Digital Commons Network^™

City Of Longevity: A Framework To Integrate Emerging Technologies And Participatory Design Into Urban Environments, Camilla Borghi, Beatrice Ferrarini, Valeria Leonardi, Xueying Xiong

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The City of Longevity (CoL) framework integrates emerging technologies, participatory methodologies, and systemic service design to mainstream longevity in urban planning. Anchored in equity and intergenerational engagement, CoL introduces an AI-driven decision-support platform that translates longevity evidence into actionable urban policy through participatory co-design, KPI setting, and systemic service design principles. Following the Longevity as a Service (LaaS) concept, CoL advances a phased, coordinated implementation architecture whose deliverables are tailored to each municipality's cultural heritage and civic identity. This architecture is embedded within a collaborative inter-city network. Methodologically, this work synthesises convergent evidence from exposome science, longevity-ready urbanism, participatory design, …

Reconfiguring Care: Envision Postpartum Support For Women In Southern China Through The Lens Of Home-Based Iot, Wentao Deng, Yunfei Chen, Yingying Luo, Ying Hu, Yiwen Wang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study explores design opportunities to support postpartum mothers during “zuòyuèzi,” a culturally significant confinement practice in southern China, through the lens of home-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Grounded in feminist ethics of care, the research employs a three-phase methodology combining digital ethnography, co-design workshops, and thematic analysis. Participants from multigenerational households shared experiences and envisioned the roles of IoT systems to facilitate postpartum transitions. Findings reveal that users expect technologies to function as empathetic intermediaries that foster emotional well-being, facilitate caregiving management and negotiate relationships. Distinct patterns emerged across care distribution, interpersonal communication, and interaction, underscoring the cultural …

Reflective Sociomaterialist Learning For Design For Sustainability (Dfs) In The Global South: Evaluations Of Students’ Product Service System (Pss) Design Projects At A Thai Design School, Hyunwook Hwangbo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study explores how teaching service design through Product-Service System projects can encourage reflective sociomaterialist learning for Design for Sustainability in the Global South. It analyses 22 Product-Service Systems projects by undergraduate students at a Thai design school to examine how design education, aligned with Thailand’s bio-circular-green (BCG) economy initiative, helps develop students as social agents who drive sustainable innovation. Using ethnographic action research and thematic analysis, six case vignettes illustrate how participatory design methods and systems thinking in Product-Service Systems projects empower students to build sociotechnical systems and offer localized, community-centered solutions. Findings show that integrating Product-Service Systems practices …

Design Materials, Roberta Bernabei, Maria Maclennan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

No abstract provided.

Longevitytech Cities: Design For Age-Inclusive Urban Futures, Sheng-Hung Lee, Sofie Hodara, Satu Miettinen, Bruce Hanington, Carla Sedini, Andreas Sicklinger, Miso Kim, Joseph F. Coughlin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The global demographic transition toward longer lifespans is fundamentally reshaping cities, services, and social infrastructures. This editorial introduces the LongevityTech City track at the Design Research Society (DRS) conference, positioning it as an evolution of Design for Longevity (D4L) toward urban-scale systems integration. Building on prior D4L discourse that emphasizes life-stage continuity, service systems, and human-centered design, this track foregrounds the intersection of technology, participatory design, and systemic urban transformation. Eleven accepted papers collectively explore how emerging technologies, multisensory experiences, participatory methods, and service ecosystems can support equitable, meaningful, and sustainable aging across diverse contexts. Organized around three interdependent themes—1. …

Design For Wellbeing And Happiness, Leandro Miletto Tonetto, Siyuan Huang, Ann Petermans, Rebecca Cain, Tiiu Poldma, Anna Pohlmeyer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This editorial presents the Design for Wellbeing and Happiness theme track at the DRS 2026 conference and reflects on how its contributions relate to the broader development of the field. Since DRS 2024, there has been a shift from establishing the relevance of design for wellbeing toward exploring how it can be put into practice across different contexts, populations, and scales. The papers included this year engage more deeply with wellbeing as what emerges through the interactions among environments, technologies, and the ensuing social relations. Grouped into three areas, namely designing environments, designing technologies and interventions, and rethinking wellbeing, the …

More-Than-Human Design In The Real World: Resistance, Regeneration, And Radical Solidarity, Cristina Zaga, Iohanna Nicenboim, Elisa Giaccardi, Joseph Lindley, Arne Berger, Claudia Garduño García, Laura Forlano

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In Capitalocene, humanity faces the intertwined crises of technological advancement and ecological collapse. These urgent challenges require us to question the power structures embedded in design, technology, and society. As a response, More-than-human design (MthD) recognizes the agency, sentience, and mutual influence of nonhuman species, materials, and environments, foregrounding principles of care, reciprocity, and collaborative co-shaping to foster multispecies cohabitation, ecological justice, and planetary well-being. Yet, it remains unclear how MthD can move beyond academia to influence policy, industry, and communities for ecological and social regeneration. Practicing MthD in the real world means proposing different ways of knowing and ways …

The Transformative Nature Of Food – Adaptation, Connectivity And Identity, Dolly Daou, Claudia De Souza Libanio, Juan Montalván Lume

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This theme track examines the transformative role of food migration in shaping cultural identity, ecological systems, and practices of belonging through a food design lens. Building on The Transformative Nature of Food: Adaptation, Connectivity and Identity (Daou & Sarantou, 2026), it conceptualises food as a dynamic, designed system that evolves across geographies through processes of adaptation, connectivity and identities. As food travels, it connects people to both their original homeland and to the existing and emerging cultural identities, to develop a sense of belonging to local ecosystems. Food migration reinforces cultural continuity, political and social cohesion and belonging while influencing …

Designing More-Than-Human Climate Futures: Affect, Aesthetics And Relational Practices, Rachel E. Clarke, Michelle Westerlaken, Sara Heitlinger, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This track brings together papers that explore more-than-human design practices that generate alternative, plural, situated, and relational approaches to climate futures through affect, aesthetics, and care. Framing climate crisis as a polycrisis of interconnected ecological, political, cultural, and epistemic conditions, the track foregrounds how designers are working across contradictory, incommensurable, and unevenly recognised and experienced impacts of climate change. The included papers examine how more-than-human design can attend to embodied, felt, and sensed worlds of multiple species and digital-material entities, infrastructures, and their environments. Across landscapes, waterscapes, governance, microbial growth, and multiple intelligences, the contributions reveal both the possibilities and …

Critical Reflections On Systemic Design Participation: Ethics, Care And Justice, Cecilia Landa-Avila, Josina Vink, Sine Celik, Simon Downs, Peter Jones

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This theme track examines how participation is conceived and practised within systemic design for complex challenges. Designing for interwoven systemic crises requires the participation of those who both affect and are affected by these systems. Participation is reframed here not as a discrete event, but as a dynamic, ongoing meta-process that reconfigures power relations and influences what is recognised as meaningful data. Synthesising fifteen papers across three sessions, this editorial explores the tensions between care, justice, and ethics, moving beyond performative co-creation toward sustained, power-sharing partnerships.

Designing Preventive Health Technologies And Practices, Ayşe Özge Ağça, Teresa Almeida, Armağan Karahanoğlu, Anna Vallgårda

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This track explores how design influences preventive health technologies and practices, considering them as spaces for care, negotiation, and future planning. While preventive health is often examined through medical and technological lenses, design offers a unique perspective by focusing on lived experiences, care relationships, and the processes of making sense of things. In this editorial, we outline five contributions that investigate preventive health across diverse contexts, including behavior change, immersive care technologies, critical perspectives on healthcare systems, health communication, and bio-inspired design frameworks. These findings together show that designing for preventive health goes beyond just predicting or reducing future problems …

Design Principles, Bianca Kóczán, Bianca Herlo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The theme track “Design Principles” includes twelve papers that frame design research as a situated and relational practice. Across the papers, design is understood as a way of generating meaning, mediating emotions, negotiating power, and shaping collective learning and action. Through collage, play, activism, empathy, process models, and rural cultural co-creation, the two sessions inquire how design frameworks, methods, and metrics actively produce relations between people, environments, institutions, cultures, and forms of knowledge. Together, the papers challenge neutral or universalising accounts of design, showing how design meaning emerges through language, context, bodies, affect, participation, and lived experience.

Bodies In Design: Rethinking Norms, Materials, Technologies, And Methods, Gözde Göncü-Berk, Sarah Kettley, Elif Ozden-Yenigun, Theodore Hughes-Riley

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The Bodies in Design track deals with the ways design engages with the human body with an emphasis on critical and creative investigations into the role of the body in contemporary design. While the body remains implicitly central to design thinking, it can be rendered invisible by a focus on the rational user or the cognitively motivated actor, and unreflexively normalized through forms of conservative and market-driven design agendas. Advancements in wearables and soft systems however, are reshaping design as a practice that engages the body in more considered and complex ways. We therefore sought contributions across material domains that …

Design Technologies, Beatriz Itzel Cruz Megchun, Michael Stead

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The theme track, ‘design technologies’, includes eleven papers covering a wide range of approaches to human-AI collaborations, reflections, and resistances in the design realm, process, and outcomes. In this editorial, we identify two broad themes, human-AI design collaborations and critical discourse on AI in design, to unfold the different design stances and intents with regard to AI in praxis and education. We want to ignite a conversation in which we reflect on our stances as designers, while respecting and honouring the poise of other humans, on the AI emerging landscape, and question how each of us uses design-AI exchanges in …

From Peril To Perseverance: Dr. Arthur C. Parker And The Seneca Arts Project, Brennan Ciccolone

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Like many Native people, the Haudenosaunee were subjected to culturcide and assimilation using residential schools like the Thomas Indian School in the late 19th and early 20th century. During this time, in 1925, the Seneca archaeologist Dr. Arthur C. Parker was hired as the director of the Rochester Museum and Science Center. Parker used his museum position to uplift and preserve Haudenosaunee arts and culture. This paper focuses on his Seneca Arts Project (1935-1941), which gathered art and artifacts from both ancient and contemporary Haudenosaunee members. This project explores how Parker’s work was used to help revitalize and honor Native …

Faculty Perceptions Of Lgbtq+ Students In Higher Education, Serena Gramling, Laura E. Barrow, Stacy Mikel, Mark J. Sciuchetti Dr., Falynn Turley

Higher Learning Research Communications

Objective: Limited faculty understanding of LGBTQ+ student experiences may contribute to exclusionary campus climates and discriminatory practices. This study examined faculty perceptions to identify ways to improve support for LGBTQ+ students and promote inclusive environments.

Method: A descriptive quantitative design was used to examine faculty perceptions of LGBTQ+ students and differences across geographic regions. 142 participants completed the 20-item instrument.

Results: Although regional differences in acceptance were observed, geographic location did not significantly predict faculty attitudes. Faculty acceptance played a key moderating role in the relationship between awareness and engagement in inclusive practices. Findings indicated that faculty attitudes alone are …

Minimizing The Gap Between Church And Disability In Churches Of Christ, Paris Freeman

Discernment: Theology and the Practice of Ministry

Church members with intellectual and developmental disabilities often experience disconnection from their churches. This qualitative study examined this disconnect in three suburban Church of Christ congregations within the North Texas area. Using an ethnographic approach, data was collected through interviews with ministry leaders, participatory observation, and a literature review. The analysis of the data, in conjunction with family systems theory, was utilized to construct a model for disability ministry which validates personhood and promotes awareness of self and others. The impact of the church growth movement on disability was also examined, but no definitive correlation could be determined. Further research …

Las Caras De Belleza En Madrid, Virginia L. Piccirillo

Cultivating Emotional Intelligence through the Humanities in Spain

Las Caras de la Belleza en Madrid, España explora cómo la belleza femenina ha sido representada, celebrada y cuestionada a través del arte, la poesía y la experiencia cultural. A través de museos como el Prado y el Thyssen-Bornemisza, este documental analiza la evolución de los ideales de belleza desde representaciones clásicas inspiradas por Venus hasta interpretaciones contemporáneas que desafían los estándares tradicionales. Mediante obras visuales, el poema Ilustre y hermosísima María y reflexiones personales, el proyecto invita a reconsiderar la relación entre belleza, identidad y feminidad, demostrando que la verdadera belleza existe en múltiples formas y perspectivas.

Rape Pregnancies And Consequent Ptsd Resulting From The Overturn Of Roe V. Wade, Emma Lindenfelser, Yulia Garaeva, Nenette Nti-Agyemang, Ellen Davis, Anna Kabwa, Alexandra M Calaman

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, access to safe legal abortions was limited and often restricted along racial, economic, and geographic lines. Nearly fifty years later, women’s health policy evolved again following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This court ruling decimated federal protections of abortion. This paper presents the research that the 2022 Dobbs judicial decision may contribute to and exacerbate rape-related PTSD on 1 out of 20 American who are unable to access a safe abortion after a rape-related pregnancy. Pregnant women living in conservative states that have outlawed …

Ambedkar's Pragmatist Feminism: Beyond Rorty And Dewey, Kanchana Mahadevan

Dewey Studies

No abstract provided.

Quiet Hills, Restless Hearts: An Intersectional Exploration Of Lgbtq+ Religious Journeys In Appalachia, Allison S. Monroe, Stacey L. Williams

McNair Culminating Research Projects

Many researchers have utilized Meyer’s (2003) minority stress model to examine the social factors influencing the daily lives of LGBTQ+ individuals. Previous research has looked at negative mental health outcomes for LGBTQ+ individuals (McGraw et al., 2023), the presence of religious stress for this community (Page et al., 2013), and religious journeys of these individuals (Halkitis et al, 2009).  However, few studies have examined the intersection of religion, LGBTQ+ identity, social support, and the overarching values of Appalachian culture. The proposed study seeks to add to the literature and understand the breadth of these experiences by employing qualitative semi-structured interviews. …

[2026 Honorable Mention] Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, Daylyn R. Reese

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

This research offers unique insights into the creation and development of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary (N.M.S.) with a focus on indigenous populations’ roles (primarily Chumash and Costanoan). In this episode, I analyze what makes this NMS different from every NMS precluding it, how it recognizes a new goal in conservation (thrivability), and the areas in which improvements still must be made to authentically include and honor indigenous voices.

“Subjugated Knowledge And Narrative Justice”: An Interview With Grace M. Cho, Anupama Arora, Yuni Kim

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Liberal Apologies, Toward Abolitionist Trans Politics, Koda Sokol, Kaden Paulson-Smith

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In the wake of Trump’s second election, the liberal fantasy of a benevolent state reared its head: the right policy, politician, or police officer will end anti-trans oppression. This article heeds the warning from generations of abolitionists before us that violence is not a defect of the state but endemic to it. By consequence, reforms that strengthen the state by expanding avenues for criminalization, resourcing the police, and incorporating more people into the military further jeopardize those subject to premature death, trans or otherwise. The current U.S. political regime’s overt cruelty provides an opening for widespread reckoning with the state’s …

Getting Close, Sadie Laufe Mccarthy

Dissertations and Theses

"Getting Close" is a collection of short pieces, some fiction and some memoir. It's not important which is which.

I'm interested in the barriers we face when it comes to connection, and how aloneness can often be more sensual than togetherness. I'm interested in the places we find respite from the pain of existing within societal pressures.

I'm not interested in acceptability. I write toward a world in which we do not have to be anything other than ourselves.

The Spring 2026 Issue, Destiny Dehart, Sara Gonzalez, Crystal Walker, Karen Winstead, Anthony Toledo, Lauren Nimon-Viola, Tristan Mioduszewski, Fatima Al Jaberi

Fonds and Feathers

The theme of this issue is "we explore what matters" – what matters to us, what matters to archives, and what matters to libraries. Different voices are reflected by writers in the formats of poetry, artwork, research, and articles.

Wrack Lines Spring-Summer 2026 Volume Number 1, Margaret Cozens, Johann Heupel, Owen Placido, Paul Salopek, Judy Benson

Wrack Lines

“Building community around the places we love,” is the theme of the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Wrack Lines magazine. Learn about the work of the Six Lakes Park coalition in Hamden, Riverfront Recapture in Hartford, MyCoast in southeastern Connecticut and the statewide land conservation conference. Additional stories tell about the artistry and mission of photographer-videographer Tomas Koeck, and National Geographic explorer Paul Salopek, who is traveling the world on foot.

Holy Hunger: A Study Of How Spiritually Formative Practices Shape A Faith Community At The Cedar Lane Church Of Christ, David W. Mitchell

DMin Project Theses

I have served in leadership as an elder/shepherd at the Cedar Lane Church of Christ in Tullahoma, Tennessee, since 2011. Before serving in this leadership position, I was in full-time ministry with churches of Christ from 1982 to 2005 (as a youth minister, education minister, and preaching minister). Since 2007, I have been a public educator, first as a High School Civics teacher and now as a Middle School Social Studies teacher. My primary work as an elder includes education, spiritual formation, and community engagement. Another role I have is to assess the spiritual health of the believers I am …

The Sustainable Autonomy Framework: Explaining Autonomy In Aceh And Southern Yemen, Abdulsalam Saad, Arie Kusuma Paksi

Jurnal Politik

This article examines why post-conflict autonomy consolidates into durable self-governance in some cases while remaining fragile and externally dependent in others. While Aceh has maintained stable self-governance since the 2005 Helsinki Agreement, Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council remains a fragmented authority sustained by external patronage. To explain this divergence, the article develops the Sustainable Autonomy Framework (SAF) and asks: under what conditions does post-conflict autonomy become viable and sustainable? The SAF argues that durability depends on the alignment of three mutually reinforcing pillars: elite legitimacy, resource sovereignty, and mediation credibility. Using a most-similar systems comparison of Aceh’s Free Aceh Movement and …

Jubilación, Janet Munoz

Writing Waves

No abstract provided.