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Design As A Mediator: Bridging Traditional Cosmologies And Scientific Knowledge For Climate Change Adaptation Through Value-Led Design, Natascha Ng, Alphayo Lutta Jun 2026

Design As A Mediator: Bridging Traditional Cosmologies And Scientific Knowledge For Climate Change Adaptation Through Value-Led Design, Natascha Ng, Alphayo Lutta

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Sub-Saharan Africa is at the frontline of climate change, with impacts particuarly acute in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). This study examines how value-led design can mediate between traditional cosmologies and scientific climate knowledge to strengthen adaptation. Focusing on pastoralist communities in Kenya’s Maasai Mara region, it applies the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) as a participatory reflection tool. Findings show how value-led design can advance equity by embedding community voices and centring values in decision-making, contributing to broader debates on design’s role in fostering systemic transitions amid climate uncertainty, safeguarding against maladaptation. It presents the MLP as a tool for value-led …

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Crafting Savage Futures: Translanguaging And The Material Politics Of Peripheral Making, Guilherme Meyer, Seher Mirza, Raees Calafato Jun 2026

Crafting Savage Futures: Translanguaging And The Material Politics Of Peripheral Making, Guilherme Meyer, Seher Mirza, Raees Calafato

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Dominant paradigms have confined imaginaries to narrow, hegemonic narratives, severing them from plural, relational, and non-domesticated possibilities. This paper challenges monolithic views of language and material craft by offering a transformative lens on cultural and linguistic dynamism within design research and practice. Drawing on “savage” futures (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) and “translanguaging” (Lee, 2015; García & Kleifgen, 2020), we highlight the situated creative practices of peripheral craft makers as mediums for multilingual storytelling, identity negotiation, and speculative futures. Translanguaging extends beyond language, involving embodied, material, and affective communication as non-hierarchical resources for collective worlding and shared meaning-making. Through participatory craft projects in …

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Mediating Heritage Through Design: Participatory Approaches To Post-Digital Transformation, Lorenzo Barberis, Lorenzo Arena, Vlasios Kasapakis, Viktor Malakuczi, Ioannis Chatziannakis Jun 2026

Mediating Heritage Through Design: Participatory Approaches To Post-Digital Transformation, Lorenzo Barberis, Lorenzo Arena, Vlasios Kasapakis, Viktor Malakuczi, Ioannis Chatziannakis

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This research explores how design mediates the digital transformation of cultural heritage through hybrid and multisensory installations in archaeological contexts. Using the Case Romane del Celio in Rome as a pilot site for the European project HeritAdapt, it aims to redistribute visitor flows and promote sustainable tourism by enhancing the intangible value of minor sites. The study contributes to the post-digital museology debate by framing design as a critical, participatory practice operating across physical and virtual dimensions, fostering collaboration among engineering, management and restoration. Combining Service Design, Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence technologies, qualitative research and iterative prototyping guided the …

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Co-Designing Academic Archives: Design-Led Frameworks For Post-Digital Cultural Heritage, Ana Luísa Marques, Juliana F. Duque, Filipe Figueiredo Jun 2026

Co-Designing Academic Archives: Design-Led Frameworks For Post-Digital Cultural Heritage, Ana Luísa Marques, Juliana F. Duque, Filipe Figueiredo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Building an information legacy requires method: identifying, selecting, and cataloguing information that can anchor future research demands a thorough archiving process, with accurate information access and rigorous preservation practice. Yet academic archives today must also respond to a broader cultural condition shaped by digital transformation and interdisciplinary collaboration. This paper discusses the development of an academic design archive as part of the wider GLAM ecosystem, where preservation, innovation and digital transformation coexist. It proposes a design-led framework that approaches archiving as a cultural and participatory process. Through literature review and institutional reflection, the study highlights the archive’s dual role: collecting …

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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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Collective Handiness In Prospective Design: Philosophical Musings On A Serious Play Workshop On Articulation Work, Polyana Andrade Tavares, Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto, Frederick M.C. Van Amstel Jun 2026

Collective Handiness In Prospective Design: Philosophical Musings On A Serious Play Workshop On Articulation Work, Polyana Andrade Tavares, Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto, Frederick M.C. Van Amstel

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Building on the German philosopher Heidegger, design philosophy has historically dealt with handiness (zuhandenheit/vorhandenheit) as an ontological relationship between an individual, a technology, and an artificial world. Such handiness conceptualization does not account for the social accumulation of work necessary to bring technology ready-to-specific-hands. Building on the work of Brazilian philosopher Vieira Pinto, this investigation foregrounds the collective aspect of handiness to account for the articulation work behind a new design philosophy program, prospective design. This program embraces philosophy through design; therefore, this investigation includes a description of a stakeholder mapping workshop in which serious play was used to develop …

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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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Design For Healthy Ageing: Developing And Applying A Resource Model, Yumei Dong, Hua Dong, Tingting Wang, Richard H. M. Goossens Jun 2026

Design For Healthy Ageing: Developing And Applying A Resource Model, Yumei Dong, Hua Dong, Tingting Wang, Richard H. M. Goossens

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The sustainable development of an ageing society necessitates active participation of older people, requiring effective integration of their individual and collective resources into design. However, designers’ understanding of older people’s resources is rather limited. This study aims to develop a conceptual model of older people’s resources to support design for healthy ageing. Through literature review and interviews with 19 recently retired Dutch seniors, twelve resource types were identified, categorised into six dimensions: practical, emotional, intellectual, social, cultural, and time. These categories were synthesised into a Diamond Model of Resources. The framework, encompassing both resource categories and the Diamond Model, was …

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Locality As A Driver For Transitional Materialities, Gökçe Deniz, Owain Pedgley, Camilo Ayala-Garcia Jun 2026

Locality As A Driver For Transitional Materialities, Gökçe Deniz, Owain Pedgley, Camilo Ayala-Garcia

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Material designers worldwide are transforming how innovation emerges through local engagement, moving beyond conventional material selection to create materials that reflect and embody their originating contexts. This research examines how locality influences design motivations, resource utilisation, and collaborative approaches through a systematic analysis of 635 material design projects across 56 countries, complemented by questionnaire responses from 19 practitioners across 14 countries. The mixed-methods research establishes the state of the art by mapping ingredient sourcing patterns, fabrication processes, and stakeholder engagements across diverse geographical contexts, while illuminating designers' conceptual frameworks regarding the role of locality in material development. The research reveals …

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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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Imperfect Utopias: Norms In Vr Design And Queer Counter-Strategies, Alexandra Chalmers Braithwaite Jun 2026

Imperfect Utopias: Norms In Vr Design And Queer Counter-Strategies, Alexandra Chalmers Braithwaite

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper puts forward a set of strategies for designing queer experiences for virtual reality. First, the paper will outline The Body Traces Archive VR experience, the primary practice-based outcome of my doctoral research. This will be followed by a discussion of the medium of virtual reality and three industry-standard design norms that serve to limit and foreclose the possibilities of virtual reality: militaristic mastery and control, seamless (dis)embodiment, and prioritisation of comfort. For each industry standard norm, I propose a queer counter-strategy that works to re-align VR towards other possibilities. In turn, they are: utopian worldbuilding, embodiment via friction, …

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Designing For Themselves: The Gearbox Model Of Value-Reclaiming Design Within Grassroots Sports Communities, Yijia Jiang, Huiyi Zhang, Keren Zhang, Shiyu Liu, Kin Wai Michael Siu Jun 2026

Designing For Themselves: The Gearbox Model Of Value-Reclaiming Design Within Grassroots Sports Communities, Yijia Jiang, Huiyi Zhang, Keren Zhang, Shiyu Liu, Kin Wai Michael Siu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Grassroots sports communities (GSCs) express and impact values through everyday design practices that build belonging, identity, and agency. Adopting qualitative multi-case analysis of representative GSCs (n=10), this study explores how these communities define and reclaim their values through design practice. Four modalities are identified: 1) narrative re-authoring, 2) aesthetic re-coding, 3) collaborative re-making, and 4) ethical re-grounding. These modalities constitute a dynamic process wherein design functions as a relational infrastructure for collective meaning-making. Based on these findings, the study generates a Gearbox Model of Value-Reclaiming Design, theorising how communal design agency is exercised through dynamic and recursive interplay. The model …

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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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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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Designing A Toolkit To Explore The Design Space Of Woven Textiles, Milou Voorwinden, Savanne Klop, Holly Mcquillan Jun 2026

Designing A Toolkit To Explore The Design Space Of Woven Textiles, Milou Voorwinden, Savanne Klop, Holly Mcquillan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Driven by the potential of smart textiles, shape-changing structures, living textiles, and sustainable manufacturing methods, designers seek to push the boundaries of weaving. However, most existing industrial technologies are designed for mass-producing simple, flat fabrics. This has narrowed the collective understanding of the design potential of woven textiles, thereby restricting the development of complex, three-dimensional, and animated textiles. We present a toolkit, developed through an exploratory workshop and focus group discussions with academic and industry-based designers, that enables exploration and expansion of the design space for woven textiles. The card deck and canvas provide a shared language to externalise and …

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Ai' S Brush On Novice Posters: Unfolding Visual Competence Shifts Of Design Students, Yisu Zhao, Chuhan Li, Qianqian Hu, Fang Liu, Renke He Jun 2026

Ai' S Brush On Novice Posters: Unfolding Visual Competence Shifts Of Design Students, Yisu Zhao, Chuhan Li, Qianqian Hu, Fang Liu, Renke He

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As generative AI tools increasingly permeate design education, questions arise about their impact on novice students’ creative competence. This study addresses two research questions: (RQ1) How does AI participation affect students’ creative outcomes, particularly the visual dimensions of their work? (RQ2) How do evaluators redefine competence amid AI involvement in novice design students’ creative processes? Using a mixed-method approach, Study1 analysed professional evaluations of 88 student projects, showing that AI-assisted works scored higher in creativity and visual elaboration but not in design logic, with greater score divergence.Study2 involved interviews with eight design experts, revealing tensions in evaluators’ attribution of competence …

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Absent Voices, Alternative Futures: What Design Issues Didn't Say About Design (1984-2025), Yeqiu Yang Jun 2026

Absent Voices, Alternative Futures: What Design Issues Didn't Say About Design (1984-2025), Yeqiu Yang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Can Western design theory be a universal panacea? Celebrating Design Issues' 40-year legacy (1984-2025), "The Unfolding Culture" exhibition asks how culture will shape design's future, yet overlooks whose culture dominates design discourse. Through critical analysis of Design Issues, the author reveals three structural absences that question theoretical universalism: (1) Medium constraints—text-based format systematically excludes sound, video, and material-based knowledge production, eliminating epistemologies that resist textualization; (2) Temporal lag—non-Western topics arrive decades late, revealing one-way delayed recognition rather than dialogue; (3) Divergent concerns—East and West simultaneously focus on fundamentally different design questions yet lack mechanisms for synchronous exchange, resulting in parallel …

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Mapping Circular Design Pathways For Wearables: An Annotated Portfolio At The Intersection Of Material-Driven Design And Bio-Hci, Nicla Guarino, Venere Ferraro, Valentina Rognoli Jun 2026

Mapping Circular Design Pathways For Wearables: An Annotated Portfolio At The Intersection Of Material-Driven Design And Bio-Hci, Nicla Guarino, Venere Ferraro, Valentina Rognoli

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As the environmental impacts of wearable technologies intensify, exploring how material choices can enable circularity in such a waste-intensive sector has become critical for design research. In response to this challenge, materials are recognised as pivotal in emerging wearable alternatives, yet how they can actively support circular practices remains underexplored. The study addresses this gap through an annotated portfolio of 40 case studies situated in or informing the wearable domain at the intersection of Material-Driven Design and Bio-HCI. By foregrounding recurring materials, methods, and tools, the analysis aims to reveal how matter can act as a transformative agent in shaping …

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Contextualising Soil To Soil Textile Production In Aotearoa, Genevieve Rae, Gina Russell, Seonaid Burnie, Ngaio Cowell Jun 2026

Contextualising Soil To Soil Textile Production In Aotearoa, Genevieve Rae, Gina Russell, Seonaid Burnie, Ngaio Cowell

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Regenerative textile design begins in the soil, and ends in the oneone (soil). In this paper oneone is described and articulated by Papahoa Fibreworks (Papahoa or the organisation) as their context and guide for designing a textile production system in Aotearoa. The kaupapa (purpose, foundational approach) of context based design, alongside Hua Parakore has led Papahoa to offer organically grown linen, dye plants, and dye services for the local fashion industry. As a case study, Papahoa demonstrates both soil to oneone textile processes in Waitaha (Canterbury) historically, and looks into the future of how fibre production could be remodeled in …

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Incommensurable Durations: Fungal Time And The Limits Of Attunement In Multispecies Design, Nina Williams, Alia Parker Jun 2026

Incommensurable Durations: Fungal Time And The Limits Of Attunement In Multispecies Design, Nina Williams, Alia Parker

DRS Biennial Conference Series

An emerging dimension of multispecies design is the effort to attune to new sensory entanglements with the more-than-human world that foreground the alternative temporalities of multispecies life. Adding to such approaches, in this paper we want to emphasise that there is an incommensurability between the timeframes of organisms and those of human ways of thinking about time and of capitalist production. Indeed, multispecies design involves trying to work with alternative timeframes that necessarily disrupt dominant rhythms of design and production. Exploring a set of encounters with fungal time, we consider how such experiments have the capacity to plunge us into …

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Design For Mending The Rift: Rethinking Sustainable Design From An Eco-Marxist Perspective, Yan Yang, Zhaoyu Wang, Jia Ren, Tie Ji, Han Meng Jun 2026

Design For Mending The Rift: Rethinking Sustainable Design From An Eco-Marxist Perspective, Yan Yang, Zhaoyu Wang, Jia Ren, Tie Ji, Han Meng

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Despite the advancement of sustainable design, a critical paradox persists: many practices remain embedded in industrial paradigms, failing to address deep-seated socio-natural contradictions. Grounded in the Eco-Marxist "metabolic rift" framework and informed by recent Agricultural Innovation Design (AID) research, this study proposes a key path for mending these rifts. The research offers a systemic framework for intervening in complex social-ecological systems. The primary conclusions are: (1) metabolic rifts are fundamentally rooted in relational alienation, characterized by the disruption of healthy and reciprocal metabolic relationships between society and nature; (2) structural sustainability requires reshaping metabolic relationships across social, ecological, and intergenerational …

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A Survey Of Generative Ai Adoption Amongst Industrial Design Experts, Trym Abrahamsen, Charlotte Sjödell Jun 2026

A Survey Of Generative Ai Adoption Amongst Industrial Design Experts, Trym Abrahamsen, Charlotte Sjödell

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper is based on interviews with 20 expert industrial designers with 8-40+ years of experience about how they are adopting generative AI into their workflows. Using thematic analysis, the study reveals how top-down pressure for speed and efficiency drives rapid, bottom-up adoption of generative AI tools. The core finding is that in this scramble for adoption, designers and design businesses risk cognitive offloading and significant loss of control over micro-decisions in key parts of the design process. By critically examining the potential loss of control and reflection, the inquiry explores how the value of industrial design work extends far …

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Analysis Of Design Start-Up Companies’ Challenges And Enablers In Saudi Arabian Ecosystem, Omaimah Alsenani, Paul Rodgers, Alexander Holliman Jun 2026

Analysis Of Design Start-Up Companies’ Challenges And Enablers In Saudi Arabian Ecosystem, Omaimah Alsenani, Paul Rodgers, Alexander Holliman

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s economy has shifted from oil dependence toward diversification, spotlighting the “creative economy”. This transformation highlights the design economy, where designers are pursuing entrepreneurial and commercial opportunities. Understanding the challenges and enablers that shape design start-ups is key to supporting their growth within the design economy. This paper, part of larger PhD research, explores the Saudi Arabia design ecosystem and the experiences of running a design start-up. The paper addresses the question: “How does the Saudi Arabian ecosystem support or hinder design start-ups?” It provides a qualitative perspective based on semi-structured interviews with fifteen designer-entrepreneurs across …

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Designing Archipelagic Ai: Challenging The Coloniality Of Ai Through Speculative Metaphors, Fabio De Almeida, Pedro Sanches, Valentina Nisi, Nuno Jardim Nunes Jun 2026

Designing Archipelagic Ai: Challenging The Coloniality Of Ai Through Speculative Metaphors, Fabio De Almeida, Pedro Sanches, Valentina Nisi, Nuno Jardim Nunes

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Metaphors play a crucial role in how designers understand, communicate, and shape technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) is no exception. This paper introduces Archipelagic AI (AAI), a speculative framework that employs metaphor-making as a design research strategy to challenge the colonial epistemologies that structure AI systems. Developed through collaborative autoethnography and fabulation in one of Europe’s richer ecosystems (Samouco in the Tagus Estuary), AAI draws on archipelagic studies and Caribbean decolonial thought to foreground a geosocial intelligence emerging through relational nodes of situated knowledge, where matter, forces, currents, and affects interweave in fluid assemblages. Structured around three metaphorical figures — …

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Occupying The Sensors: Underwater Sound In An Urban River, Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero, Dietmar Offenhuber Jun 2026

Occupying The Sensors: Underwater Sound In An Urban River, Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero, Dietmar Offenhuber

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Although underwater soundscapes of urban rivers are understudied, they can reveal urban and biological processes across multiple scales. We present a case study of the Charles River’s underwater soundscapes in Boston, Massachusetts. We approach underwater acoustic sensing as a method to attune to infrastructural, non-human, and environmental dynamics. Given that water is an ideal medium for sound propagation, the river becomes a magnifier for ignored aspects of the city, such as the urban infrastructure’s impact on the river's soundscape or aquatic fauna activity. In the sensing process, the river’s underwater environment becomes a space where human, more-than-human, environmental, and infrastructural …

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Growing Pains Of Sustainability: Scale, Care, And Counter-Infrastructures, Angela Ka Ki Lee Jun 2026

Growing Pains Of Sustainability: Scale, Care, And Counter-Infrastructures, Angela Ka Ki Lee

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Sustainability transitions are marked by growing pains: tensions between planetary and local scales, global urgency and lived experience. This paper argues that techno-centric, metric-driven, and scalable approaches obscure inequalities, conceal the labour of maintenance, and overlook affective dimensions. It proposes a counter-infrastructural approach that understands sustainability as emerging through infrastructural, ecological, temporal, embodied, and relational dynamics. Drawing on interdisciplinary theory, participatory workshops, and experiential experiments, the study shows how process-oriented practices can reconnect individuals to energy systems. Bioregional thinking, community-led initiatives, repair and maintenance, and sensory engagement are explored as alternatives that foreground resilience and interdependence. Through lenses of scale, …

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Extended Directions In Design Research, Hadas Zohar, Amalia De Götzen, Anca-Simona Horvath Jun 2026

Extended Directions In Design Research, Hadas Zohar, Amalia De Götzen, Anca-Simona Horvath

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The open track welcomes design research that explores distinctive directions beyond the conference's thematic streams, thereby enriching the scholarly discourse with diverse perspectives. The selected papers are divided into four sessions. The first session, Relational and Situated Design Practice, foregrounds embodiment, exchange, co-exploration, ritual performance, feminist critique, and cultural remembrance. The second session, Material, Mind and Machine, investigates the entanglements among physical matter, human cognition, and computational processes, challenging the separation among the object, the mind, and the machine that mediates them. The third session, Strategic Design Practices for Learning, Attention, and Co-Creation, discusses strategic design, together with means of …

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