Digital Commons Network^™

Reseeding Relations: Comparing Museum And Indigenous Seed Sharing & Rematriation Protocols In The Midwestern United States, Madeline G. Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) paved the way for the repatriation of ancestors and certain cultural objects to Indigenous communities, museums still struggle to address other forms of cultural returns. Heritage seeds, those which hold cultural significance to Indigenous peoples, held within museum collections perpetuates the colonization of Indigenous lifeways. This research examines rematriation as an Indigenous form of cultural return better suited to address these needs than limited repatriation models. I analyze how museums are working to create rematriation processes for their collections which reflect diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies through a three-tiered approach: …

Difficult History During Difficult Times: Amache Junior Rangers, Katelyn Morkovsky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My research aims to understand approaches to teaching difficult histories to children at cultural heritage institutions. To do this, I examined the creation process of the Amache Junior Ranger booklet that launched at the site in the fall of 2025. Amache, a WWII Japanese American incarceration center, presents significant interpretive challenges in balancing the traumatic nature of the site with age-appropriate content as well as highlighting the agency people exercised without losing the gravity of the situation. In addition to how the booklet was made, I use my research to situate the booklet in the social and political climate in …

The Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Enhancing Arabic Regional Tv News Stations, Engy Mohamed Elzakazeky

Theses and Dissertations

Arabic regional TV news stations have started using artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for facilitating journalism work, coping with technology, and engaging audiences, as a result of the digital transformation in the television industry. This study examines how Arab regional TV news stations are incorporating AI into their operations, including its uses, opportunities, and limitations, in its early stages, through in-depth interviews with 14 media professionals in 13 Arab news stations. By reflecting on their own experiences, a purposive sample of news editors, managing editors, and graphic designers employed by news channels were interviewed. These media professionals were able …

Documenting Death: A Question Of Sovereignty In The Cairo Geniza, Thomas Adkins

Theses and Dissertations

How can death offer a case study for the question of sovereignty in eleventh to thirteenth century Egypt as it was performed by sovereigns, officials, and subjects alike, and, in this context, how can the documentary practices preserved in the Geniza be understood as an instrument to perform sovereignty? This thesis uses death as a case study in the same way that scholars of the medieval Islamic world have studied taxation, administration, and ceremonials to understand sovereignty as it was performed by the state, officials, and subjects. This performance of sovereignty by each implicated actor left a rich documentary trail, …

“What Was Man Created For?”: Socialist Visions Of The Future In William Morris's News From Nowhere And Andrey Platonov’S Chevengur, Jasper Digennaro-Willcox

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper aims to expand on the various theories of socialist utopianism first put forward by Hegel and Marx, and later expanded by Frederic Jameson, through a comparative analysis of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur (1928). While Morris presents a coherent and optimistic vision of a post-capitalist society, where labor, art, and daily life are harmoniously integrated, Platonov’s destabilizes this vision, depicting a fragmented and ambiguous utopia shaped by revolutionary upheaval and competing philosophical influences. These two polarities of what the utopian novel can look like have both been underappreciated and misunderstood for very different …

Forced Dependency: The Subjugation Of Women Through Medicine In Ancient Greece And Rome, Evelyn J. Polovich

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

In the ancient Mediterranean men were in charge of every facet of life, including women’s medicine. They forced women out of the oversight of gynecology and reformed it into a method of control that they could assert in order to force women into a position of submission. This paper aims to bring the ways in which ancient medicine was influenced by cultural ideas and worked to subjugate women and allow men to gain further control over their autonomy. This research was inspired by the works of ancient physicians like Hippocrates, Soranus, and Galen, as well as contemporary sources that critique …

Drawing As Continuance: What Insists On Being Heard, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article extends She-Hero through an inquiry into drawing as a creation-centred practice of continuance. Five drawings are engaged as aesthetic encounters through which relational and perceptual shifts become perceptible, allowing inner authority to emerge as a cultivated capacity to remain responsive to what is unfolding. Drawing is approached as a site of metramorphic reconfiguration where imagination, memory, and embodied sensing participate in the decolonizing of perceptual habits and the restoration of relational ways of knowing.

The Verge, Reconsidered: Love, Salt, Seed, Time, Origin, Interweave––Triptychs In Conversation Across Time, Marna Hauk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Sparked particularly by the poetic and the emergent data conversation analysis from an earlier Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal article (Hauk & Kippen, 2020) piece, which discussed data from 2016, the author creates a contemporary “conversation” from visual and poetic material, in 2026, and imagines forward a further 10 years to 2036. The three-plated visual-poetic artworkings speak also back and forth across the verges of spacetimemattering, riding the dip and wave, tide and weave, of deeper time and meaning sensing, with visual and poetic material. The original article proposed collaborative workings with other researchers. This work imagines the artworkings and …

Teaching The Eye To Slow Down: Attentive Noticing As Ecological Practice, Sara Ko

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This visual essay unfolds through acts of careful noticing. Drawing from materials encountered through repeated walks across forested landscapes on Vancouver Island, it translates moss, soil, plant matter, and animal traces into immersive digital environments. Working through atmosphere, texture, and shifting forms rather than fixed representation, the project explores how perception is shaped by time spent with what is often overlooked. Digital processes are used not to stabilize or explain, but to hold uncertainty, fragility, and partial presence. The work invites readers to slow their looking and consider how learning, relation, and meaning can emerge through sustained attention.

Moving Forward: The Pulse Of Arts-Centred Research [Editorial], Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial

About The Cover Art: Pulsing Renewal, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

“Pulsing Renewal,” featured on the cover of this issue, is part of River’s Invocations, a creation-centred inquiry exploring River's ecologies, relationality, and creation. The painting was chosen for its close affinity with the issue theme, The Pulse of Arts-Centred Research. The visual language of Pulsing Renewal—its movement, rhythm, and emergence—echoes the vitality, responsiveness, and ongoing renewal evident across the articles, artworks, and conversations assembled in this volume. The work is presented here as a thematic point of entry into the diverse inquiries that follow.

"Everyone Leaves Me Behind”: How Harmful Tropes In Fiction Impact Autistic Women, Sara E. Allard

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Until now, females with ASD have been ignored by healthcare professionals, policymakers, and the general public. The unique presentation of autistic women and girls is now in the cultural spotlight within not just the advocacy and scientific community, but also the arts. Female autistic characters are getting increased representation across literature and television, yet their narratives are still often stuck in the past. Most authors and screenwriters have yet to understand the specific struggles that female autistics face compared to their male counterparts, relying on the outdated, reductive perceptions that have plagued them for decades.

This article outlines three harmful …

User-Centered Dread: A Lovecraftian Critique Of Design, Lewis Urquhart, Emma Lawrie

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper offers a speculative critique of contemporary design practice through the lens of Lovecraftian horror by critically interrogating assumptions embedded in user-centered design theory. Drawing on the oeuvre of 'weird fiction' author H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmically pessimistic mythologies, this paper explores three thematic dimensions - control, user unknowability, alien materiality - to reveal the limitations of human-centred design paradigms. Utlising examples from literature, film, and everyday experience, this critique demonstrates how design’s aspirational narratives, centered on mastery, empathy, and progress, are increasingly inadequate in addressing the complexities of a more-than-human world. The concept of 'user-centered dread' emerges as a central …

Designing For Transversal Play: Experience, Materiality And Connection, Kim Holflod

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper introduces transversal play as a material, experiential, and relational mode of playful inquiry and connection that traverses disciplinary, institutional, and cultural worlds in pedagogy and education. Drawing on design philosophical, posthumanist, and play theoretical perspectives, transversal play is framed as a situated, collaborative, and world-travelling practice of interbeing, where difference becomes a generative site for collective experimentation, care, and transformation. Through four design-based research examples, the paper explores how transversal play emerges in tangible engagements with materials, experiences, and agencies. These examples illustrate how transversal play can reconfigure roles, soften boundaries, and support speculative, caring, and ethical pedagogical …

Value Co-Creation, Co-Displacement, And Co-Destruction In Design: Bridging Value And Values In Human-Data Interaction, Boyeun Lee, Ella Tallyn, Ramprabu Thangaraj, Chris Elsden, Chris Speed

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Data has emerged as a fundamental driver of value creation within design processes, shaping economic, ethical, and environmental outcomes across societies and socio-technical systems. Existing scholarship often frames value in binary terms of co-creation and co-destruction, overlooking the systemic complexities introduced by interconnected, data-intensive systems. This paper introduces the novel concept of value co-displacement to capture how alternative forms of value emerge and displace others within human–data interaction. Drawing on four design research case studies, we investigate how value and values are co-created, co-displaced, and co-destroyed across interconnected, data-intensive systems. We develop a framework that conceptualises the dynamic interplay of …

Against The Given: Reframing The Brief For Transformative Design Practices, Roger Paez, James Auger

DRS Biennial Conference Series

While design transition discourse foregrounds systemic change, pedagogy frequently remains rooted in a solutionist mindset, in which the design brief often functions to perpetuate norms. Drawing on the Erasmus+ project Speculative Urban Futures, we reimagine the design brief as an infrastructure for epistemic plurality. Students collaboratively develop and circulate briefs across groups, harnessing divergence as a means of expanding the design space and unsettling normative expectations. We argue that embracing this tension is central to navigating the “growing pains” of design transitions. By embedding theoretical complexity within viscerality, playfulness and speculation, design education can shift from transmission to transformation—equipping students …

Designing Motion Identity: Exploring The Aesthetic Expression Of Brand Style Through System Motion, Xinyi Xie, Yinman Guo, Zican Chen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study investigates how system motion enhances aesthetic experience and shapes users’ interpretation of brand style. Using Windows 11, macOS, and HarmonyOS as representative cases, the study analyses four categories of system animations through a motor-level framework comprising temporal, spatial, and transformational attributes. Twelve motion samples were coded, and participants evaluated each sample using perceptual adjectives. The results show that consistent attribute patterns across functional categories lead to stable aesthetic tendencies, while differences emerge from how each system repeatedly applies these attributes. These attribute biases create distinct perceptual profiles, indicating that motion can function as a subtle medium for expressing …

Interspecies: A Collaborative Curatorial Inquiry Into New Romanticism, Mariana Pestana, Katerina Inglezaki, Carlos Pastor, Mathilde Gouin, Bernardo Gaeiras, Fernanda Costa, Mariana Simões

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents a situated, plural, and horizontal curatorial methodology centered on questioning rather than providing solutions in response to posthuman thought and practice. It inquires whether we might be witnessing the emergence of a New Romanticism in contemporary design and architecture concerned with interspecies relations. This romantic turn arises by acknowledging subjectivity and imagination while engaging critically with the complexities of the climate crisis. To this end, this paper examines the making of an exhibition that assembled material evidence from science, art, technology, and design. The exhibition was developed through a three-step curatorial framework aligned with the decentering narratives …

Making Sense Of Pain: Participatory Design Approaches To Understanding And Supporting People Living With Chronic Pain, Ivana Nakarada-Kordic, Jannisa Seck, Nathan Beetge, Cassandra Khoo, Stephen Reay

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Pain is universal, yet its invisible nature makes it difficult to express or understand. Understanding the intricate mechanics of chronic pain and how to manage it effectively can be particularly challenging. This paper describes research exploring how human-centred design, transdisciplinary collaboration, and participatory approaches can produce diverse design outcomes that support the management and treatment of chronic pain. Two case studies are presented: 1) an exploration of how pain might be expressed through illustration and storytelling to offer insight into lived experience, and 2) how experiences of pain could be made more tangible through physical artefacts to support patient–clinician communication. …

Default Bodies: Challenging Gendered Norms In Fighting Games Through Participatory Design, Shalom Taiwo, Laura Pruszko

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The over-sexualisation of female characters in video games peaked in the 1990s and 2000s and fighting games have been slow to move away from it. Their reliance on visual exaggeration to convey identity and fighting style makes this harder to change. With 48% of players today being women, this raises questions about how these portrayals persist. This paper examines how participatory approaches can be used to explore how women players respond to these designs through a survey, a within-subject evaluation task, and a co-design workshop. Participants recognised exaggeration as part of the genre’s identity but criticised its association with sexualisation. …

Modes Of Being Amid Anthropocene: Living Through The 2024 Rio Grande Do Sul Floods, Natalia Dai Prá Penteado, Guilherme Meyer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper situates the 2024 Rio Grande do Sul climate disaster within the intertwined crises of the Anthropocene, arguing that those impacted developed situated practices to preserve identities and sustain life amidst collapse. Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirteen individuals directly affected by the floods, the research identifies Modes of Being that illuminate strategies of adaptation, care, and continuity rooted in Latin American ontologies. Through the interpretive lenses of Anna Tsing’s concepts of ghosts, monsters, and ruins, these modes reveal how to endure life in the Anthropocene and reconfigure identities and relations to persist. The study proposes a framework of …

Fostering Emergence In Behavioral Public Policy: A Systemic Behavioral Design Framework, Ruth Schmidt

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Behavioral public policy design tends to take a top-down, evidence-based approach to prompting behavioral change through mechanisms like ‘nudges.’ Yet behavioral responses to evolving conditions in complex systems—such as the recent No Kings rallies and anti-ICE activities in the US—often manifest as emergent, self-organizing movements, representing a powerful ‘bottom-up’ form of behavioral change that provides an alternative to traditional behavioral policy. This paper proposes a behavioral systems framework to explore the dynamic of behavioral emergence in a systemic context, composed of two matrixed dimensions: 1) micro, meso, and macro system levels; and 2) mechanisms that support behavior, ranging from targeted …

Mechanical Jewellery As Epimethean Practice: Staying With The Trouble Of Human–Machine Entanglement, Zhiyang Ding, Guang Dai, Beverley Hood, Sarah Kettley

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores how mechanical jewellery can serve as an Epimethean design practice that rethinks human–machine relationships through care, hesitation, and affective engagement. Drawing from post-anthropocentric design discourse and new materialist theory, the research investigates how low-tech, playful, and speculative prototypes can undo conventional narratives of technological progress. Through a practice-based workshop conducted at Fringe Arts Bath 2025, the study examines how wearable artefacts exhibiting unpredictable motion provoke emotional response and relational awareness in participants. The findings suggest that mechanical jewellery can operate as a modest yet generative medium for staying with the trouble of human–machine entanglement, foregrounding absurd materiality, …

Youth As Cultural Agents: Facilitating Cultural And Civic Engagement Through Game Design, Carlo De Gaetano, Maarten Groen, Sabine Niederer, Susannah Montgomery

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper analyzes four Cultural Game Jams (CGJs) in the Netherlands, conducted within EPIC-WE, a European project exploring how game-making can become a tool for both cultural reflection and dialogue between youth and cultural, educational and creative stakeholders. The jams connected cultural heritage organisations, creative industries, higher education, and young people (15–25) in a Quadruple Helix framework. Across two years, youths designed games that addressed societal issues, cultural heritage, and European values, while their roles evolved from participants to members of a Youth Advisory Board acting as co-designers, research contributors, and co-facilitators. Through cross-case analysis of jam formats, game outcomes, …

“Why Do All The Schools Look The Same?” Exploring Children’S Spatial Design Preferences Through Generative Ai In India, Chinmay Pade, Charu Monga

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly embedded in creative and spatial design processes, transforming how ideas are visualized and interpreted. This study examines how generative AI tools influence children’s imagination and articulation of spatial design preferences for schools in India. In a context where school environments are often standardized and children’s perspectives remain marginalized, participatory workshops with primary-school students engaged them in describing, writing, and generating AI-assisted images to express their visions for school spaces. The process revealed both the potential and the limits of AI-driven visualization. While AI expanded imagination and made ideas instantly visible, it also reproduced globalized aesthetics detached …

More Than Weeds: Thickening Designer-Plant Relations In The Sonoran Desert, Andrew James Whitcomb, Marysol Ortega Pallanez

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Affective relations among humans and more-than-humans are full of shifts, subtleties, and complexities. Yet, design research often treats feelings as stable instruments to utilize for making sustainable climate futures. Through reflection-on-practice, we untangle impressions and gestures in the field during a design research project in the Sonoran Desert titled Gifts for Tempe. Our reflections focus on shifts in our attention and attachments with an ‘invasive’ plant commonly known as Stinknet. The impressions and gestures reveal designer-researchers’ thick tensions in designing for climate futures. By showing how affective relations with more-than-humans change over time, we identify that climate futuring involves learning …

Visual Thinking With Artificial Intelligence And Augmented And Virtual Reality, Peter Stewart Harkins, Jan Michel Auernhammer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Visual thinking, a foundation of design, is often framed as a reflective conversation between a designer and their medium. Recent advances in generative Artificial Intelligence and immersive technologies, such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, are profoundly reshaping this conversation. This article explores how these digital tools augment the visual design process, moving beyond traditional methods. Through a series of autoethnographic, practice-based examples, we demonstrate several key transformations, particularly: AI-driven dialogues that rapidly iterate within a visual language and translate across languages; embodied, spatial sketching in AR/VR that enables new forms of visuospatial reasoning; and novel methods for perspective-taking and collaboration …

Sketching Social Robots: Visualising Futures Of Human–Robot Interaction Through Participatory Imagination, Nicholas Vanderschantz, Jessica Turner, Jemma Konig, Claire Timpany, Rafeea Siddika, Nathan Shakes

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In this paper, we explore sketching as a speculative and reflective practice for imagining social robots. Through a series of participatory design workshops, participants observed two prototype robots and then produced sketches and word maps envisioning possible appearances, behaviours, and social roles for robots in everyday life. Analysing the artefacts of these workshops reveals how non-expert human users perceive and imagine future robots in their worlds. We examine common themes of emotion, familiarity, discomfort, and relational values in the artefacts produced by the workshop participants. Our work highlights a way that sketching and written idea generation by non-designers can serve …

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 Laboratories: A Historical Review, Lynn Harles

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In recent decades, Design Research Labs have proliferated across design educational institutions worldwide, emerging as dynamic spaces that challenge traditional pedagogical models. However, understanding this contemporary phenomenon requires contextualizing it within the historical origins of the laboratory metaphor in design—a concept repeatedly reimagined over nearly a century. Building upon Hasenhütl's (2018, 2023) identification of two historical generations from the early to mid-20th century, this research extends the genealogy to encompass contemporary developments, with particular attention to socio-ecological themes. The analysis reveals four distinct generations of Design Research Labs that do not follow strictly linear chronological progression but represent "expanding parameters" …