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Toward A Culturally Situated Perspective: Rethinking The Role Of Ai In Intangible Cultural Heritage Pattern Creation, Xiaojing Yuan, Xiang Yuan, Sanyi Wang, Hao Li, Mengzhi He, Duoduo Zhang, Nick Bryan-Kinns Jun 2026

Toward A Culturally Situated Perspective: Rethinking The Role Of Ai In Intangible Cultural Heritage Pattern Creation, Xiaojing Yuan, Xiang Yuan, Sanyi Wang, Hao Li, Mengzhi He, Duoduo Zhang, Nick Bryan-Kinns

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Research on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in cultural design has primarily focused on generative control and creative efficiency, often overlooking the misalignment between AI task definition and cultural creation. This study explores how GenAI can be culturally adapted within traditional pattern-making practices. Using an ethnographically informed generative probe, field experiments were conducted in the Huayao cross-stitch community, which practices a form of Chinese intangible cultural heritage. The findings reveal how cultural practitioners negotiate creative logic and cultural judgment when collaborating with AI, identifying four key orientations: liveliness, locality, creation-in-progress, and community creativity. Building on these insights, the paper redefines AI’s …

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Dropping Pebbles: The Ripple Effect Of Designerly Co-Creation In Steering Sustainability Transitions In Hospitals, Ayşegül Özçelik, Jotte De Koning, Nicole Hunfeld, Jan-Carel Diehl Jun 2026

Dropping Pebbles: The Ripple Effect Of Designerly Co-Creation In Steering Sustainability Transitions In Hospitals, Ayşegül Özçelik, Jotte De Koning, Nicole Hunfeld, Jan-Carel Diehl

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Steering sustainability transitions in complex organizations, such as hospitals, may benefit from iterative, situated, and participatory experimentation. Co-creation holds particular promise in this regard, acting as a “pebble” in the system that generates ripple effects towards sustainable change. However, its implications and methodologies within hospital systems, especially those grounded in design practice, remain underexplored. This paper investigates designerly co-creation through seven medical device design projects conducted by master’s students in collaboration with healthcare professionals. Drawing on observations of co-creation processes and 14 interviews, the study identifies designerly co-creation as both an “incubation space” for sustainability innovations and a potential “catalyst …

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Disrupting And Reimagining Women’S Identities: A Feminist Design Methodology Inspired By The Self-Combing Women’S “Goddess Fictual” Practice, Lu Li, Catherine Caudwell, Rosie Scott Jun 2026

Disrupting And Reimagining Women’S Identities: A Feminist Design Methodology Inspired By The Self-Combing Women’S “Goddess Fictual” Practice, Lu Li, Catherine Caudwell, Rosie Scott

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper investigates the feminist identity transformation strategies of "self-combing" women in late nineteenth-century China, who resisted patriarchal marriage identity by enacting alternative female identities through "Goddess Fictual" practice (goddess fiction belief and ritual performance). Through fieldwork of the historical residences and spiritual spaces of self-combing women, this paper identifies the goddess shrine as their new female identity performative site. It was within this specific site that spiritual goddess belief and identity ritual performance converged to support these women’s identities. Inspired by this historical experience, we translate this feminist practice into a new design methodology. It demonstrates how this historical …

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Epimethean Design In Practice: Infrastructuring Reproductive Labour In The Maternity Ward, Sissel Olander, Tau Lenskjold Jun 2026

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: …

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Bodystorming Through Disruption: Ai-Assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy, Jiawei Li, Jiayue Wang, Lin Zhu, Jiaxuan Xu, Changran Zhao, Zhiyong Fu Jun 2026

Bodystorming Through Disruption: Ai-Assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy, Jiawei Li, Jiayue Wang, Lin Zhu, Jiaxuan Xu, Changran Zhao, Zhiyong Fu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study presents an AI-assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy integrating artificial intelligence with bodystorming in space design education. Built on a three-dimensional framework—Embodiment, Enactment, and Improvisation—an AI system was developed using Coze to generate emergent scenarios and guide improvisational performance. Validated over three semesters with 16 undergraduate students tackling extreme environment challenges, the system employed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to deliver context-rich, adaptive prompts. Results showed strong correlation between AI support and enhanced improvisational creativity (r = 0.48), especially in spontaneous adaptability. Students often underrated their own performances, with significant gaps in Improvisation (p < 0.01). Material types influenced outcomes, with sound-based tasks producing the largest evaluation discrepancies. Findings highlight AI’s evolving role from tool to creative collaborator, offering a novel pedagogical model that merges embodied cognition, reflective practice, and AI to foster design thinking under constraints.

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The In-Situ Ai Pattern Merchant: A Speculative Intervention In Huayao Embroidery Futures, Hao Li, Duoduo Zhang, Siqi Chen, Nick Bryan-Kinns Jun 2026

The In-Situ Ai Pattern Merchant: A Speculative Intervention In Huayao Embroidery Futures, Hao Li, Duoduo Zhang, Siqi Chen, Nick Bryan-Kinns

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Research on AI and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) often reflects a static, object-centered perspective. This paper instead explores how generative AI can be embedded in the living practices of ICH. Through a speculative intervention in a Huayao embroidery community in Hunan, China, we reframe AI not as a tool for content generation, but as a social mediator within local craft networks. By performing as an “AI Cross-stitch Pattern Merchant” during the local festival, the study reveals how AI’s creative empowerment of young women sparked intergenerational tensions around legitimacy, labor, and authority. While youth embraced GenAI for playful self-expression, elder embroiderers …

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Making Worlds Thinkable: Design As Diffractive Sensemaking., Joan Vellvé Rafecas Jun 2026

Making Worlds Thinkable: Design As Diffractive Sensemaking., Joan Vellvé Rafecas

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Across contemporary design practice, an attitude has been consolidating design as diffractive sensemaking. It is not method- or outcome-oriented, nor even necessarily a discipline, but a habit of attention in which fragments, measures and memories, timings and routines, infrastructures and more-than-human traces are placed so they read through one another to develop conscious, situated practices. Often grounded in research practice, these approaches lead to diverse outcomes. In all of them, an ecosophic orientation keeps environmental, social and mental ecologies mutually in play without collapsing them into a single index or metric. In such practices, care appears as activism: framing, positioning, …

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Time Travelers: Bridging Generations In Boston’S Seaport, Robiya Sahibnazarova, Annika Kim Jun 2026

Time Travelers: Bridging Generations In Boston’S Seaport, Robiya Sahibnazarova, Annika Kim

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This qualitative study examines social isolation among Boston's elders aged 65 and older. We explored ways to employ service design and interactive encounters to connect different generations around history. Our focus was on Boston’s Seaport—a district shaped by redevelopment and technology. This study involved four interviews with museum professionals, elders, and locals to understand how memories influence community connections. The Time Travelers app features an Interactive Memory Map of stories along with guided walks and collaborative memory threads that encourage intergenerational exchange. Complementing the app, a Seaport boardwalk installation features televisions from different decades displaying memories from each era. Visitors …

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Affective Epistemologies: Textile Teaching At University Of Chile, 1930-2000, Camila Vicencio-Pérez, Magdalena Cattan-Lavin Jun 2026

Affective Epistemologies: Textile Teaching At University Of Chile, 1930-2000, Camila Vicencio-Pérez, Magdalena Cattan-Lavin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study analyses textile teaching at Universidad de Chile (1930-2000), the first institution to incorporate it as an academic discipline in the country, as a case of theory-making through practice. Drawing on archives, oral testimonies, and material objects (looms, notebooks, works), we reconstruct how textiles operated simultaneously as technical knowledge, affective space, and pedagogical practice. In dialogue with Catherine Dormor, we approach weaving as material thinking and "theory-making" through making; following Elvira Espejo, we situate it as a matrix of relational knowledges. This case inscribes itself within institutionalization of textiles in 20th-century art and design schools, with influence from foreign …

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Information Hierarchies For Better Health Communication: Mapping Expert-User Differences For Drug Instruction Design, Hengyi Shi, Hao Wang, Zhilong Luan, Chunxi Huang Jun 2026

Information Hierarchies For Better Health Communication: Mapping Expert-User Differences For Drug Instruction Design, Hengyi Shi, Hao Wang, Zhilong Luan, Chunxi Huang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Designing drug instructions that communicate effectively to both experts and lay users requires understanding of their different information needs. This study examines how healthcare professionals and the public differ in their priorities and cognitive focus when interpreting drug instructions, offering design guidance for future instructions and labeling system. Using a two-stage approach, we conducted a survey of 111 professionals and 123 public participants to assess their perceived importance of 22 information items, followed by focus groups exploring perceptual and structural expectations. Professionals prioritized procedural accuracy and detailed guidance, while public users emphasized clarity and safety. Despite these differences, both groups …

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The Invisible Playground For Taboos: A Framework For Recognising And Designing For Inner Play To Engage With Death And Anticipatory Grief, Manuela Melo, Sofie Kinch, Andrew Tibbles, Allan Køster Jun 2026

The Invisible Playground For Taboos: A Framework For Recognising And Designing For Inner Play To Engage With Death And Anticipatory Grief, Manuela Melo, Sofie Kinch, Andrew Tibbles, Allan Køster

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Death and Anticipatory Grief remain culturally taboo, limiting opportunities for open dialogue and emotional preparedness. This paper explores how design can facilitate such conversations through play. Inner Play is a form of imaginative and introspective play that aids engagement with taboos in an empathic way, but lacks ways to understand and evaluate how to design for it. Employing a Research-through-Design approach, the papers presents a speculative design project that mediates communication between the bereaved and the deceased with a game kit resulting in a shared grief artefact. Ten participants in five workshops engaged in an iterative prototyping process, which resulted …

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Designing With And Through Care: From Empathy To Relational Accountability, Ibtissam Jayed, Valentina Sorvillo Jun 2026

Designing With And Through Care: From Empathy To Relational Accountability, Ibtissam Jayed, Valentina Sorvillo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In contemporary design practice, care risks becoming an imperative that obscures asymmetric power relations. This paper interrogates the relationship between design and care, asking: how can design shift from producing solutions to cultivating relations of care without reproducing paternalistic logics? Through a comparative analysis of case studies through the lenses of knowing, making, and defining with care, we treat caring about, caring for, and caring with as simultaneous and co-present dimensions to examine how care operates within design processes. The analysis identifies a structural pattern: while caring about and caring for are compatible with existing design logics, caring with encounters …

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Practice-As-Paradigm: Towards Ethical And Affective Methodologies In Participatory Architectural Research, Tom Harvey Jun 2026

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. …

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Between Worlds: Play Materials As Mediators Of The Lived And The Ludic, Lakshmi Srinivasan, Khushboo Jogani Jun 2026

Between Worlds: Play Materials As Mediators Of The Lived And The Ludic, Lakshmi Srinivasan, Khushboo Jogani

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The ludic space exists both within and beyond reality as a parallel world. While play design has been explored through rules, experiences, and systems, the role of play materials as mediators between lived and ludic space remains under-discussed. This paper examines how play materials invite players into, operate within, and emerge from the ludic space, shaping gameplay and learning. Using a practice-based approach, the Between Worlds (BW) framework was developed and empirically grounded through classroom projects involving over 130 undergraduate students at BITS Design School. The framework identifies four qualities of play materials that enable transitions between lived and ludic …

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Unlearning To Rest: Machine Unlearning As A Method Of Mitigating Design Fixation In Human-Ai Creative Collaboration, Martin Disley, Murad Khan Jun 2026

Unlearning To Rest: Machine Unlearning As A Method Of Mitigating Design Fixation In Human-Ai Creative Collaboration, Martin Disley, Murad Khan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design fixation - the unconscious adherence to familiar design patterns that limit creative exploration - remains a challenge for creative practitioners despite advances in the development of creativity support tools. While recent work in design research has explored how large language models can augment human creativity, evidence suggests these systems may exacerbate fixation. We propose machine unlearning as a novel approach to mitigating fixation in human-AI creative collaboration. Unlike fine-tuning methods that expand a model's knowledge base, unlearning removes specific concepts to create productive gaps in the model's representational space. Responding to findings that semantic constraints on prompt composition alleviate …

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Design Philosophy: Amplifying The Unheard, Fernando Secomandi, Daniel Portugal, Virginia Tassinari, Philippe D'Anjou Jun 2026

Design Philosophy: Amplifying The Unheard, Fernando Secomandi, Daniel Portugal, Virginia Tassinari, Philippe D'Anjou

DRS Biennial Conference Series

At a time of intersecting planetary, social, and epistemic crises, design philosophy must confront a central question: whose investigative ideas and knowledge count? This theme track, Amplifying the unheard, challenges the consolidation of design philosophy into predominantly North Atlantic and Anglophone frameworks. Rather than stabilising the field, it seeks to reconfigure it as a plural, contested, and situated space shaped by diverse cosmologies, practices, and epistemologies. The contributions gathered here move beyond inclusion toward transformation, foregrounding Indigenous, decolonial, posthuman, and practice-based approaches that reconfigure design’s conceptual and ethical conditions. Together, they demonstrate that amplifying unheard voices is not merely additive, …

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Democratizing The Newsroom: A Participatory Design Approach To Empower Citizen-Participatory Journalism And Civic Knowledge, Sangyun Lee, Kyungho Lee Jun 2026

Democratizing The Newsroom: A Participatory Design Approach To Empower Citizen-Participatory Journalism And Civic Knowledge, Sangyun Lee, Kyungho Lee

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Local news sustains democratic life by connecting citizens to community issues and fostering public deliberation. Yet the global phenomenon of Local News Desertification—the decline of trustworthy local media—has weakened civic discourse, civic knowledge, and collective belonging in local areas. Citizen-participatory journalism enables citizens to report and interpret local issues; however, conventional newsroom hierarchies and insufficient support for community participants without formal journalistic training hinder its democratic potential. This study frames that tension as a Participatory Design (PD) problem concerning power and imbalanced agency in sociotechnical news systems. Through a PD process, the study develops a citizen–AI participatory journalism model that …

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Linking An Attention-Based View Of The Firm And Critical Design In Strategizing: Attention To Harmful Consequences, Tarja Pääkkönen, Satu Miettinen Jun 2026

Linking An Attention-Based View Of The Firm And Critical Design In Strategizing: Attention To Harmful Consequences, Tarja Pääkkönen, Satu Miettinen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article discusses an attention-based view of the firm ABV in the context of situated organisational decision making and strategising at the intersection of design and management. To encourage the articulation of contradictions among professionals in strategy making, a speculative approach is proposed with alternative games. An open conversation on the assumptions guiding attention in strategising may benefit from diverse design approaches that create attentional engagement to improve neglected user situations. Harmful consequences among (senior) users of modern technologies are used as examples.

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City Of Longevity: A Framework To Integrate Emerging Technologies And Participatory Design Into Urban Environments, Camilla Borghi, Beatrice Ferrarini, Valeria Leonardi, Xueying Xiong Jun 2026

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Reconfiguring Care: Envision Postpartum Support For Women In Southern China Through The Lens Of Home-Based Iot, Wentao Deng, Yunfei Chen, Yingying Luo, Ying Hu, Yiwen Wang Jun 2026

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Queer/Cuir Methodological Approaches In Activist Design And Art Research In Contemporary Brazil., Guilherme Altmayer Jun 2026

Queer/Cuir Methodological Approaches In Activist Design And Art Research In Contemporary Brazil., Guilherme Altmayer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article explores the methodological approaches developed within the Tropicuir research project, an investigation of activist queer art and design practices in Brazil, started in the 2010s. Through a combination of activist research, sentimental cartography, and collaborative curatorial practice, the study examines how aesthetic-political actions function as strategies of micropolitical resistance, collective memory, and worldmaking. Drawing from fieldwork in exhibitions curation, archival practices, art auctions and activist networks, the research articulates a methodological framework that blurs the boundaries between design and art, embracing embodied, affective, and relational modes of inquiry. By engaging concepts such as anthropophagy, micropolitics, and localized knowledge, …

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Reflective Sociomaterialist Learning For Design For Sustainability (Dfs) In The Global South: Evaluations Of Students’ Product Service System (Pss) Design Projects At A Thai Design School, Hyunwook Hwangbo Jun 2026

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Restaging Doing And Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design, Tau Lenskjold, Li Jönsson, Alex Wilkie, Pablo Hermansen, Laura Forlano, Martín Tironi, Sissel Olander Jun 2026

Restaging Doing And Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design, Tau Lenskjold, Li Jönsson, Alex Wilkie, Pablo Hermansen, Laura Forlano, Martín Tironi, Sissel Olander

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Guided by a deliberate undoing of design’s attachment to acceleration and forward progression, this theme track sets out to advance a practice of epistemic reuse, aiming to cultivate spaces for reflection, hesitation, and generative reuse. Returning and circling back to a previous proposition is not to be confused with trying to resurrect the past. Instead, it suggests the demand to insist on the value of remaining with unresolved tensions, feminist figurations and the complex entanglements of more-than-human worlds. The contributions to this track, in various ways, support the shift in attention from heroic innovation toward more careful, situated engagements by …

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Design Materials, Roberta Bernabei, Maria Maclennan Jun 2026

Design Materials, Roberta Bernabei, Maria Maclennan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

No abstract provided.

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Longevitytech Cities: Design For Age-Inclusive Urban Futures, Sheng-Hung Lee, Sofie Hodara, Satu Miettinen, Bruce Hanington, Carla Sedini, Andreas Sicklinger, Miso Kim, Joseph F. Coughlin Jun 2026

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Design For Wellbeing And Happiness, Leandro Miletto Tonetto, Siyuan Huang, Ann Petermans, Rebecca Cain, Tiiu Poldma, Anna Pohlmeyer Jun 2026

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Central But Decentered: Repositioning The Practitioner In Design Research Involving Practice, Luis Vega, Julia Valle-Noronha Jun 2026

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 …

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Opening Up Design Impact Assessment: From Singular Metrics To Plural Understandings, Cyril Tjahja, Barbara Predan, Joana Meroz, Petra Černe Oven, Harun Kaygan, Flavia Piancazzo, Ines Tolic, Annamari Vänskä Jun 2026

Opening Up Design Impact Assessment: From Singular Metrics To Plural Understandings, Cyril Tjahja, Barbara Predan, Joana Meroz, Petra Černe Oven, Harun Kaygan, Flavia Piancazzo, Ines Tolic, Annamari Vänskä

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The theme track Opening Up Design Impact Assessment: From Singular Metrics to Plural Understandings addresses the limitations of conventional approaches that rely on standardised and predominantly quantitative metrics. The ten contributions in this track therefore explore alternative ways of understanding design impact, considering it as a situated, relational, and interpretative phenomenon. Instead of proposing a single evaluative framework, the papers collectively demonstrate how impact emerges through diverse practices, contexts, and forms of knowledge. The track is organised into two complementary sessions: one that reconfigures structured approaches to assessment, and another that foregrounds lived experience and participatory processes. Together, they point …

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Experience As Knowledge Contributions, Nithikul Nimkulrat, Camilla Groth, Spyros Bofylatos, Haian Xue Jun 2026

Experience As Knowledge Contributions, Nithikul Nimkulrat, Camilla Groth, Spyros Bofylatos, Haian Xue

DRS Biennial Conference Series

“Experience” is at the forefront of the design and making process of artefacts in different ways. In this year’s conference session, we are interested in exploring all the various ways in which experience is informing design and craft practice and processes. Themes presented in the papers closely align with the call, and many refer to either the authors’ own experiences or those of participants or users in the research process for new designs. We could also detect three concurrent orientations and have consequently divided the presentations into these themes. The first orientation concerns sensory experiences and how they lead to …

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More-Than-Human Design In The Real World: Resistance, Regeneration, And Radical Solidarity, Cristina Zaga, Iohanna Nicenboim, Elisa Giaccardi, Joseph Lindley, Arne Berger, Claudia Garduño García, Laura Forlano Jun 2026

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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