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Designing For Node-Based Ai Tools: An Analysis And Synthesis Of Design Principles, Shunan Zhang, Yi Xiao Jun 2026

Designing For Node-Based Ai Tools: An Analysis And Synthesis Of Design Principles, Shunan Zhang, Yi Xiao

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Node-based interfaces are rapidly gaining traction in AI-driven design tools, yet a clear and comprehensive design framework remains essential. This paper addresses this critical need by presenting 10 carefully distilled design principles. These principles emerged from a thematic literature review of 14 recent, impactful papers published between 2020 and 2025, specifically focusing on Human-AI Interaction and visual programming. We meticulously grouped these principles into three core categories: Interaction & Usability, Human-AI Co-Creation & Creativity Support, and Explainability & Extensibility. Crucially, we also analysed how these principles intricately interconnect at a detailed level, highlighting their dynamic relationships. Based on this foundational …

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Imperfect Utopias: Norms In Vr Design And Queer Counter-Strategies, Alexandra Chalmers Braithwaite Jun 2026

Imperfect Utopias: Norms In Vr Design And Queer Counter-Strategies, Alexandra Chalmers Braithwaite

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper puts forward a set of strategies for designing queer experiences for virtual reality. First, the paper will outline The Body Traces Archive VR experience, the primary practice-based outcome of my doctoral research. This will be followed by a discussion of the medium of virtual reality and three industry-standard design norms that serve to limit and foreclose the possibilities of virtual reality: militaristic mastery and control, seamless (dis)embodiment, and prioritisation of comfort. For each industry standard norm, I propose a queer counter-strategy that works to re-align VR towards other possibilities. In turn, they are: utopian worldbuilding, embodiment via friction, …

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From Lab To Line: Mechanisms For Anchoring Human-Centred Design In Public Policy And Service Development, Maike Klip, Jasper Van Kuijk Jun 2026

From Lab To Line: Mechanisms For Anchoring Human-Centred Design In Public Policy And Service Development, Maike Klip, Jasper Van Kuijk

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Human-Centred Design (HCD) is increasingly proposed as a way to align government policies and services with citizens’ needs and capabilities. However, embedding HCD in everyday government practice remains challenging. This paper reports on a 2.5-year longitudinal action research study within the CGDC programme, where eight national agencies jointly redesigned debt-repayment services. The study combines observations, interviews and workshop data to analyse barriers and enablers for HCD practices in a politically and organisationally complex environment. Findings identify six recurring mechanisms: 1) Normalising user involvement, 2) Organising mandate for user needs, 3) Building multidisciplinary collaboration, 4) Creating facts on the ground, 5) …

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Designing For Themselves: The Gearbox Model Of Value-Reclaiming Design Within Grassroots Sports Communities, Yijia Jiang, Huiyi Zhang, Keren Zhang, Shiyu Liu, Kin Wai Michael Siu Jun 2026

Designing For Themselves: The Gearbox Model Of Value-Reclaiming Design Within Grassroots Sports Communities, Yijia Jiang, Huiyi Zhang, Keren Zhang, Shiyu Liu, Kin Wai Michael Siu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Grassroots sports communities (GSCs) express and impact values through everyday design practices that build belonging, identity, and agency. Adopting qualitative multi-case analysis of representative GSCs (n=10), this study explores how these communities define and reclaim their values through design practice. Four modalities are identified: 1) narrative re-authoring, 2) aesthetic re-coding, 3) collaborative re-making, and 4) ethical re-grounding. These modalities constitute a dynamic process wherein design functions as a relational infrastructure for collective meaning-making. Based on these findings, the study generates a Gearbox Model of Value-Reclaiming Design, theorising how communal design agency is exercised through dynamic and recursive interplay. The model …

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Understanding The Electric Vehicle Purchase Decision Through The Lens Of Experience, Yen Chen Chang, Hsien Hui Tang Tang Jun 2026

Understanding The Electric Vehicle Purchase Decision Through The Lens Of Experience, Yen Chen Chang, Hsien Hui Tang Tang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study reinterprets the EKB model from an experiential perspective to examine electric vehicle (EV) consumer decision-making in Taiwan and extends the influence factors in the modified EKB model. Based on semi-structured interviews, the findings reveal how experience operates differently across five stages. Regarding internal factors, personal beliefs are identified as a long-term factors of problem recognition stage, while “Consumer experience with product/brand” is extended to include vicarious experience and experiential control. Post-purchase experience generates affect that, together with “Switching cost”, re-initiates evaluation cycles. Regarding external factors, real experiences from “Role of third parties” can shorten or bypass search and …

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Knowledge Products From Applied Design Research, Koen Van Turnhout, Wina Smeenk, Daan Andriessen, Miriam Losse Jun 2026

Knowledge Products From Applied Design Research, Koen Van Turnhout, Wina Smeenk, Daan Andriessen, Miriam Losse

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article examines how researchers can enhance the impact of their work on professional practice by developing effective knowledge products. This term refers to the means by which researchers enable others to learn from the knowledge they generate through their research. The concept of knowledge products is related to discussions on intermediate-level knowledge and alternative forms of research communication. Both elements contribute to the uptake in practice. Despite successful examples of knowledge product development, the design research community lacks a shared theoretical foundation for knowledge products. This paper addresses that gap by 1) framing knowledge products as mediating artefacts that …

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Design As A Distributed Capability For Organizational Strategies Of New Product Development, Caterina Dastoli, Gabriele Goretti Jun 2026

Design As A Distributed Capability For Organizational Strategies Of New Product Development, Caterina Dastoli, Gabriele Goretti

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study positions Design as a distributed capability for New Product Development through ecosystems knowledge. While the strategic role of Design in local productive systems is well established, new technology affordances often necessitate the design and implementation of organizational strategies—beyond traditional business strategies—across SMEs from diverse industrial clusters. Consequently, technological evolution calls for a system-level positioning of Design interventions and a clear articulation of Design capabilities within the organizational dimension of an ecosystem, where multiple actors participate in strategic and operational decision-making for New Product Development. By conceptualizing Design as an organizational intelligence, this research highlights its potential to enable …

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Staging Dramaturgies: Supporting Urban Curators In Navigating Sustainability Transitions, Cristina Ampatzidou, Martijn De Waal, Linda Vlassenrood Jun 2026

Staging Dramaturgies: Supporting Urban Curators In Navigating Sustainability Transitions, Cristina Ampatzidou, Martijn De Waal, Linda Vlassenrood

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Urban curators, citizen-professionals with creative backgrounds, who mobilise their skills to orchestrate positive local change, require tools that help building community, engaging institutions and establishing legitimacy within complex transition dynamics. This paper examines Huis van de Toekomst (HvdT), a community space in a Rotterdam district undergoing a shift from natural gas to district heating, where using a participatory design approach, we co-developed a digital community visualization prototype. Using dramaturgical analysis, the study shows how the setting and composition of participatory events, and how different actors are addressed, influence how community and institutional dynamics unfold. The prototype functioned as a boundary …

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Nature-Centred Biodesign For Regeneration. Design Understandings In Europe., Nina Costa, Pierre Oskam, Helen Charoupia, Fátima Pombo Jun 2026

Nature-Centred Biodesign For Regeneration. Design Understandings In Europe., Nina Costa, Pierre Oskam, Helen Charoupia, Fátima Pombo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study explores how design researchers in Europe understand and enact nature-centred biodesign for regeneration: an emerging approach that bridges design, biology, and ecology to foster regenerative futures. It proposes an evolutionary framework of design agency, mapping the transition from imitation to co-evolution and from instrumental ethics to ecological justice. The framework highlights four paradigmatic quadrants: Anthropocentric Planning, Emerging Bioeconomy, Socio-Ecology, and Regenerative Biodesign that capture how ethical, ecological, and material orientations shape practice. In parallel, it employs a qualitative analysis of a questionnaire with 32 researchers from COST Action DESIGNAE (2025), which investigates how design operates between scientific, material, …

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Making The Invisible Visible: Supporting Older Adults’ Expression Of Emotional Needs For Companion Robots Through Visual Co-Design Tools, Chuxuan Xu, Hua Dong, Mohammed Elsouri, Mingfeng Wang Jun 2026

Making The Invisible Visible: Supporting Older Adults’ Expression Of Emotional Needs For Companion Robots Through Visual Co-Design Tools, Chuxuan Xu, Hua Dong, Mohammed Elsouri, Mingfeng Wang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As populations age, companion robots are increasingly explored to support emotional well-being in later life. However, older adults often find it difficult to express abstract emotions or imagine interactions with unfamiliar technologies, limiting their participation in early-stage design. This study develops and validates a structured toolkit designed to support emotional articulation and co-design participation. The toolkit, consisting of companionship cards, robot role cards, and recording canvases, was refined through expert evaluation and user testing, and validated through comparative interviews with older adults (n=10). Results show that the toolkit supported richer emotional expression, smoother dialogue, and more sustained engagement, helping participants …

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Holding Paradoxes Together: Navigating Institutional Complexity In Public Design, Luis Garcia, Geert Brinkman Jun 2026

Holding Paradoxes Together: Navigating Institutional Complexity In Public Design, Luis Garcia, Geert Brinkman

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores the evolving practice of design in the public sector. To do so, we initiated a reading group that brought together academics and practitioners from around the globe to discuss how public design is understood and practiced in different contexts. The common thread across the six reading groups held so far was that public design is inherently paradoxical. Three core paradoxes appear to characterize its practice: the identity paradox (blending in to stand out), the enablement paradox (constraining design by enabling it), and the political paradox (designing apolitically while designing politically). These paradoxes highlight the need for strategic …

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Fictionalized Affective Relations:Rethinking Wellbeing In Human–Ai Interaction From A Design Perspective, Boyu Zhang, Li Zhang Jun 2026

Fictionalized Affective Relations:Rethinking Wellbeing In Human–Ai Interaction From A Design Perspective, Boyu Zhang, Li Zhang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As AI increasingly enters everyday life in intimate roles of companionship and emotional support, established understandings of wellbeing in design research are being challenged. Conventional approaches tend to frame wellbeing as an optimizable experiential state, typically enhanced by means of emotional design. However, as AI becomes a medium for emotional engagement, wellbeing shifts toward a relational outcome that emerges from ongoing interactions.This paper introduces fictionalized affective relations to describe how users, despite knowing AI lacks genuine consciousness and emotion, nonetheless disclose vulnerability, invest affectively, and derive experiences of intimacy. It identifies three ethical tensions: emotional capitalization, loss of affective sovereignty, …

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Educating Inclusive Human Augmentation By Design: A Triadic Definitional Framework And Pedagogical Validation, Keren Zhang, Huiyi Zhang, Ka Wing Tsang, Yijia Jiang, Shiyu Liu, Kin Wai Michael Siu Jun 2026

Educating Inclusive Human Augmentation By Design: A Triadic Definitional Framework And Pedagogical Validation, Keren Zhang, Huiyi Zhang, Ka Wing Tsang, Yijia Jiang, Shiyu Liu, Kin Wai Michael Siu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Advances in AI, wearables, exoskeletons, and BCIs are driving human augmentation (HA) into everyday use, yet education lacks a design-focused definition, a practical positioning language, and awareness of ethics. This study asks: How should HA be defined for design, and how can a critical, inclusive approach be taught and validated? Based on systematic reviews, we propose a three-part toolkit: a Human–Machine–Environment paradigm that redefines objects and boundaries; a map of design possibilities (dimensions, categories, intervention levels); and ethical dimensions spanning the thing, the human, the environment, and society. We validated the toolkit through three 8–11 week speculative workshops (n=45). Four …

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Enacting Micro-Utopias: Situated Pedagogies Of Collective Imagination In Design-Based Education, Ricardo García Galiot Jun 2026

Enacting Micro-Utopias: Situated Pedagogies Of Collective Imagination In Design-Based Education, Ricardo García Galiot

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores a pedagogical intervention that leveraged speculative enactment as a portal to utopian futures. During a Blended Intensive Program, students were presented with a design challenge that addresses workplace inclusion by reimagining it as a “future otherwise.” The challenge was projected into a future temporality, allowing participants to respond to contemporary challenges with radical imagination. Drawing on Levitas’s (2013) utopia as method and Bloch’s (1986) notion of concrete utopias, this study investigates how engaging with these enacted visions as sensorial expression serves as a mechanism to unleash potentialities latent in the present. Situated at the intersection of Design …

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Toward An Architectural Model Of Design Methods: Meta-Methods, Proto-Methods, And Method Building Blocks, Colin M. Gray, Shruthi Sai Chivukula, Abdul Moeed Asad Jun 2026

Toward An Architectural Model Of Design Methods: Meta-Methods, Proto-Methods, And Method Building Blocks, Colin M. Gray, Shruthi Sai Chivukula, Abdul Moeed Asad

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design methods have long occupied a central yet ambiguous role in design research. They are invoked as distillations of procedural knowledge and recipes for action but also function as placeholders for more complex performances. Yet the persistent assumption that methods are checklists—mechanical sequences of steps that can be validated or optimized—has obscured their performative and situated dimensions. This paper revisits the nature of methods through an architectural model that distinguishes between meta-methods, proto-methods, and method building blocks. Drawing from historical, theoretical, and empirical discussions, we argue that methods are best understood as assemblages of prescription and performance, whose coherence emerges …

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How To Observe Design Practices, Aurelien Catros Jun 2026

How To Observe Design Practices, Aurelien Catros

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Aside from design theories and design methods, the design research field has built numerous methods for observing design practices. Most of them can be classified into two categories: ethnographies, which consist of sharing the daily lives of designers, and experimental approaches, which reconstruct design situations in the controlled environment of a laboratory. This study retraces the history of these methods, that exist almost independently from one another creating silos within the design research field. Throughout their respective developments, both ethnographies and experimental approaches indicate the same blind spot: the study of material traces of processes that have already taken place. …

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When Data Systems Meet Ecosystems: Tensions Between Ai Platforms And Vitality In Corporate Sustainability, Michelle Westerlaken, Sonja Rattay Jun 2026

When Data Systems Meet Ecosystems: Tensions Between Ai Platforms And Vitality In Corporate Sustainability, Michelle Westerlaken, Sonja Rattay

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Ecosystems are not computers. They are alive, endlessly complex, and deeply intriguing. What if the data systems used to better understand living worlds could embed this more-than-human vitality? This paper examines ecosystem data tools in corporate sustainability, where AI tools have become key mediators in sustainable transitions. Drawing on desk research and empirical data with biodiversity specialists at 13 large corporations, it identifies four tensions that reveal deeper mismatches between computational systems and ecological worlds. These arise between demands for certainty and the unstable dynamics of ecosystems; between the need for data as neutral evidence and as arguments towards managing …

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Design Through Co-Elaboration: Friction, Dysfunction, And More-Than-Human, Corentin Loubet Jun 2026

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 …

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Disruption As An Ecologizing Co-Design Method, Alp Yilmaz, Dennis Rolfes, Lutz Robbers Jun 2026

Disruption As An Ecologizing Co-Design Method, Alp Yilmaz, Dennis Rolfes, Lutz Robbers

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Conventional participatory planning and design practice imply linear accumulation of data, facts, and representations, predicting meaningful futures through consensus-driven strategies. Transformation is framed as the transparent management of knowable information towards a providential destiny. By reducing participatory reasoning to factual transfer and discursive negotiation, reductionist approaches fail to address the systemic complexity and contingent character of socio-ecological challenges. They overlook disruptive shocks (financial crises, pandemics) that reorder systems. We propose disruption as a co-design method: a deliberately staged technique that exposes boundaries, surfaces dependencies, and fosters collective sense-making under uncertainty. Drawing on 4E cognition and relational design theory, we propose …

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Tangible Conversations For Uncertain Futures: A Design-Led Approach With Families Affected By Multiple Sclerosis, Alison Thomson, Hannah Scott, Ruth Dobson Jun 2026

Tangible Conversations For Uncertain Futures: A Design-Led Approach With Families Affected By Multiple Sclerosis, Alison Thomson, Hannah Scott, Ruth Dobson

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Neurological prevention science is gaining traction, with implications for people at raised familial risk of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). We examine how design can intervene in this emerging prevention space through Digesting Science (DS), a co-designed public engagement project that brings families affected by MS together through events and playful, hands-on activities in community settings. We analyse post-event open-ended evaluation forms and a follow up study using auto-photo-elicitation with semi-structured interviews with children and parents. Findings show that DS makes MS discussable without increasing anxiety, embodied activities create shared reference points and language for talking about symptoms, science and uncertainty. We …

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Plundergeist: Exploring Generative Ai Through Vibe Coding As Reflective Design Practice, Christian Nold Jun 2026

Plundergeist: Exploring Generative Ai Through Vibe Coding As Reflective Design Practice, Christian Nold

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Generative AI (GenAI) has sparked intense media debate, yet design research has often echoed these narratives rather than examining how GenAI reshapes everyday design practices. This paper presents a year-long auto-ethnographic study involving 34 games and apps created through vibe coding, a GenAI-native approach that uses natural-language prompts to generate code. The study reveals distinct qualities that unsettle design processes: playful intervention, creative forgetting, spectral echoes, inventive excess, and fragile limits. Two key insights emerge: designing with GenAI requires deliberate engagement with cultural archetypes and treating AI as an unruly collaborator. Drawing on John Oswald’s 1985 concept of ‘plunderphonics’, the …

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Making Futures With Textiles: Boundaries, Practice, Sustainability, Martin John Bonney Jun 2026

Making Futures With Textiles: Boundaries, Practice, Sustainability, Martin John Bonney

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores craft as a site of making and thinking, asking how practice-based ethnography can extend design theory amid ecological and social uncertainty. Drawing on apprenticeship-style fieldwork (2024-2025) with craft communities in London (UK) and Yogyakarta (Indonesia), the study engages practitioners working across textiles, silver, gold, stone, wax-resist batik, wool, and silk. While textiles provide a methodological thread, the research examines how diverse materials shape knowledge through constraints, resistances, and affordances. Grounded in design anthropology and practice-based interpretations of posthuman and new materialist thought, material agency is understood as the capacity of matter and process to influence decisions and …

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Forking Futures: Fidelity And Resolution In Responsive Prototyping, Ricardo Sosa, Clare Mary Cooper Jun 2026

Forking Futures: Fidelity And Resolution In Responsive Prototyping, Ricardo Sosa, Clare Mary Cooper

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Prototyping offers ways to anticipate futures by supporting people to inhabit futures through hands-on experiences. Prototypes offer “invitations” to suspend disbelief and make believe. A canonical distinction is made between levels of fidelity in prototyping. Here, we critically re-examine “fidelity” by asking: How may fidelity inform prototyping practices and pedagogies? How may prototyping practices be more responsive, generative and ethical? How can fidelity in prototyping contribute to engagements with futures? Building on foundational ideas in prototyping and futuring, we put forward the FIRE (Fidelity/Resolution) map, a framework for distinguishing between fidelity and resolution and for navigating their spread and interplay …

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Buying, Consuming And Discarding: Consumer Value And Furniture Lifetimes, Katryn Elizabeth Elizabeth Furmston Jun 2026

Buying, Consuming And Discarding: Consumer Value And Furniture Lifetimes, Katryn Elizabeth Elizabeth Furmston

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The way consumers buy, care for, and discard their furniture reveals complex motivations that extend beyond cost and function. This paper examines the connection between consumer values, emotional attachment, and discard practices in determining the lifespan of furniture. Drawing on data from a mixed-methods approach that uses a survey, ethnographic observations, and object interviews, it analyses how consumers negotiate repair, justify replacement, and assign value to objects. It is argued that furniture consumption cannot be reduced to personal preference and market availability. Instead, it is influenced by cultural norms, consumer mobility, and access to durable goods. This paper proposes design …

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Influence And Potential Of Quintessential Forms As Inspirational Stimuli, Beatriz De Moura Figueiredo Jun 2026

Influence And Potential Of Quintessential Forms As Inspirational Stimuli, Beatriz De Moura Figueiredo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Quintessential products, forms widely perceived as typical examples of their category, are embedded in everyday life, yet their influence on product design ideation remains largely unexplored. This study investigates if and how such products can affect inspiration in the creative process of students and suggests approaches on how to address fixation, should it arise from the quintessential stimuli. Through a multi-modal case study with design students working on product development briefs, the research captures both self-reported and observed data to reveal patterns in creative decision-making. The findings indicate that quintessence is not particularly perceived as highly inspirational; however, there might …

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Infrastructuring Transitional Bio-Materialities: Case Of The Biomakerstudio, Ena Naito Jun 2026

Infrastructuring Transitional Bio-Materialities: Case Of The Biomakerstudio, Ena Naito

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Designers today are actively engaging with experimentation and innovation of bio-materials derived from living matter, foregrounding the interrelationship between biological processes, material design, and ecological responsibility. In this context, workspaces that provide conditions to design with living organisms become especially crucial to leverage their transitional material potentials. Grounded upon a 24-month research-through-design study, this paper discusses the ground-up infrastructuring work of establishing a biodesign workspace to support designing with living matter in a university setting. I highlight the emergent nature of such endeavour, including the continuous alignment, containment, and care and maintenance work necessary for growing a provisional intervention into …

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Designing With Care For The End Of Life: A Reflective Co-Design Workshop Using Material Facilitation, Chenfei Yu, Michael Arnold Mages Jun 2026

Designing With Care For The End Of Life: A Reflective Co-Design Workshop Using Material Facilitation, Chenfei Yu, Michael Arnold Mages

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Conversations about end-of-life (EOL) care are often delayed until moments of crisis, leaving little time or emotional capacity for people to reflect on what matters most to them. This paper reports on a reflective co-design workshop in which fifteen participants used material-facilitated methods to explore their imagined EOL experiences. Through landscape making, journey mapping, and collaborative service model building, participants expressed hopes, fears, values, and priorities that are difficult to articulate through direct questioning. The materials created a low-pressure and supportive environment, allowing participants to approach a sensitive topic at their own pace and translate personal meaning into ideas for …

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Reimagining Body–Instrument Relations Through Feminist Design Practice: Reflections On An E-Textile Musical Interface, Qiaosheng Lyu, Ryo Ikeshiro Jun 2026

Reimagining Body–Instrument Relations Through Feminist Design Practice: Reflections On An E-Textile Musical Interface, Qiaosheng Lyu, Ryo Ikeshiro

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores how e-textile musical interface can reimagine the relationship between body and instrument from a feminist perspective. Drawing on a practice-based research project, the study examines how soft, deformable materials and embodied interaction can challenge the masculine-coded logic of control that dominates digital musical instrument (DMI) design. Constructed from knitted conductive textiles, the interface functions both as musical controller and prostheses that redistributes agency between performer and instrument. Through design practice, reflective performance, and a somatic experiment with another performer, the research investigates the entangled relationship between performer and instrument from a feminist perspective. The findings suggest that …

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Exploring Future Smellscapes With Smellwalks, Zuzana Neupauerová, Simone Ashby, Supraja Sankaran Jun 2026

Exploring Future Smellscapes With Smellwalks, Zuzana Neupauerová, Simone Ashby, Supraja Sankaran

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study examines how present-day smell encounters stimulate participants to reflect on possible futures and those scents that are emergent or susceptible to becoming transformed or lost altogether. We describe our speculative design setup whereby participants assumed the persona of an olfactory researcher from the year 2100, armed with a smell passport and set of vials, and tasked with time-traveling back to 2025 to capture scent samples. Smellwalk observations span three themes: environmental awareness of scent, the functional role of future scents, and social and cultural dimensions of olfaction. We discuss those scents which participants found to be particularly salient …

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The Future Of Architectural Design Research: An Emerging Niche In Digital Transition, Angela Rout, Michael Tjia, Marija Mateljan Jun 2026

The Future Of Architectural Design Research: An Emerging Niche In Digital Transition, Angela Rout, Michael Tjia, Marija Mateljan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

To remain effective in an era of technological flux and AI-driven tools, architects must continuously expand their knowledge base. Architectural research and education must evolve alongside these digital transitions to secure legitimacy and funding within academic institutions. This paper asks how the architectural design research community can self-manage in response to these changes. Using the lens of Strategic Niche Management (SNM), we examine how design research behaves as an emerging niche seeking to participate in broader academic regimes. We conducted a multi-stage review of the Design Research Society (DRS) Conference Biennale Series (2002–2024), involving a quantitative analysis of over 2,000 …

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