Film Costumes?, Sophie Fretwell, Jon Burgess
How Does Costume Illustration Sketching Mediate Between Visual Development Concept Art And The Practical Construction Of Film Costumes?, Sophie Fretwell, Jon Burgess
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Sketching is a vital form of communication across creative industries. As an essential part of the filmmaking process, costume illustration functions as a mediating design practice where sketching translates concept art into wearable garments. Historically rooted in hand-drawn fashion illustration, contemporary costume sketching has evolved into a globalised digital practice that bridges artistic vision and physical construction. Through this lens of design mediation and embodied expertise, the study draws on industry interviews and reflective practice to examine the costume illustrator’s changing role as translator between the digital concept and physical costume. Costume sketching solves practical challenges based on knowledge of …
Is There Limitless Romance Behind A “Bunch Of Ones And Zeros”? How Social Vr Shapes Romantic Interaction And Its Design Implications, Ágnes Karolina Bakk, David Redmond, Borbála Tölgyesi, Kata Szita
Is There Limitless Romance Behind A “Bunch Of Ones And Zeros”? How Social Vr Shapes Romantic Interaction And Its Design Implications, Ágnes Karolina Bakk, David Redmond, Borbála Tölgyesi, Kata Szita
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study explores how romantic relationships and expressions of intimacy unfold within social virtual reality (SVR) environments such as VRChat. Drawing on virtual ethnography and 26 semi-structured interviews, it examines how embodiment, anonymity, and technological affordances shape trust, emotional intimacy, and sexual expression. While often framed as taboo, these dynamics are central to understanding relational practices in immersive environments. Findings show that intimacy is experienced as both emotionally authentic and technologically mediated, emerging through practices such as roleplay, virtual touch, and shared activities. The study highlights how anonymity simultaneously enables openness and introduces challenges around trust, consent, and safety. By …
Inclusive Design Revisited: A Paradigm Of Trustworthy Connectedness, Iris Van Hest, Eveline Van Zeeland, Jörg Henseler
Inclusive Design Revisited: A Paradigm Of Trustworthy Connectedness, Iris Van Hest, Eveline Van Zeeland, Jörg Henseler
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper revisits inclusive design by moving beyond its traditional emphasis on individual accessibility, which tends to overlook the relational dimension of inclusion. It proposes a paradigm of trustworthy connectedness, in which inclusion is conceptualised not merely as individual participation, but as the facilitation of relational ties between the designer or researcher and the individual or group. Inclusive design often relies on participatory methods, yet when participation and control become central, they risk silencing the very groups these approaches seek to include. Rather than participation or decision control, trustworthy connectedness, expressed through the designer’s competence and warmth, is central to …
Body Class, The Grand Museum And The Queer Archive, Tadeas Riha
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 …
Mapping Agents: A Fab City Full Stack Geospatial Framework For Interdependent, Community-Led Interventions, Tomas Vivanco, Tomas Diez
Mapping Agents: A Fab City Full Stack Geospatial Framework For Interdependent, Community-Led Interventions, Tomas Vivanco, Tomas Diez
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This article explores mapping as an experimental design practice that emerges from the intersection of ecosystems, technologies, and communities. Grounded in the Powers of Ten model and the Fab City Full Stack framework, our approach combines multi-scale observation- ranging from local infrastructures to bioregional systems- to capture ecological, material, and social data that reveal the interdependencies shaping territories. The work focuses on detecting weak signals of hyperlocal phenomena, often overlooked shifts in ecological or social systems, that can guide an iterative prototyping process. In this way, mapping becomes a generative act, tracing connections between citizens' behaviors, environmental conditions, and material …
Crafting Savage Futures: Translanguaging And The Material Politics Of Peripheral Making, Guilherme Meyer, Seher Mirza, Raees Calafato
Crafting Savage Futures: Translanguaging And The Material Politics Of Peripheral Making, Guilherme Meyer, Seher Mirza, Raees Calafato
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Dominant paradigms have confined imaginaries to narrow, hegemonic narratives, severing them from plural, relational, and non-domesticated possibilities. This paper challenges monolithic views of language and material craft by offering a transformative lens on cultural and linguistic dynamism within design research and practice. Drawing on “savage” futures (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) and “translanguaging” (Lee, 2015; García & Kleifgen, 2020), we highlight the situated creative practices of peripheral craft makers as mediums for multilingual storytelling, identity negotiation, and speculative futures. Translanguaging extends beyond language, involving embodied, material, and affective communication as non-hierarchical resources for collective worlding and shared meaning-making. Through participatory craft projects in …
Material Articulation: Toward An Ornamental Thinking In Digital Tectonics, Ali Etemadi Esfarjani, Manuel Kretzer
Material Articulation: Toward An Ornamental Thinking In Digital Tectonics, Ali Etemadi Esfarjani, Manuel Kretzer
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This research explores ornament as a form of material intelligence in large-scale additive manufacturing. Through the evolution of two design case studies, this paper investigates how micro-scale design articulation evolves from surface tectonics to the traces of the machine’s toolpath and material behaviour. One reveals itself as an organic, agent-based, data-informed modulation. The other integrates a woven toolpath strategy that transforms 3D printing into a spatial composition. Considering ornament not only as an aesthetic element but as a manifestation of process creates a dialogue between matter, performance, and application. With the help of computational design and data, this intervention expands …
Between Worlds: Play Materials As Mediators Of The Lived And The Ludic, Lakshmi Srinivasan, Khushboo Jogani
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 …
Bias Reconsidered: Ecologically Rational Heuristics In Design Cognition, Paul Parsons, Srishti Agrawal, Phuong Bui, Prakash Shukla, Ali Baigelenov
Bias Reconsidered: Ecologically Rational Heuristics In Design Cognition, Paul Parsons, Srishti Agrawal, Phuong Bui, Prakash Shukla, Ali Baigelenov
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Design cognition is often described through a heuristics-and-biases lens that foregrounds systematic errors such as anchoring, fixation, and premature narrowing. Yet in professional practice, the same patterns may function as adaptive strategies for coping with ambiguity, constraint, and ill-defined problems. This paper examines how bias-like tendencies appear in expert data visualization work using a multi-phase qualitative study with 11 professional designers. We analyze situated episodes through two contrastive interpretive lenses: a bias lens that highlights potential distortions, and an adaptive-expertise lens that treats the same tendencies as resource-rational strategies. We situate these interpretations within a broader design cognition perspective, drawing …
Reframing Architectural Practice Through Territory And Emotion: The Atlas Of Emotions In Bajo Atrato, Colombia, Carolina Saldarriaga-Cardona
Reframing Architectural Practice Through Territory And Emotion: The Atlas Of Emotions In Bajo Atrato, Colombia, Carolina Saldarriaga-Cardona
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This study reframes architectural practice in Bajo Atrato, Colombia, through a relational understanding of territory and emotion, during the implementation of the Peace Agreement. Using a situated research-by-design approach, the study combines field journeys, workshops on emotional cartographies, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and audiovisual recordings in Carmen del Darién, Marriaga Swamp, Triganá Bay, and Santa María de la Antigua del Darién. These methods consider everyday life, memory, and collective care as forms of territorial knowledge. The recognition of territories, identification of emotions, and the visibility of the Territorial Expressions of Grieving led to the creation of the Atlas of Emotions, …
Speculative Design Through Synthetic Data: Exploring How Synthetic Data Be Used To Represent Missing ‘More-Than-Human' Data, Michael Dunbar, Chris Speed
Speculative Design Through Synthetic Data: Exploring How Synthetic Data Be Used To Represent Missing ‘More-Than-Human' Data, Michael Dunbar, Chris Speed
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Smart city data infrastructures largely reinforce anthropocentric paradigms, neglecting the entangled relationships that shape more-than-human worlds. This paper explores synthetic data as a transformative tool to address these omissions, offering alternative ways to represent missing non-human perspectives. Through a research-through-design approach, we present Kin Bank: a speculative interface that uses synthetic data to generate poetic, transactional representations between human and non-human actors. Adopting the metaphor of a shared bank account, the system foregrounds ecological and financial interdependencies while challenging reductionist data practices. Findings from a user study show how synthetic data can surface unseen relationships, embrace ecological complexity, and provoke …
Design Research During And After Artificial Intelligence, Matthew Lee-Smith, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Mafalda Gamboa, Stephan Wensveen
Design Research During And After Artificial Intelligence, Matthew Lee-Smith, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Mafalda Gamboa, Stephan Wensveen
DRS Biennial Conference Series
The shift in design research caused by the escalation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking considerable space in the field. In a mixture of potential and undeniable risks, we looked for a blend of critique and practice, of analysis and foresight. In the set of papers to be published, we see a span of precisely that: reflexive re-orientations in the evaluation of what AI is doing to design, mirrored in current practices; and speculations on the after (en)during AI. In this editorial, we contextualize the research in the world it was produced in, exposing the during that unfolded hand-in-hand with …
Play Design Materials: Entangled Matter And Making, Helle Marie Skovbjerg, Mathias Poulsen, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Sofie Kinch, Hyunjae Daniel Shin, Ricardo Conçalves Dutra, Eun Sun Park, Louise Ravnløkke, Jennifer Ann Skriver
Play Design Materials: Entangled Matter And Making, Helle Marie Skovbjerg, Mathias Poulsen, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Sofie Kinch, Hyunjae Daniel Shin, Ricardo Conçalves Dutra, Eun Sun Park, Louise Ravnløkke, Jennifer Ann Skriver
DRS Biennial Conference Series
To design for play is to engage with materials, whether physical, virtual, symbolic, or ephemeral. In design for play we don’t just select materials; we shape and are shaped by them. Yet within design research, we must explore how materials do play, not merely support it. This theme track invites contributions that consider materials not as passive tools, but as active collaborators in a relational field where matter, mood, meaning, affect, and politics entangle. We are interested in how materials act not only as substrates for play, but as collaborators, provocateurs, and agents in the making of play, relationships, and …
Acknowledging The Blind Men And The Elephant In The Room, Arvind Lodaya
Acknowledging The Blind Men And The Elephant In The Room, Arvind Lodaya
DRS Biennial Conference Series
Systemic design addresses complex, transdisciplinary challenges by integrating systems thinking and design methods. Yet, academic discourse remains limited to formal research and institutional methods, “invisibilizing” the rich, plural, and grounded practices of grassroots non-designer practitioners such as social workers, indigenous knowledge practitioners, and community facilitators. This paper challenges that narrow epistemology, and advocates restoring practice-centricity and incorporating plurality & pluriversality as essential ethical and political commitments to advancing the field. Mashing up the metaphors of “The Blind Men and the Elephant” and “The Elephant in the Room”, it highlights the need to proactively accommodate multiple perspectives for better reflexivity. The …
From Commodity To Commons: Creating Local Eco-Systems For The Design Of Sustainable Nhs Garments In Scotland, Lewis Urquhart, Paul Rodgers, Niki Taylor, Euan Winton, Lucy Welsh, Sophia Murden
From Commodity To Commons: Creating Local Eco-Systems For The Design Of Sustainable Nhs Garments In Scotland, Lewis Urquhart, Paul Rodgers, Niki Taylor, Euan Winton, Lucy Welsh, Sophia Murden
DRS Biennial Conference Series
This paper investigates the transformation of NHS Scotland garment systems through a design-led, commons-based localist framework that challenges prevailing globalised procurement models. Drawing on co-design methodologies and sustainable material innovation, this project repositions garments - specifically surgical caps and scrubs - as relational artefacts embedded within systems of care, identity, and ecological responsibility. Collaborations with healthcare professionals, designers, and regional manufacturers have yielded prototypes utilising regenerative fibres such as lyocell and linen, made locally within Scotland. These interventions demonstrate the potential of commons-design to foster civic engagement, decentralised production, and circular economies. By embedding garment systems within local ecologies and …