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Queering Empathy In/For/With/By Design, Jessica Meharry Jun 2026

Queering Empathy In/For/With/By Design, Jessica Meharry

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Empathy is widely used as the initial stage of the design process to understand users and meet their needs and desires. Recently these methods have been critiqued for commodifying empathy in commercial practice, centering the designer instead of the user, and failing to account for power dynamics. Empathy is also under attack in political spheres, increasing the dehumanization of others. To address these criticisms, we explore the value of empathy in design processes and examine how queer theory and queering methodologies can help designers move past “walking in someone else’s shoes” towards intersectional design processes rooted in political responsibility. Synthesizing …

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Reconfiguring Industrial Heritage: Human-Centered Narrative Design For Reconciliation And Inclusive Storytelling, Yiling Fu, Marco Borsotti Jun 2026

Reconfiguring Industrial Heritage: Human-Centered Narrative Design For Reconciliation And Inclusive Storytelling, Yiling Fu, Marco Borsotti

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article takes the Shenyang China Industrial Museum as an example to expose the interpretation and design of China's representative industrial heritage museums dominated by authoritative narratives and technocratic biases. Through the case study of the “Steel Home Still” exhibition, explore how narrative design can reconstruct industrial archives and challenge their power structure. This article conducts a comparative analysis of two cases based on three parameters: narrative themes and strategies, representation of individuals and workers, technology narratives and human engagement, discussing how human-centered exhibition narratives reposition human memory at the core of industrial heritage, transforming it from static representations of …

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Erased By Default: Reorienting Digital Welfare Systems With Care And Participation, Emma Holden, P.J. White, Aisling Tuite, Ray Griffin Jun 2026

Erased By Default: Reorienting Digital Welfare Systems With Care And Participation, Emma Holden, P.J. White, Aisling Tuite, Ray Griffin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The shift from analogue to digital-first government service delivery positions design as a central gatekeeper of welfare access and civic recognition. However, these systems frequently act upon blanket assumptions regarding trust, digital literacy, and engagement, inadvertently marginalizing the most vulnerable of society. This paper examines how digital welfare interfaces produce forms of non-response, interpreted both as user disengagement and systemic erasure. Grounded in a qualitative, design-led study with marginalized young adults in Ireland’s Youthreach programme, alongside the perspectives of frontline support and service providers. The study documents how these users navigate and resist platforms that presume universal digital competence. Their …

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Craft As Experiential Knowledge: Designing Workshops And Record-Keeping Practices For Cultural Transmission Among Young Generations, Kai Kishita Jun 2026

Craft As Experiential Knowledge: Designing Workshops And Record-Keeping Practices For Cultural Transmission Among Young Generations, Kai Kishita

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study demonstrates the potential of an experiential learning approach combining craft production experiences, dialogue with craftsmen, and record-keeping activities for young people. An ageing workforce and declining demand contribute to the loss of cultural identity and intangible value that craftsmanship culture provides to contemporary Japanese society. However, opportunities to engage with crafts beyond mere consumption remain limited. Using Kyoto roof tiles (京瓦 / Kyō-gawara) making as a primary case study, this research examines how experiential knowledge can promote cultural transmission and education through workshops and record-keeping (聞き書き / kikigaki). Through hands-on making and record-keeping, participants gained technical skills and …

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Producing Knowledge For Whom? Parallel Knowledge Worlds In Chinese Doctoral Education In Design And International Design Research, Linghao Li, Wangda Zhu, Tingxin Zheng Jun 2026

Producing Knowledge For Whom? Parallel Knowledge Worlds In Chinese Doctoral Education In Design And International Design Research, Linghao Li, Wangda Zhu, Tingxin Zheng

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Since the first programs were established in 2011, China's design doctoral education has expanded to 37 institutions by 2024, yet Chinese scholars remain marginalized in international venues like DRS (3.6% of papers, 2012–2024). Through mixed-methods analysis of 426 dissertations, 95 conference papers, 6,239 citations, 40 author trajectories, and 9 interviews, we reveal systematic divergence rather than exclusion. Citation analysis demonstrates a 50.9 percentage point shift: scholars cite 54.5% Chinese-language sources in dissertations but only 3.6% in DRS papers. Author tracking shows 72.5% became one-time participants with no subsequent first-author international publications, evidencing strategic credential-seeking over sustained engagement. Keyword analysis confirms …

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Design Things In Search For Public Concern: A Study Of How Urban Lighting Is Scripted In The City Of Gothenburg, Christina Vildinge, Elena Raviola Jun 2026

Design Things In Search For Public Concern: A Study Of How Urban Lighting Is Scripted In The City Of Gothenburg, Christina Vildinge, Elena Raviola

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Light is gaining attention as a design element in public space. Its relational and ephemeral aesthetics enable urban transformations beyond the built environment, offering new possibilities for sustainable and inclusive cities. Yet, artificial light remains a relatively new concern in planning, traditionally excluded in drawings and regulations. This paper examines how light’s relational materiality is translated within urban planning and design, and travels as a matter of concern in city governance to become a public thing. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, we analyze municipal lighting policymaking in Gothenburg, Sweden, showing how light’s multiple dimensions—its aesthetics, sustainability, safety, environmental —are mediated through …

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Dilemmas Of Institutionalizing Human-Centered Design In Startups, Wenlin Zhang, Jin Ma Jun 2026

Dilemmas Of Institutionalizing Human-Centered Design In Startups, Wenlin Zhang, Jin Ma

DRS Biennial Conference Series

While business and strategic design scholarship widely acknowledges the benefits of Human-Centered Design (HCD), limited research noted that implementing HCD may produce intricate challenges in real-world business contexts—especially in startups constrained by resource scarcity and limited time for trial and error. Drawing on institutional theory, we examine how HCD permeate into organizational culture, strategy making, and daily operations. Our case study develops a framework of “HCD Institutionalization Dilemma”. The framework encompasses four themes. First, overcommitment to HCD, where organizational members deeply adhere to HCD tenets. Second, operational predicament perception, where high investments fail to deliver tangible, actionable design outputs. Third, …

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Questioning One’S Body: Overtrusting In Body-Sensing Technology, Piyakorn Koowattanataworn, Margo Lengua, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, Steve Benford Jun 2026

Questioning One’S Body: Overtrusting In Body-Sensing Technology, Piyakorn Koowattanataworn, Margo Lengua, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, Steve Benford

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Body sensors render human bodies as digital data, promising better self-knowledge. Yet, as people trust and learn to attune to these representations, system breakdowns expose tensions between embodied knowing and digital authority. Through Research through Design and Critical Design, this paper investigates how trust, control, and self-perception are negotiated in bodily interaction with data. Breathe Kritisk is a critical artefact that externalises breathing via an inflatable system linked to the user's solar plexus. Designed for estrangement, it resists attunement through a sensitive sensor and deceptive outputs — sometimes following the user’s breaths, other times acting on its own. We discuss …

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Creating A Regenerative Design Practice That Gives Back To People And Planet: Lessons From Stakeholder Interactions In Industrial Agriculture, Cecilie Baann, Birgitta Ralston, Jannike Falk-Andersson, Line Johanne Barkved Jun 2026

Creating A Regenerative Design Practice That Gives Back To People And Planet: Lessons From Stakeholder Interactions In Industrial Agriculture, Cecilie Baann, Birgitta Ralston, Jannike Falk-Andersson, Line Johanne Barkved

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper considers the development of a regenerative design practice as a grounded and participatory method that fosters sustainable design and solutions, sensitive to relational practices and values, even when these are thought to be negligible. We draw upon theories of ecological relationality, in combination with posthuman theory, to argue that holistic regenerative design should aim to foster ownership of the design processes amongst affected actors. To do so, our regenerative design practice allows participants to search for, promote, and expand existing practices of relationality, a focus we argue have been missing in the existing research on regenerative design. Drawing …

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From Edgeland To Gentrified-Land: Graphic Communication As Intermediary For Negotiating Place Identity In Hackney Wick, London, Angelina Hang Pan, Jennifer Mchugn, Jingnan Bian Jun 2026

From Edgeland To Gentrified-Land: Graphic Communication As Intermediary For Negotiating Place Identity In Hackney Wick, London, Angelina Hang Pan, Jennifer Mchugn, Jingnan Bian

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Hackney Wick has long been regarded as an urban edgeland, marked by significant poverty since the 1860s, with distinctive topographic and socio- economic features. Yet in the early 2000s, it saw a rapid transformation into a creative space as artists began to occupy abandoned warehouses, building a live- work culture and quickly establishing itself as one of Europe’s most vibrant artistic communities. More recently, the development of the London Olympic infrastructure and government-led urban regeneration initiatives have accelerated gentrification and drive for social capital, whilst intensifying social exclusion and community marginalisation amongst disadvantaged communities. This paper integrates visual ethnography (graphic …

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Negotiating Control With Materials: Progressive Modes Of Engagement In Design Practice, Yuliang Kang, Enza Migliore, Jingze Liu Jun 2026

Negotiating Control With Materials: Progressive Modes Of Engagement In Design Practice, Yuliang Kang, Enza Migliore, Jingze Liu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper addresses a design dilemma: how can designers engage with materials that exhibit recognizable yet unpredictable behaviors? Traditional design relies on predictability and control. However, in an era of crises and complexity, we must acknowledge non-human agency and recognize that materials inherently respond and adapt. Complex material systems, characterized by self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, and emergent patterns, resist deterministic control, requiring an alternative approach. Drawing on material agency and play perspectives of rules and chances, we develop an operative framework of negotiating control, exemplified through clay fractals using the Lifting Hele-Shaw cell (LHSC). We identify three progressive modes of engagement: …

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More-Than-Human Data Practices, Elisa Giaccardi, Sara Lenzi, Chris Speed, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Jiwei Zhou Jun 2026

More-Than-Human Data Practices, Elisa Giaccardi, Sara Lenzi, Chris Speed, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Jiwei Zhou

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Grounded in post-anthropocentric and post-humanist perspectives, this track explores more-than-human data practices that challenge dominant data paradigms and cultivate alternative modes of engagement with the world, from the microbial to the planetary. Rather than treating non-human life as objects of measurement and classification, as data subjects, the contributions in this track ask what it would mean to recognize organisms, systems, and processes as data co-producers, whose perceptual worlds, temporal rhythms, and relational entanglements actively participate in what counts as knowledge. This reorientation carries profound consequences for the designer. Co-producing data with more-than-human others is a political, epistemic, and ontological commitment …

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Resilient Design Pedagogies: Examining Sustainability's Translation Into Contemporary Design Education, Flavia Alice Mameli Jun 2026

Resilient Design Pedagogies: Examining Sustainability's Translation Into Contemporary Design Education, Flavia Alice Mameli

DRS Biennial Conference Series

What is the status quo of contemporary design education in the context of sustainability as a holistic and timely training, a binding professional ethos, and materialised everyday practice for future designers? This research investigates how contemporary tertiary design education is responding to polycrisis discourse and the multilaterally demanded paradigm shift towards sustainability. This includes a critical reflection on the political dimension of the term itself. A mixed-methods approach, combining systematic programme mapping, discourse analytical case studies of tertiary design education, and interviews with educators, investigates the translation of sustainability rhetoric into pedagogical practice across design and architecture education worldwide. A …

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Understanding Food Waste Practices In Cross-Cultural Food Adaptation: The Case Of Chinese Students In The Uk, Xuecheng Dai, Emmanuel Tsekleves, Yekta Bakırlıoğlu Jun 2026

Understanding Food Waste Practices In Cross-Cultural Food Adaptation: The Case Of Chinese Students In The Uk, Xuecheng Dai, Emmanuel Tsekleves, Yekta Bakırlıoğlu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Food waste is a global sustainability concern, yet its connection to cross-cultural adaptation remains underexplored. For international students, adapting to unfamiliar food environments involves cycles of trial, error and waste. Among Chinese students in the UK (one of the largest international student populations), cultural differences and short stays intensify these processes, resulting in distinct forms of waste. This study explores how food adaptation relates to waste among first-time Chinese students in the UK, attempting to reveal areas for design interventions. Seventeen students completed seven-day cultural probes, combining daily tasks with self-reflection on food practices. The analysis revealed various types of …

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Pen-Palling Systems Change: A Collaborative Approach To Growing Individual Agency In Light Of Global Polycrises, Donna Maione, Mathilda Tham Jun 2026

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 …

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Territorial Design As Frictional Landscapes: Reframing Urban-Landscape Discourse And Practice Into Multi-Scalar Governance, Sophie Eberhardt Jun 2026

Territorial Design As Frictional Landscapes: Reframing Urban-Landscape Discourse And Practice Into Multi-Scalar Governance, Sophie Eberhardt

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper traces the emergence of territorial design as a distinct discourse and practice that repositions urban-landscape design from site-based form-making toward socio-ecological governance across scales. Drawing on a systematic review of scholarly literature (1960-2025), a practice survey (42 questionnaires with designers working in France), and three comparative case studies - Room for the River, Medellín’s social urbanism, and riverfront renaturation projects in Paris and Lyon - we show how ecological planning, landscape urbanism, and territorialist thought converge into methods that couple territorial diagnosis, morphological and biophysical patterning, and participatory co-design. The analysis foregrounds two fertile frictions: replicability vs. situatedness, …

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Bridging The Community-Institution Divide: Multi-Level Community-Based Participatory Design For Migrant Health In China, Linfu Zhang, Emmanuel Tsekleves, David Pérez Ojeda, Zhangfeng Chen, Jingyuan Tan Jun 2026

Bridging The Community-Institution Divide: Multi-Level Community-Based Participatory Design For Migrant Health In China, Linfu Zhang, Emmanuel Tsekleves, David Pérez Ojeda, Zhangfeng Chen, Jingyuan Tan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Co-design with marginalised communities in developing settings —and their experiential knowledge—often collides with expert rationalities and hierarchical logics in public health institutions, undermining power-sharing, sustained participation, and institutionalisation. This paper explores how co-design mediates these competing logics to bring structurally produced health injustices back into the formal institutional field of vision. Based on seven months of immersive fieldwork in Shenzhen, China’s largest migrant city, the paper analyses a social design case addressing rural–urban migrants’ psychological well-being in an informal settlement. It integrates community-based participatory research (CBPR) and co-design to initiate the process of returning public health concerns to the institutional …

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Winds, Sand, Companions, Humans: Attuning Bodies For Post-Antropocentric Worlds, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Laura Novik, Pablo Hermansen Jun 2026

Winds, Sand, Companions, Humans: Attuning Bodies For Post-Antropocentric Worlds, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Laura Novik, Pablo Hermansen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This Laboratorio de Futuros held in Mar del Plata (Argentina), brought together architecture and design professors and master’s students from Argentina, Chile, and Colombia to explore an Epimethean approach to design—acting after rather than ahead of action, embracing delay, reflection, and care. Rooted in voices and material practices from the Global South, participants engaged in embodied exercises fostering inter-learning through reciprocity and complementarity. We explored the territory holistically with our whole bodies, attuning to wind, sand, sea, and insects, and reframing design as the enactment of relational infrastructures through affective attunement and planetary excesses. Our bodies became sensors, registering the …

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Design For Care-Full Inclusion: Foregrounding The Voices Of Vulnerable Communities Through Vignettes In Co-Design, Daniel Campos-Muñiz, Yiming Yao, Tse Pei Ng, Celeste Seah, Givson Ong, Janghee Cho, Jung-Joo Lee Jun 2026

Design For Care-Full Inclusion: Foregrounding The Voices Of Vulnerable Communities Through Vignettes In Co-Design, Daniel Campos-Muñiz, Yiming Yao, Tse Pei Ng, Celeste Seah, Givson Ong, Janghee Cho, Jung-Joo Lee

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Foregrounding the voices of vulnerable communities in future-oriented co-design workshops is a growing concern in design. Yet, their participation in multi-stakeholder settings may be limited by factors such as power imbalances, cultural differences, low self-efficacy or limited availability. In this paper, we present a case where a care-oriented approach to vignette making and use was adopted to foreground the voices of migrant care workers (MCWs) in a multi-stakeholder co-design workshop. Through this approach, vignettes (1) fostered our critical reflection and affective understanding, (2) supported the articulation of MCWs’ lived experiences, and (3) provided a medium to highlight the interconnectedness and …

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Caring For Memory: A Neuroscientific Framework For Commemorative Exhibition Design, Caterina Vettraino Jun 2026

Caring For Memory: A Neuroscientific Framework For Commemorative Exhibition Design, Caterina Vettraino

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Contemporary memorial exhibitions presume emotional intensity produces durable memory, employing affective saturation strategies that neuroscientific research reveals as counterproductive. Emotional arousal consolidates central affective impressions whilst compromising contextual understanding: visitors retain visceral sensations but lose historical processes. This paper develops a theoretical framework integrating Assmann's cultural memory theory, neuroscience of memory consolidation, and care ethics to inform commemorative exhibition design. A four-modality taxonomy, individual, collective, spatial, and sensory, translates psychological memory categories into operationally distinct design approaches. Digital mediation constitutes a transversal narrative apparatus serving memory transmission across all four modalities, functioning as infrastructural support. Design parameters specify spatial configurations, …

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Situated Knowledge In Rural Craft Practices: A Context-Sensitive Approach To Craft–Design Collaboration In Fife, Scotland, Peining Sheng, Ayaan Ahmed Jun 2026

Situated Knowledge In Rural Craft Practices: A Context-Sensitive Approach To Craft–Design Collaboration In Fife, Scotland, Peining Sheng, Ayaan Ahmed

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores how craft, as an unselfconscious design practice and embodied knowledge, contributes to situated design research, based on an ethnographic field study in Fife, Scotland, and a co-creation workshop in Edinburgh. The study points out that existing studies and practices promoting craft–design collaboration tend to focus on urban contexts and designer-led methods, often resulting in a lack of context-sensitive consideration and the presence of imbalanced relationships. Thus, this study underscores that understanding the local knowledge of rural-based craft practitioners and the distinct attributes of rural settings can respond to the challenges of rural craft practices and the barriers …

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The Didactic Body: Interdisciplinary Design Pedagogy In 1970s Denmark, Christine Bjerke Jun 2026

The Didactic Body: Interdisciplinary Design Pedagogy In 1970s Denmark, Christine Bjerke

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores alternative pedagogical approaches that centred the relationship between the human body and design in 1970s Denmark. Initiated by lecturers at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts – School of Architecture (today Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation), a series of interdisciplinary ergonomics seminars (1974–78) at Institute 3C2 brought together more than a hundred students and lecturers from architecture, design, dance, and the medical and social sciences. Through archival research and oral history, I analyse these overlooked teaching practices and situate them within broader societal changes. Informed by disability studies, I examine how the seminars negotiated …

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Hidden Constellations: Mapping Queer Sapphic Spatiality In New York City, Yuchun Zhang Jun 2026

Hidden Constellations: Mapping Queer Sapphic Spatiality In New York City, Yuchun Zhang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Hidden Constellations examines how queer sapphic spatiality in New York City is shaped through everyday negotiations rather than formal venues. While official data record only four lesbian bars, this paper argues that scarcity in data does not signify absence in lived experience. Drawing from qualitative interviews and participatory cognitive mapping, the study treats mapping as a queer design method that transforms memory, emotion, and silence into spatial knowledge. Informed by queer phenomenology, feminist and critical cartography, and data feminism, the research reframes mapping from representation to resonance. The paper shows how sapphic individuals tactically inhabit, sense, and remake urban space …

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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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Projects As Actors In Design Education, Barak Pelman, Edith Bouton Jun 2026

Projects As Actors In Design Education, Barak Pelman, Edith Bouton

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study examines how design projects function as actors within studio-based pedagogy, drawing on Actor-Network Theory. Data were collected over a nine-month fieldwork at a higher education institution, covering courses in architecture, industrial design, and ceramics design. The study was conducted as a Research-Practice Partnership, uniting education researchers and design practitioners to shift the focus away from practitioners' specialized knowledge and experiences by positioning them alongside critical perspectives from K-12 educational research. Our findings demonstrate how students and instructors view projects as active actors in the design process across three main dimensions: 1) Through language: instructors and students personify projects, …

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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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Constraints As Knowledge Amplifiers: Understanding How Research-Through-Design Makes Design Knowledge Visible, Amit Kundal, Tina Mangwani Jun 2026

Constraints As Knowledge Amplifiers: Understanding How Research-Through-Design Makes Design Knowledge Visible, Amit Kundal, Tina Mangwani

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Research-through-Design (RtD) continues to grapple with how prototypes can generate comparable design knowledge beyond stand-alone studies. This paper addresses that gap by studying how knowledge takes shape in constrained design settings, where limitations themselves become sources of insight. Using the case of affordable dental care in India, chosen for its material, spatial, and procedural limitations, the study shows how constraints can make tacit design understandings more visible. From this work, three categories of knowledge emerged: embodied negotiation of ergonomics, enacted hygiene, and modularity-for-resilience. These categories describe how designers learn through doing, maintaining, and adjusting within limitations. Rather than focusing on …

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Recognize Ourselves, Understand And Transform: An Approach To A Latin American Feminist Design Methodology, Dora Sánchez-Hidalgo Jun 2026

Recognize Ourselves, Understand And Transform: An Approach To A Latin American Feminist Design Methodology, Dora Sánchez-Hidalgo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents a first approach to a Latin American feminist design method based on three actions proposed by the Chilean feminist sociologist Julieta Kirkwood who said feminist praxis required to (1) know the structures of oppression, (2) recognize our place in them and (3) transform them through our practice. Although the intersection between design and feminism has successfully pointed out the false neutrality in design practice and its potential to imagine more equal futures, practical approaches are still needed as a guidance to put feminist design into practice. Therefore, this design method based on understanding, recognizing ourselves and transforming …

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Visualising Values In Women’S Digital Labour: Design Ethics For Assembling Social Justice, Li Zhang, Yujia Liu Jun 2026

Visualising Values In Women’S Digital Labour: Design Ethics For Assembling Social Justice, Li Zhang, Yujia Liu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines how visualising values in women’s digital labour shapes recognition and justice in platform-driven environments. Visualisation is advanced as a design-ethics strategy for surfacing and negotiating undervalued work that remains obscured in digital economies. Grounded in Nancy Fraser’s justice framework and feminist epistemologies centred on situated and embodied experience, the study positions visualisation as a means to reveal and contest structural devaluation. A three-phase ethical practice is developed: ethical narration to make hidden value perceptible, ethical prototyping to question recognition mechanisms, and ethical interaction to build collective participation in decisions about representation. Insights draw on sociological and anthropological …

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Tracing Oppression Through Things: Facilitating A Slow Critique In Post-Anthropocene Design, Thanussayan Karunakaran, Dilina Nawarathne Jun 2026

Tracing Oppression Through Things: Facilitating A Slow Critique In Post-Anthropocene Design, Thanussayan Karunakaran, Dilina Nawarathne

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper reconsiders what it means to be critical in design studies under Post-Anthropocene conditions. It proposes slow relational critique as an orientation. In doing so, it stays with the fragile entanglements through which oppression is enacted by both human and more-than-human entities. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory, the paper revisits a case of a cradle in a caste-oppressed community in Sri Lanka to show how power and inequality are relationally produced through mundane associations of “things.” The analysis demonstrates how critique can remain empirical and attentive to objects while resisting the purification of problems into grand Anthropocene social explanations. Rather …

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