Digital Commons Network^™

Hacking As A Queering Design Practice. Insights From A Visual Analysis Of Product Hacking Scenes In Movies., Julia Carrasco Parodi, Massimo Menichinelli, Guim Espelt Estopà

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article examines hacking, understood as the alteration of an object’s function, as a queer and feminist design practice that disrupts normative relations between bodies and things. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist snap as a moment of rupture and reconfiguration, we define hacking as an embodied act of refusal that reconfigures everyday things. Through "Función Rota", an audiovisual research project that gathers product hacking scenes in movies, we identify hacking as a form of both critique and speculation: it reveals the normative logics embedded in things, while opening up the possibility of re-prototyping from below. Through feminist …

Navigating Ai In Design Leadership: Insights On Emerging Competencies And Cultural Challenges In China, Xuan Gao, Yekta Bakırlıoğlu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores current challenges of and competencies in design education through an industry lens, highlighting both the opportunities and obstacles arising from the growing integration of AI. Drawing on the interviews with design leaders, scholars and students, the findings reveal diverse perspectives and challenges related to AI, including four main aspects: (1) AI can serve as an assistive tool in design practice; (2) AI creates new requirements and needs for designer roles and affects job displacement; (3) AI can improve work efficiency and reshape organisational structures; and (4) AI raises ethical issues such as plagiarism. Moreover, two AI-related cultural …

Epimethean Design In Practice: Infrastructuring Reproductive Labour In The Maternity Ward, Sissel Olander, Tau Lenskjold

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper proposes an Epimethean mode of design that works with reproductive labour as a counterpoint to Anthropocenic narratives of progress. Rather than innovating new futures, design is approached as a practice of aftercare, sustaining endangered forms of life-making within existing institutions. Drawing on a long-term participatory design project at a large hospital maternity ward, the paper theorizes Epimethean design as a mode of infrastructuring that resists the translation of care into productivity and reclaims reproduction as a site of ontological and political contestation. At the same time, it argues that confronting reductionist ideas of productivity requires a double movement: …

Public Participation Infrastructuring For Sustainability Transitions, Maria Andrea Valladares, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Martina Maria Keitsch

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Public participation plays a central role in sustainability transitions and addressing complex environmental challenges. However, governments face multiple challenges in enabling meaningful public participation and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Such processes tend to be constrained by legal frameworks, institutional rigidity, fragmented infrastructures, and limited capacity to facilitate multi-stakeholder dynamics. Drawing on insights from literature on transition governance and public participation, this article explores how public participation systems and infrastructures can be shifted towards what is needed in the context of transitions. The concept of infrastructuring is proposed as an analytical and design-orienting tool. Infrastructuring, here understood as an ongoing process of building …

Quilt: Designing A Values-Driven Toolkit For Surfacing Participant-Led Impact Assessment Of Participatory Design And Making Experiences, Emma Shercliff, Asha Ward

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Conventional impact assessment tools can overlook subtle sensory, cognitive and interpersonal transformations experienced in participatory design and making interventions by focusing on metrics, often retrospectively, rather than facilitating shared dialogue-based learning. The process of designing the QUILT toolkit discussed in this paper is anchored in a values-based approach that aims to prioritise participant-led narratives of discovery and change. Working with seven researcher-practitioners undertaking active projects in varied interdisciplinary and socially engaged design and making contexts, and their participant groups, we designed and tested questions, presented as a set of cards, for prompting dialogue and co-reflection. Findings highlight a) the significance …

Exploring Current Understandings Of ‘Design Systems’: Toward A Conceptual Framework, Margrethe Nielsen, Peter Vistisen, Nanna Inie, Michael Mose Biskjaer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design systems are foundational in the design of user experience (UX) across platforms and products. Although design systems have become pervasive in design practice, the term remains ambiguous due to multiple definitions and conceptualizations. The lack of a shared definition can lead to misunderstandings and ill-aligned uses of design systems in practice, vulnerable to the same issues of parallel activities and inconsistencies that design systems are meant to prevent. This paper reviews the concept from the term’s origin in design theory and into its current practice and proposes a new frame of reference for researchers and practitioners, focusing on improved …

Crafting Semiotic Riddles: Materiality And Interpretive Play In Speculative Design, Jess Uhre Rahbek, Sofie Kinch

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper repositions speculative design artefacts as semiotic riddles, where materiality operates not merely as a carrier of speculation but as a vehicle for play. Drawing on Peircean semiotics and narrative theory, we extend Auger’s notion of the ‘perceptual bridge’ to show how speculative artefacts invite audiences into riddle-solving, assembling ‘fabula’ worlds from incomplete ‘syuzhet’ clues. Methodologically, we propose that speculative design can be understood as the crafting of riddles: designing with ambiguity, incompleteness, and interpretive openness. Through three design projects, we illustrate distinct ways in which designers structure the clues of semiotic riddles, whether singular artefacts, fragmented constellations or …

Pen-Palling Systems Change: A Collaborative Approach To Growing Individual Agency In Light Of Global Polycrises, Donna Maione, Mathilda Tham

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In a world of increasing complexity, designers working in transitional spaces face blockages imposed by the dominant, locked-in capitalist mindset. Frustrated by the impediments in the systems we try to change, we were prompted to go deeper into the conditions for our change agency, as researchers focused on sustainability and long-term straddlers of industry and academia. As we asked how we can navigate being change agents within complex systems, we turned to becoming systems change pen pals, following the steps of a metadesign tool, which takes us from the remit of personal feelings to future perspectives and new vantage points …

Sounding Out Service: Explaining Representational Capacity Of Sound In Service Design, Ana Kuštrak Korper, Vanessa Esperance Rodrigues

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Recent research has established the necessity to understand sound as a service design material since its unique qualities can enhance representational design methods and contribute to the understanding, communication, and collaboration in designing complex service situations. However, much is still unknown about the role sound plays in the service design process and how the nuances related to its representational capacity influence collaborative sensemaking. This paper explores these nuances by developing a framework that allows inclusion of sound in service design practices regardless of sound-related skill level. The framework was developed based on empirical input from a master level course in …

Seeing Systemic Design Through Policy Eyes: A Frame-Work To Navigate Complexities Of Policy Contexts, Elke Michel Wennekers, Geert Brinkman, Jotte I.J.C. De Koning, Arwin Van Buuren

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines why design practitioners experience tensions when ap-plying systemic design approaches within policy contexts. Drawing on Bekkers’ four analytical perspectives (rational, political, cultural, and institutional), we reinterpret the systemic design activities to reveal how each perspective places distinct, and at times conflicting, demands on design processes. By comparing the lenses across the dimensions of principles, framing, validity, appropriateness, and embedding, we develop a theoretical framework to shed light on how these tensions emerge. The framework also shows that each perspective puts different demands on a design process in the policy context. The framework helps both designers and policy …

Practice-As-Paradigm: Towards Ethical And Affective Methodologies In Participatory Architectural Research, Tom Harvey

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This practice-based and interdisciplinary doctoral research develops methods for participatory and ethically engaged architectural research. Drawing on over a decade of architectural practice, it proposes practice-as-paradigm: a mode of knowledge production grounded in making, relation, and reflection. Centred on the Southampton Way estate in south-east London, the research develops a reflexive and diffractive methodology attentive to affective-knowing—tacit, embodied, and emotional knowledge—alongside technical expertise. Drawing on radical democratic theory, it treats participation as performative and political, where care and conflict co-produce insight. Models, prototypes, and installations operate as heuristic and epistemic artefacts through which collaboration, negotiation, and play generate situated understanding. …

Design Materials, Roberta Bernabei, Maria Maclennan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

No abstract provided.

Central But Decentered: Repositioning The Practitioner In Design Research Involving Practice, Luis Vega, Julia Valle-Noronha

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design research involving practice affords a unique mode of inquiry facilitated by acts of making, generative thinking, and iterative experimentation. The practitioner’s perspective is central because it foregrounds the significance of personal engagement with the research problem at hand. Current efforts in the field are nonetheless aiming to expand this inward-looking gaze by attending to the systemic and entangled dimensions of designing. With the increasing turn to relational, posthuman, and decolonial approaches towards that end, it becomes imperative to reconstrue what counts as ‘practice’ and reexamine whose perspectives are included in such a reconstrual. The present track brings together five …

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 …

Innovating Scientific Publishing Of Design Research: Promoting Plurality And Equity, Eleonora Lupo, Lorela Mehmeti

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This track aims to investigate the epistemological and ethical framework of scientific publishing in design research, from a pluriversal perspective, that challenges dominant and Western models of knowledge production and dissemination. The track aims to approach some of the current tensions in the design publishing landscape as starting conditions for the discussion. We observe that technoscientific advancements (digital infrastructures, open access platforms, business models) are transforming academic publishing by enabling more transparent, collaborative and accessible models of dissemination. At the same time, the design research community continues to rely on traditional publishing models that are shaped by ethnocentric editorial norms …

Temporalities Of More-Than-Human Design, Larissa Pschetz, Gizem Oktay, Valentina Nisi, Jiwei Zhou, Doris Kosminsky, Keili Koppel, Fiona Bell, Katharina Vones, Marta Ferreira

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This theme track builds on emerging research that foreground time as relational, situated, and plural, while examining how a shift towards more-than-human temporalities could reshape design practices, material engagements, and ethical responsibilities. The track proposes five areas of exploration: a) experimental representations of entangled temporalities; b) material transformations, geological formations, and temporal scales of planetary life; c) accounts on practices of noticing, attuning, and orchestrating more-than-human times; d) designerly ways of negotiating and coordinating rhythms; and e) etico-onto-epistemological reflections on time and design. The contributions engage these areas across contexts such as coastal ecologies, plant systems, and bio-based materials, framing …

Design And The Public Sector: Contemporary Methods And Practice, Scott Schmidt, Sabine Junginger, Marzia Mortati, Federico Vaz

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The DRS2026 track titled “Design and the Public Sector: Contemporary Methods and Practices” examines the expanding relationship between design and the public sector, situating design as an active process in shaping public services, institutional change, and governance practices. Building on a trajectory established across DRS2022, DRS2024, and now DRS2026, this third Design for Policy and Governance Special Interest Group (PoGoSIG) hosted track reflects a shift from foundational and integrative concerns toward a more systems-based orientation. The following contributions are organised around four central themes: AI and New Technologies, Design and Infrastructure, Hope and Imagination, and Participation in Policymaking. Drawing on …

Counter Design: Changing Perspectives In Design Action, Yekta Bakırlıoğlu, Claudia Garduño García, Nicola Morelli

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design continues to operate through assumptions inherited from its industrial and epistemic origins, yet the contributions gathered here unsettle those defaults and propose alternative orientations for practice. They examine how design problems are framed, how publics are organised, and how designers themselves are produced under specific historical and political conditions. Spanning urban governance, feminist methodologies, grassroots archival infrastructures, digital representation, relational approaches to AI, and critiques of universalised design expertise, the papers illuminate how counter-practices cultivate alternative publics and expand the epistemic boundaries of design. Counter Design appears not as a unified method or approach but as a constellation of …

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.

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 …

Reframing Narratives: Remedies For Improved Human Trafficking Coverage, Stefanie Henriques

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

The global rise in human trafficking is not receiving adequate media attention. While newspaper coverage of the topic has increased, current research argues that the issue is framed with a lack of diversity, limiting audience understanding of its complexity. Some researchers also note that coverage disproportionately focuses on sex trafficking, with minimal attention directed to other forms of trafficking such as the labor or organ trade. This paper conducts a narrative literature analysis of media research on human trafficking, drawing on framing theory to identify dominant frames in media messaging and synthesize cross-cultural factors that impact how the issue is …

They, The People, Ammel Sharon

Socio-Legal Review

This essay engages with Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution by situating it within a broader conceptual history of “the people.” While the book offers a compelling account of participatory constitution-making, the essay suggests that it opens up further questions about the conceptual and historical conditions shaping the people as a political subject. Drawing on contemporary political theory on populism, the essay explores how politics invokes the people through affective and performative practices alongside constitutional forms.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Entering The Villa: Love Island Usa Season 7 As A Site For Neoliberal Prosumption, Laura Cunningham

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Love Is In The Walls, Jonathan Champagne

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Vanishing Point, Michael Hoyt

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Progress, Jennifer Cormack

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Fuck The Border Wall, Isdaly Reyes

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.