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2026

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Touch Wood: Stuckness, Risk Assessment, And Embodied Knowledge In Practice, Hugo Glover Jun 2026

Touch Wood: Stuckness, Risk Assessment, And Embodied Knowledge In Practice, Hugo Glover

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This practice-based research explores stuckness in creative work not as a problem to eliminate, but as a threshold state where tacit knowledge becomes operative. Drawing on autoethnographic narrative, I examine how attending to stuckness reveals the autonomic nervous system's (ANS) role in embodied knowing. Through a close reading of wood carving practice, I document how physical engagement with materials offered a way to work with, rather than overcome, stuckness. When invited to exhibit this work, I experienced acute stress that led me to adapt a Risk Assessment form—typically used for physical hazards—to map emotional risks such as shame and humiliation. …

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Computational User Research For A Public Helpline For Continuous Service Improvement: Parents Anonymous® As A Service Ecosystem, Ali O. Ilhan, Elizabeth C. Harris, Isil Oygur Jun 2026

Computational User Research For A Public Helpline For Continuous Service Improvement: Parents Anonymous® As A Service Ecosystem, Ali O. Ilhan, Elizabeth C. Harris, Isil Oygur

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Parents Anonymous®, a social service agency, provides a comprehensive ecosystem of supports to parents through its National Parent & Youth Helpline and mutual support groups. The verbal support provided through the Helpline is the core of this public service. We present a computational user research approach that learns from call transcripts to guide continuous improvement across the helpline–group system. From real conversations, we extract clear, actionable signals: how emotions shift during a call, which needs recur over time and when people are most likely to reach out. These insights feed back into everyday practice: refining counsellors’ training and responses, timing …

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Code Ecologies: Reclaiming Design As Meaning-Making Within Human–Ecological Systems, Laura Santamaria Jun 2026

Code Ecologies: Reclaiming Design As Meaning-Making Within Human–Ecological Systems, Laura Santamaria

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper reclaims the role of design as a practice of meaning-making within human–ecological systems. While meaning has always been part of design discourse, successive turns – semiotic, experiential, relational – have addressed what meaning is without asking why living systems make meaning at all. Drawing on recent advances in neuroscience, biosemiotics and code biology, it argues that meaning-making is not a cognitive phenomenon unique to humans but a regulatory process intrinsic to living systems. Code Ecologies offers a philosophical framework that reinterprets the biosphere, technosphere and semiosphere as interdependent ecologies of codes, resonant with relational and Indigenous cosmologies. The …

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Material Agents At Work In Alternative Food Networks, Cagri G. Varli, Stefano Maffei Jun 2026

Material Agents At Work In Alternative Food Networks, Cagri G. Varli, Stefano Maffei

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Despite growing interest in sustainable food systems, their material dimension as active design agents (artefacts and infrastructures) remains largely unrecognized. This study challenges the positioning of packaging and distribution tools as passive elements, repositioning them as entities that shape the ongoing negotiation of ethics, responsibility, and co-dependence within food systems. Drawing on interviews, thing ethnography, and relational mapping across two alternative food network case studies, the study examines the roles of these material agents. The findings show that material artefacts contribute to the organization of care, responsibility, and continuity across both pragmatic and symbolic dimensions of food networks. Differences in …

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Drawing In The Minor Key: An Approach For Multi-Actor Designing For Societal Transformation, Caroline Hummels Jun 2026

Drawing In The Minor Key: An Approach For Multi-Actor Designing For Societal Transformation, Caroline Hummels

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As a society, we are confronted with polycrisis. An epistemic shift, that means shifting our way of knowing and changing our ways of looking at complex societal issues, is necessary to be able to transform our practices. Tim Ingold offers such an epistemic shift through the concept of ‘minor key’, fostering open-endedness, imagination, and experimentation. Designing for transformation in the minor key requires different forms of co-creating and communicating. In contrast to a major key, closed style of visualising, minor key drawing might fit, due to its potential for imperfection, open-endedness and imagination. In this pictorial, I’ll reflect on a …

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Design For Coastal Futures: Rethinking Space And Time With A More-Than-Human And Transcultural Lens., Serena Pollastri, Juan Montalvan Lume, Louise Mullagh, Suzana Ilic Jun 2026

Design For Coastal Futures: Rethinking Space And Time With A More-Than-Human And Transcultural Lens., Serena Pollastri, Juan Montalvan Lume, Louise Mullagh, Suzana Ilic

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Amid the intensifying challenges of climate change, there is an emerging consensus within coastal academic and practitioner networks on the importance of integrating design led-approaches that enhance resilience and foster the long-term adaptation for coastal communities. However, coastal environments present peculiar contexts for design actions, as the movement of water consistently challenges the boundaries between water and land, along with the relational interactions between human and non-human communities—both in cyclical and unpredictable ways. Drawing from the authors’ experiences in tidal coastal and estuarine areas across diverse geographies, this article proposes ways to cultivate design’s response-ability (Haraway, 2016) to the more-than-human …

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Towards Positional Citizenship: Designing For The More-Than-Human Political, Vanessa Monna, Abhigyan Singh, Natalia Romero Herrera Jun 2026

Towards Positional Citizenship: Designing For The More-Than-Human Political, Vanessa Monna, Abhigyan Singh, Natalia Romero Herrera

DRS Biennial Conference Series

“We have never been modern” wrote Bruno Latour, proposing that the dualism between nature and society has represented a convenient fiction. If humans have never genuinely stood apart, what happens to one of its most anthropocentric fabrications, citizenship? Conventionally a marker of political agency, citizenship determines who can speak, act, and belong. This conceptualisation excludes the multiple more-than-human agents shaping collective experiences. Building upon Plessner’s concept of positionality, the paper introduces “Positional Citizenship” to transcend the Cartesian divide between humans and more-than-humans, reshaping the political as a relational space of co-presence. Building on this shift, design becomes a practice of …

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The Parliament Of Things: Shape-Changing Materials As Amplifiers Of Interspecies Relation Design, Yi Sui, Beatrice Bianco, Marinella Ferrara Jun 2026

The Parliament Of Things: Shape-Changing Materials As Amplifiers Of Interspecies Relation Design, Yi Sui, Beatrice Bianco, Marinella Ferrara

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores shape-changing materials as agents of material diplomacy within More-than-Human Design. Drawing from Latour’s Parliament of Things, posthumanism, and new materialism, it investigates how responsive materials mediate ecological and interspecies relations. Through a multiple-case study approach, ten design projects are analyzed using a five-dimensional framework—environmental attunement, ecological flourishing, expressive vitality, co-existence and augmentation, and relational mediation. The analysis explores how these materials can perform communicative and political roles, positioning design as a diplomatic practice that negotiates shared concerns among species, technologies, and environments. It attempts to question extractivist models, support ecological repair, and cultivate forms of interspecies attentiveness. …

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Weaving Visual Language: Encoding Gaelic In Tartan Length To Facilitate Interaction With Endangered Languages, Emmie Drummond, Dr Loraine Clarke, Miriam Sturdee, Freya Macleod Jun 2026

Weaving Visual Language: Encoding Gaelic In Tartan Length To Facilitate Interaction With Endangered Languages, Emmie Drummond, Dr Loraine Clarke, Miriam Sturdee, Freya Macleod

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This project reimagines tartan as a data-physicalization of Scots Gaelic. Extending ‘Radical Gaels’, a psycho-geographic soundscape that maps the identity, geographies and material history of Contemporary Gaels. Weaving Visual Language translates Scots waulking songs and geographies through cryptographic mapping to weave structure, using a Python-based binary matrix encoding system, illustrating the loss of Gaelic oral traditions. The resulting textiles act as linguistic archives and objects of cultural dissent. The project proposes a framework for museums to engage audiences through preserving information within the artefact itself, rather than exterior labelling. Theoretically, this work develops the idea of ‘culturally constrained physicalization’, where …

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Fostering Human-Material Co-Creative Dialogical Relationship: Operationalizing The Art Of Making Through Degeneration, Ye Yang Jun 2026

Fostering Human-Material Co-Creative Dialogical Relationship: Operationalizing The Art Of Making Through Degeneration, Ye Yang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Moving beyond instrumental rationality that treats materials as passive objects, this study operationalizes the Art of Making (AoM) by proposing a three-dimensional degeneration approach. Degeneration disrupts object fixity, reframing objects as materials in a state of in-betweenness that invites co-creative dialogue. Adopting drawing as a universal making practice, we empirically grounded this proposition through five workshops with ten participants from diverse countries and design backgrounds. By degenerating sensory, bodily, explorative, and social dimensions of drawing products and practices, the resulting state of material-in-between invited participants into dialogical engagements. Findings reveal that this state sparks curiosity, transcends preconceptions, activates subconscious exploration …

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Designing With Changeability: Material Agency And Theory In Textile Design, Zuzana Šebeková, Petra Vicianová, Zuzana Veselá, Barbora Hank Palatínusová, Zuzana Machatova Jun 2026

Designing With Changeability: Material Agency And Theory In Textile Design, Zuzana Šebeková, Petra Vicianová, Zuzana Veselá, Barbora Hank Palatínusová, Zuzana Machatova

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper investigates how natural dye printing and material agency in textile design can generate theoretical insights for design practice and pedagogy. Textiles are positioned as participants in material processes, where material behaviour, environmental exposure, and user interaction shape design outcomes, moving beyond stability and control toward adaptability, reflectivity, and sustainability. Drawing on critical making and time-based design thinking, impermanence and imperfection become foundational strategies for developing pedagogical and theoretical frameworks. Practice-based experimentation demonstrates how process, relationality, and sensitivity to materials allow theory to emerge directly from making and observing transformation. By embracing changeability, this approach reframes conventional notions of …

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Discourses In Design Research: Historical, Critical, And Speculative Perspectives, Peter Lloyd, Theodora Vardouli, Moa Carlsson, Arlene Oak, Anna Talley, Haian Xue Jun 2026

Discourses In Design Research: Historical, Critical, And Speculative Perspectives, Peter Lloyd, Theodora Vardouli, Moa Carlsson, Arlene Oak, Anna Talley, Haian Xue

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The field of design research is now over 60 years old but, despite comprehensive archives existing, such as the DRS Digital Library, little systematic historical research has been done looking critically at how concepts in the field have developed over time. Studies looking at how certain discourses have come to dominate in design research, and those that have been disregarded, are long overdue. The theme-track Discourses in Design Research: Historical, Critical, and Speculative Perspectives invited submissions engaging historically and critically with ideas and concepts that have helped shape the discipline of design research. The papers share a concern both with …

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‘Can I Cut The Big Box?’: Exploring Doubt And Material Hierarchies In Child-Centred Design, Cecilie Ann Alveniz Jun 2026

‘Can I Cut The Big Box?’: Exploring Doubt And Material Hierarchies In Child-Centred Design, Cecilie Ann Alveniz

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper offers a practical representation of evolving research within a PhD project, exploring play in a child-centred design process. During a workshop with children aged 6–8, the question "Can I cut the big box?" created a moment of tension that became a site of emerging knowledge. Drawing on abductive reasoning, the paper uses doubt as a generative method to explore uncertainty in fieldwork. Through writing and the notion of emplotment, the concept of Material hierarchies emerges - first grounded in material methods that position materials as active agents, then through the notion of playables - as a lens for …

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Longing For: Designing Activities To Break The Taboo Of Female Sexuality In Care Homes, Yoni Lefévre, Niels Hendriks, Heather Wilkinson, Andrea Wilkinson, Arno G. Verhoeven Jun 2026

Longing For: Designing Activities To Break The Taboo Of Female Sexuality In Care Homes, Yoni Lefévre, Niels Hendriks, Heather Wilkinson, Andrea Wilkinson, Arno G. Verhoeven

DRS Biennial Conference Series

An effort to co-explore later life sexuality with older adults, this study critically reflects on a series of intentionally designed activities to discuss intimacy and sexual pleasure in a care context. Five activities were organised in a Belgian care home, involving four to six female residents, that gradually introduced a more explicit language about sexual health. The results highlight that: 1) taboos are difficult to discuss, therefore storytelling is crucial, 2) feeling vulnerable is confronting, but also enables genuine connections, and 3) co-exploring taboos through playfulness, while enabling self-expression. This paper provides a more in-depth understanding of designing collective dialogues …

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Maintaining Counterpublics: Archival Recursion And Prefiguration, Seojoo Han Jun 2026

Maintaining Counterpublics: Archival Recursion And Prefiguration, Seojoo Han

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study examines Interference Archive, a collectively run archive of social movement ephemera in Brooklyn, as a site where archival practice and design converge in continuous public formation. Through an analysis of exhibitions, interviews, and institutional materials, it demonstrates how archives employ the design tactics of tracing and projection not as discrete interventions but as recursive practices embedded in long-term infrastructuring. Tracing reveals genealogies of struggle, enabling participants to locate themselves within shared histories, while projection transforms this awareness into forward-looking artifacts and events that circulate beyond the archive. Unlike conventional participatory design or speculative futuring, IA cultivates a prefigurative …

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Patterns Of Everyday Care: Translating Cultural Practices For Online Communities, Austin Toombs, Seora Park, Tilar Manion, Xinyun Zhang Jun 2026

Patterns Of Everyday Care: Translating Cultural Practices For Online Communities, Austin Toombs, Seora Park, Tilar Manion, Xinyun Zhang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design research in social computing has used the concept of care to describe how technologies help or hinder interpersonal support online. Yet opportunities remain to explore how the subtle, everyday forms of care that have long sustained communities can inform social technology design. Addressing this, we present a collection of design patterns that translate culturally specific, everyday social practices like passeggiata (Italian social stroll) and sobremesa (Spanish post-meal lingering) into design prompts for digital platforms. Our collection has five pattern families: Shared Habits and Routines, Atmospheric Qualities, Collective Identities, Facilitation Roles, and Boundary Practices. The patterns map these families to …

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Surfacing Wetlands Through Design Ethnography And Critical Visualisation, Alexandra Crosby, Sarah-Jane Jones, Holly O'Neil Jun 2026

Surfacing Wetlands Through Design Ethnography And Critical Visualisation, Alexandra Crosby, Sarah-Jane Jones, Holly O'Neil

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores the visualisation of wetlands and waterways as a more-than-human design practice that can generate situated and relational understandings of colonised urban wetlands and waterways in Australia. We analyse three design research projects that create online visualisations of wetlands in Australia: The Sound of Water, Environmental Flows in Nap Nap Swamp (2021); The Rippon Lea Water Story (2023); and Dyarubbin the real Secret River (2020). These projects are brought together in this paper to open discussion about the role of design research place-based ethnography and critical visualisation in communicating with and about water places. We make the argument …

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Rethinking Communication And Power Relations In A Collaboration Between Designers And Welfare Communites/Organisations, Zhixin Zhang, Sarah Kettley, Agnese Sile Jun 2026

Rethinking Communication And Power Relations In A Collaboration Between Designers And Welfare Communites/Organisations, Zhixin Zhang, Sarah Kettley, Agnese Sile

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents a disabled researcher’s reflection on communication and power relations experienced through direct participation in an Inclusive Design Workshop in Tokyo. It explores how designers collaborated with welfare facility communities to develop inclusive ideas and practices. The study conceptualises inclusion as a relational process that extends beyond accessibility compliance, shaped through communication, emotion, and care. Through a reflexive ethnography that combined participant observation and multimodal analysis, four key themes emerged: Communication Barriers, Effective Communication, Effective Operation of Design Decisions, and Responding to Communication Strategies. Insights suggest that institutional hierarchies and emotional asymmetries often acted to hinder participation but …

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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How To Observe Design Practices, Aurelien Catros Jun 2026

How To Observe Design Practices, Aurelien Catros

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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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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Función-Nepantla: The “Other” Functionality Inspired By Mexican Philosophy For Rethinking Industrial Design In Mexico, José De La O Jun 2026

Función-Nepantla: The “Other” Functionality Inspired By Mexican Philosophy For Rethinking Industrial Design In Mexico, José De La O

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design in Mexico, often disconnected from the local industry value chain, has long relied on arte popular as a self-referential cultural narrative to add value, establish identity, and find its “substance.” While this practice stems from a genuine search for rootedness and authenticity, it frequently leads to stagnation, raises concerns about cultural appropriation, neo-colonial dynamics between designers and craftspeople, neglect of functionality, and lack of innovation. This paper critiques this and proposes a framework for defining functionality, rooted in Mexican philosophy as an alternative value system. Drawing on thinkers such as Emilio Uranga and Grupo Hiperión’s work, it identifies parallels …

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Reciprocal Value Between Learning And Circular Practices, Franchesca Michaela De Moura, Nonkululeko Grootboom, Christina Breed Jun 2026

Reciprocal Value Between Learning And Circular Practices, Franchesca Michaela De Moura, Nonkululeko Grootboom, Christina Breed

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study investigates how adaptive reuse servicescapes may contribute to sustainable transformation through learning, by leveraging circular practices as experiential learning tools. Research on circular economy rarely adopts a human-centred lens or explores its links to learning, especially in the Global South, where the value of alternative epistemologies and informal economies often remains unrecognised. To address this gap, a qualitative case study approach was employed, combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews at educational initiatives in an adaptive reuse precinct in inner-city Johannesburg, South Africa. The findings reveal a reciprocal relationship between education and circular practices in generating value for sustainable …

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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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