Digital Commons Network^™

Mapping The Opportunity For Circularity In Fashion Retail Design And Fit-Out, Bethan Alexander, Rosemary Varley

DRS Biennial Conference Series

While the fashion industry has accepted, conceptually at least, the benefits of circularity in the context of products and supply chains, little has been written about circularity within the wider context of fashion store design and fit-out. Yet, these aspects of planning and operating retail outlets are central to an industry sector which significantly contributes to local and global economies. This paper comprises an integrated review of academic and industry literature to form themes for future research development. The review revealed four key knowledge gaps: a paucity of data to understand how circularity is implemented in fashion retail design practice; …

Introducing Systems Thinking In Design Education: Exploring Systems Through Breakfast, Michael Hohl

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Teaching and learning systems-thinking can often be abstract and, for new students, difficult to grasp. In our first-year Bachelor of Arts design theory seminar our goal was to connect systems theory to practice and thus allow for systems to become more tangible and visible. We asked ourselves: How might systems thinking become more concrete through doing, researching, reflecting, and discussing, therefore leading to a deeper understanding? In this text we present and discuss 'breakfast as a system', an evolving step-by-step and enquiry-based approach to learning. It involves background research, giga-mapping, and how researching and presenting information can lead to more …

Problem–Solution Co-Evolution Research In The Drs Conference Community (2001-2025), Michael Mose Biskjaer, Kim Halskov, Alwin De Rooij

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The problem–solution co-evolution model proposed by Dorst and Cross (2001) remains highly influential for understanding design processes. This paper contributes a scoping review of DRS conference proceedings (2001–2025) revealing how the model has been adopted, developed, and critiqued. A thematic synthesis of a corpus of sixteen DRS papers shows how the model has been used to frame, connect, and extend foundational design theories by pointing to the crucial role of mutual adaptation of problem and solution. We find that problem and solution spaces are considered distinct and interdependent. Co-evolution is conceptualized and studied through several conceptual lenses, e.g., cognitive, social, …

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: …

Within The Dialogue Box: Exploring Designer Activities And Linguistic Features In Collaboration With Textual Genai, Yulu Song, Ying Hu, Zihan Zhou, Wentao Deng, Xing Du, Yiming Bai

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Language functions as both a core element and the cognitive framework that supports the entire design process. However, the deep integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting the creative process from self- or human-to-human dialogue to human-AI conversation, requiring a careful examination of this emerging form of collaborative language. This study conducted an experiment on designer-AI collaboration. The goal was to explore the relationship between their collaborative activities, linguistic features, and co-creativity. By carefully coding activities and using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) method, we identified conversational features linked to different levels of creativity. These findings not …

Uncertainty In The Studio: Ai As A Material In The Design Of Tangible Products, Sam Theelen, Giulia Talamini, Roy Op Het Veld, Demi Sparidans, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Stephan Wensveen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

AI uncertainty has been proposed as a design material that provides practitioners with a foothold to engage with technical attributes of these technologies beyond any given output. However, it is unclear what role AI uncertainty can play in tangible product design processes. In this paper, we investigate this through two design research projects following a studio methodology; combining first-person reflective making with autoethnographic elements, incorporating a variety of AI technologies (e.g., object detection, image and video generation, mesh extraction). Through the analysis of these first-person accounts and reflection on design processes and outcomes, we find qualitatively different types of uncertainties …

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 …

The Pen Or The Prompt: Investigating Novice Design Students' Use Of Sketching And Generative Ai For Initial Concept Visualisations, Alexander “Freddie” Holliman, Rebecca Macfie, Kieran Gunn, Ross Brisco

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The pervasive use of AI in design continues to increase, affecting most, if not all, facets of design practice. This is reflected in the expectations and practices of design students, even at an early stage in their education. The integration of digital tools in sketching is nothing new, but the use of AI tools may see the outright replacement of this well-established skill. This study considers the experiences and perspectives of novice design students, examining their use of AI tools and whether GenAI could replace sketching for creating images of initial concepts, assessing both against the novice designers’ intentions using …

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 …

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.

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 …

Making Theory With Textiles: Theories Of Designing And Designing Theory, Elaine Igoe, Anne Louise Bang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Textiles have long nurtured philosophical positions and metaphors, inquiries, as well as investigations of making and everyday life aesthetics and processes. Performing ontologically and epistemologically at different scales, textiles are often used as case studies in interdisciplinary research. This track presents a varied selection of papers that take textiles as starting points for critical and theoretical investigations of our world, our modes of production and conditions of living, as well as their intersections. These papers focus on the way that practice, perception, usability and critical inquiry are theorized through the lens of textiles, and the way that textiles inform and …

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.

Tick Attack Oh!, Mindy Wren

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

The Fog, Heyi Xie

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

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.

Foundations' Deep, Emily Williams, Morgan Williams

University Honors Theses

Most historic buildings do not survive as they were built, yet preservation frameworks still tend to evaluate them as if they did.

Foundations' Deep begins with a structure located in Helena, Montana 59602, a building that sits uneasily within the categories it has been asked to meet. Built in the early twentieth century, it has persisted through alteration, abandonment, and use. What remains is not a stable artifact but a record of accumulated decisions, some careful and many indifferent, now embedded in the fabric of the building itself.

The thesis grows from this condition and from the limits of the …

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 …

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.

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 …

Catherine De Bourboulon's Diary In China (1858-1862) Fracture Between East And West, Qingya Meng

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article is dedicated to the journey of Catherine de Bourboulon (1827-1865) with her husband, a French diplomat, through northern China, Mongolia, and Russia, during which she wrote a journal that was published upon her return to France in 1866. This journal reflects both her compassion for the Chinese and Mongols living in miserable conditions and her admiration for the landscape of the Gobi Desert. However, her perspective also establishes a hierarchical relationship with the Other. In this regard, our approach aims to show how the concept of civilization justifies Catherine de Bourboulon’s stance, convinced of the superiority of Europeans …

Prompted Props, Human Pipelines: Evaluating Ai-Generated 3d Assets For Game-Ready Environments, Andrew Begemann, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Generative AI systems increasingly promise rapid 3D asset production for game development, yet their practical viability depends on whether generated models can move beyond visual preview into editable, optimized, engine-ready workflows. This article presents a practice-led comparative case study of a stylized fantasy tavern environment produced through two workflows: a human-authored Blender pipeline and an AI-assisted pipeline using Meshy 6 and Hunyuan 3D. Using a fixed asset list, shared visual theme, documented prompts, production-time tracking, visual comparison, topology inspection, UV-map analysis, and post-generation labor accounting, the study evaluates whether text-to-3D tools function as production substitutes, ideation accelerators, or conditional asset …

From Seizure To Settlement: Liberated Africans, Imperial Law, And Labor In The Indian Ocean World, 1810–1860, Holly S. Mcfate

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between British antislavery, imperial law, and labor management in the western Indian Ocean during the first half of the nineteenth century. Centered on the 1821 capture and condemnation of the slave schooner Industry by HMS Menai, the study employs a microhistorical methodology to reconstruct the legal and administrative processes that governed the lives of Africans seized from slave ships after their liberation. Drawing upon Vice-Admiralty Court records, Colonial Office correspondence, naval logbooks, and administrative registers from The National Archives (UK) and the Mauritius Archives, the thesis follows the transition of captive Africans from maritime interception …

Independent Apparel Brand Launch Campaign Strategy, Nick S. Schottenfeld

Graphic Communication

Soleil Lune is an independent California apparel brand with an established visual identity, a growing social media following, and a live product collection but lacks a coordinated marketing system to connect those pieces into a unified launch. Without that structure, the brand’s Instagram, Shopify store, and print materials were operating independently, making it difficult to build consistent customer trust or drive sales. This project developed a full launch campaign producing a print and digital lookbook, 10 Instagram campaign assets, a printed poster, and a branded care insert card all designed to work together to tell the brand story, grow the …

Kcpr 25-26 Production Handbook, Evan P. Cork

Graphic Communication

The KCPR Production Handbook serves as a resource for the production team when putting on live events for the station. It provides a brief history of the production team and context for why I decided to create this handbook. It is broken down into seven chapters, including sections that cover live event production, KCPR’s Club 91, and a list of important contacts.