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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Using Design Artefacts To Transform Doctor-Parent Communication In Neonatal Care, Peiqi Wang, Laura Ferrarello, Tongyan Han Jun 2026

Using Design Artefacts To Transform Doctor-Parent Communication In Neonatal Care, Peiqi Wang, Laura Ferrarello, Tongyan Han

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents a design intervention study, conducted at Peking University Third Hospital (PUTH), which developed artefacts to support doctor-parent communication during neonatal care. Through a series of design interventions, a set of design probes and toolkits were developed to understand the current doctor-parent communication context within local care settings, and to prompt incremental changes in these communication practices. Field observations and evaluation interviews, based on these artefacts, demonstrated that the artefacts helped to change patterns of communication from consultative mode information delivery to collaboration by partner mode. They also increased parents’ confidence in their ability to maintain the health …

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Proximity, Technology, And Care: Towards Longevity-Friendly Urban Ecosystems, Carla Sedini, Carolina Nina Bonato Jun 2026

Proximity, Technology, And Care: Towards Longevity-Friendly Urban Ecosystems, Carla Sedini, Carolina Nina Bonato

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Social relationships, extending beyond the familiar and domestic spheres, play a crucial role in sustaining the healthy ageing of cities’ inhabitants. The urban ecosystem can support social participation and interdependence among its inhabitants by combining the design of hard and soft infrastructures that shape social engagement and urban attractiveness. Within this framework, a new dimension of care is emerging, one that transcends traditional healthcare and institutionalised models. How can technologies help generate the cornerstones of caring, inclusive, long-life communities? By examining a series of international case studies on technology, proximity, care, and ageing, the paper aims to offer actionable design …

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Design With Empowerment: Developing A Framework And Toolkit For Chronic Disease Management, Renxuan Liu Jun 2026

Design With Empowerment: Developing A Framework And Toolkit For Chronic Disease Management, Renxuan Liu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Empowerment in chronic disease management (CDM) is often treated as an outcome delivered to patients, leaving limited attention to how empowerment is negotiated in practice. This study develops the Needs-Means-Values design empowerment framework and demonstrates how it can be materially enacted through a co-design toolkit. Drawing on literature review, interview, policy and case data, the framework conceptualises empowerment as a situated and relational process shaped by how needs, resources and values are interpreted across different actors in CDM settings. The resulting toolkit consists of four modules that support stakeholders in articulating multiple enactments of needs, exploring resource configurations and generating …

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Learning Through Relationality: A Curated Conversation Between Popular Education And Design Pedagogy, Estelle Berger, Françoise Blanchard, François Chabré, Tom Hébrard, Emna Kamoun Jun 2026

Learning Through Relationality: A Curated Conversation Between Popular Education And Design Pedagogy, Estelle Berger, Françoise Blanchard, François Chabré, Tom Hébrard, Emna Kamoun

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between a French design school and a food-producing farm engaged in peasant struggles, conceived as a “rural third place”. Each year, design students immerse themselves on-site, testing their knowledge through collective experimentation. Our heterogeneous pedagogical team—composed of design professors, the farming couple, and a collaborating designer—is in a continuous learning position, exchanging perspectives on education. Because relationality is central to this experience, and to equiponderate all voices, we decided this paper should take the form of a curated conversation. We explore the intersections and tensions between popular education practiced on the farm …

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Plundergeist: Exploring Generative Ai Through Vibe Coding As Reflective Design Practice, Christian Nold Jun 2026

Plundergeist: Exploring Generative Ai Through Vibe Coding As Reflective Design Practice, Christian Nold

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Generative AI (GenAI) has sparked intense media debate, yet design research has often echoed these narratives rather than examining how GenAI reshapes everyday design practices. This paper presents a year-long auto-ethnographic study involving 34 games and apps created through vibe coding, a GenAI-native approach that uses natural-language prompts to generate code. The study reveals distinct qualities that unsettle design processes: playful intervention, creative forgetting, spectral echoes, inventive excess, and fragile limits. Two key insights emerge: designing with GenAI requires deliberate engagement with cultural archetypes and treating AI as an unruly collaborator. Drawing on John Oswald’s 1985 concept of ‘plunderphonics’, the …

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Acknowledging The Blind Men And The Elephant In The Room, Arvind Lodaya Jun 2026

Acknowledging The Blind Men And The Elephant In The Room, Arvind Lodaya

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Systemic design addresses complex, transdisciplinary challenges by integrating systems thinking and design methods. Yet, academic discourse remains limited to formal research and institutional methods, “invisibilizing” the rich, plural, and grounded practices of grassroots non-designer practitioners such as social workers, indigenous knowledge practitioners, and community facilitators. This paper challenges that narrow epistemology, and advocates restoring practice-centricity and incorporating plurality & pluriversality as essential ethical and political commitments to advancing the field. Mashing up the metaphors of “The Blind Men and the Elephant” and “The Elephant in the Room”, it highlights the need to proactively accommodate multiple perspectives for better reflexivity. The …

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Reading Against The Grain: Ubuntu, Sankofa, And Rhythm As Pedagogical Infrastructures In First-Year Design Education, Yaw Ofosu-Asare Jun 2026

Reading Against The Grain: Ubuntu, Sankofa, And Rhythm As Pedagogical Infrastructures In First-Year Design Education, Yaw Ofosu-Asare

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) study examines how African philosophies can function as pedagogical infrastructures, not decorative add-ons, in first-year design education. Through a 12-week introductory studio with 25 students meeting twice weekly (2.5 hours per session), I embedded Ubuntu (relational being), Sankofa (retrieving wisdom from the past), and rhythm (cyclical temporality) into the course structure. Learning artefacts comprise studio materials, anonymised teaching feedback collected as part of routine class activities, and my own teaching observations reviewed thematically around space, time, and feedback relations. Observed teaching indicators suggested higher participation in critique (average peer comments per student rising …

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Bodies In Play: Queering Ai, Sport, And Medicine Through Design, Felix Kosok Jun 2026

Bodies In Play: Queering Ai, Sport, And Medicine Through Design, Felix Kosok

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Queerness in design often operates from the margins, yet to remain transformative it must also confront the heteronormative hegemonies embedded in central societal infrastructures. This paper examines how queer design intervenes in the fields of artificial intelligence, sport, and healthcare, identifying three strategies through which design can challenge normative systems: disruption, subversion, and circumvention. Through a comparative analysis of three case studies – Christensen and Conradi’s AI/IA experiments with queer artificial intelligence, Gabriel Fontana’s sport design projects Multiform and Sidelined, and the queer-led digital health platform Every Health – the paper explores how design practices reconfigure infrastructures that regulate bodies, …

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Empowerment For Aging Design: A Framework To Reframe The Design Of Solutions For Older Adults In The Global South, Juliana Gómez, Mariana González, Mariana Ramírez Jun 2026

Empowerment For Aging Design: A Framework To Reframe The Design Of Solutions For Older Adults In The Global South, Juliana Gómez, Mariana González, Mariana Ramírez

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design for older adults in Latin America remains strongly shaped by deficit-based and assistentialist assumptions that reduce aging to decline. Grounded in empowerment-oriented and resource-based design, this study explores how empowerment values can reframe the ideation of solutions for older people. Workshops conducted in five Colombian cities, supported by the Empowerment Nodes tool, enabled the identification of value expressions often overlooked in traditional design approaches. The findings culminated in the Empowerment Framework for Aging Design, a three-layered model composed of seven Silver Goals, fourteen Empowerment Values, and thirty-seven Enhancers, each paired with limiting counterparts that reveal how ageist paradigms subtly …

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Symbiotic Behaviors And Strategic Design: A Situated Participatory Framework For Organizations Led By/For Older Adults, Juliana Gómez, Mariana González, Tala Pedraza, Laura Sofía Riveros Jun 2026

Symbiotic Behaviors And Strategic Design: A Situated Participatory Framework For Organizations Led By/For Older Adults, Juliana Gómez, Mariana González, Tala Pedraza, Laura Sofía Riveros

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Café Séneca, the largest affinity chapter of the Uniandinos Alumni Association in Colombia, is dedicated to the wellbeing of older adults and led by retired members. Despite its popularity, the chapter lacked a strategic design structure, relying on inertia to shape its activities and limiting its ability to evolve sustainably. This paper presents a reflective case study of SenSilver, a situated participatory strategic design framework developed for organizations led by and for older adults. Combining business, positive, and empowerment-oriented design with biological, social, and psychological dimensions of aging, the framework was applied through a research-consultancy process with Café Séneca. The …

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More-Than-Human Perspectives In Teaching Technology Design: From Research To Classroom, To The Real World?, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Rikke Hagensby Jensen, Wolmet Barendregt, Daisy Yoo, Anne-Marie Hansen, Eva Eriksson Jun 2026

More-Than-Human Perspectives In Teaching Technology Design: From Research To Classroom, To The Real World?, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Rikke Hagensby Jensen, Wolmet Barendregt, Daisy Yoo, Anne-Marie Hansen, Eva Eriksson

DRS Biennial Conference Series

There is an increasing awareness of the importance of considering more-than-human (MtH) perspectives in the design of technology, especially in academia. However, to cause real-world impact, it is essential that such awareness is translated into practical action. One way to do so is by educating new designers to apply MtH perspectives. Teaching MtH to design students requires teachers to develop educational materials on the role that MtH perspectives play in design. Currently, there are not many examples of educational materials that teachers can take inspiration from. This paper therefore presents a collection of practical teaching activities to introduce students to …

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Influence And Potential Of Quintessential Forms As Inspirational Stimuli, Beatriz De Moura Figueiredo Jun 2026

Influence And Potential Of Quintessential Forms As Inspirational Stimuli, Beatriz De Moura Figueiredo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Quintessential products, forms widely perceived as typical examples of their category, are embedded in everyday life, yet their influence on product design ideation remains largely unexplored. This study investigates if and how such products can affect inspiration in the creative process of students and suggests approaches on how to address fixation, should it arise from the quintessential stimuli. Through a multi-modal case study with design students working on product development briefs, the research captures both self-reported and observed data to reveal patterns in creative decision-making. The findings indicate that quintessence is not particularly perceived as highly inspirational; however, there might …

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Infrastructuring Transitional Bio-Materialities: Case Of The Biomakerstudio, Ena Naito Jun 2026

Infrastructuring Transitional Bio-Materialities: Case Of The Biomakerstudio, Ena Naito

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Designers today are actively engaging with experimentation and innovation of bio-materials derived from living matter, foregrounding the interrelationship between biological processes, material design, and ecological responsibility. In this context, workspaces that provide conditions to design with living organisms become especially crucial to leverage their transitional material potentials. Grounded upon a 24-month research-through-design study, this paper discusses the ground-up infrastructuring work of establishing a biodesign workspace to support designing with living matter in a university setting. I highlight the emergent nature of such endeavour, including the continuous alignment, containment, and care and maintenance work necessary for growing a provisional intervention into …

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Designing With Care For The End Of Life: A Reflective Co-Design Workshop Using Material Facilitation, Chenfei Yu, Michael Arnold Mages Jun 2026

Designing With Care For The End Of Life: A Reflective Co-Design Workshop Using Material Facilitation, Chenfei Yu, Michael Arnold Mages

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Conversations about end-of-life (EOL) care are often delayed until moments of crisis, leaving little time or emotional capacity for people to reflect on what matters most to them. This paper reports on a reflective co-design workshop in which fifteen participants used material-facilitated methods to explore their imagined EOL experiences. Through landscape making, journey mapping, and collaborative service model building, participants expressed hopes, fears, values, and priorities that are difficult to articulate through direct questioning. The materials created a low-pressure and supportive environment, allowing participants to approach a sensitive topic at their own pace and translate personal meaning into ideas for …

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When Frames Collide: Participatory Frame Navigation Through Co-Design In Policy Contexts, Nicholas Spencer, Joyce Yee, Margaret Defeyter Jun 2026

When Frames Collide: Participatory Frame Navigation Through Co-Design In Policy Contexts, Nicholas Spencer, Joyce Yee, Margaret Defeyter

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design’s expanding presence in policy has generated multiple expressions of its value and impact, yet few address the political and strategic dimensions of policymaking. This paper examines how co-design operates within these dynamics by navigating frame conflicts during policy problem-setting and policy options modelling. Drawing on Schön and Rein’s theory of Frame Reflection, we analyse how institutional framings of policy issues collide with those held by communities, and how co-design practices surface, negotiate, and reconfigure these conflicts. Through two English case studies: 1) School Food Systems and 2) Breakfast Clubs, we show how co-design reveals divergent interpretations of public problems …

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Exploring Future Smellscapes With Smellwalks, Zuzana Neupauerová, Simone Ashby, Supraja Sankaran Jun 2026

Exploring Future Smellscapes With Smellwalks, Zuzana Neupauerová, Simone Ashby, Supraja Sankaran

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study examines how present-day smell encounters stimulate participants to reflect on possible futures and those scents that are emergent or susceptible to becoming transformed or lost altogether. We describe our speculative design setup whereby participants assumed the persona of an olfactory researcher from the year 2100, armed with a smell passport and set of vials, and tasked with time-traveling back to 2025 to capture scent samples. Smellwalk observations span three themes: environmental awareness of scent, the functional role of future scents, and social and cultural dimensions of olfaction. We discuss those scents which participants found to be particularly salient …

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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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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Reciprocal Sensing: Expanding Body Mapping Through Lenca And Mestizo Ontologies Of Relational Embodiment, Thaís Alvarenga Medina, Michael Nitsche Jun 2026

Reciprocal Sensing: Expanding Body Mapping Through Lenca And Mestizo Ontologies Of Relational Embodiment, Thaís Alvarenga Medina, Michael Nitsche

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Reciprocal Sensing is an alternative way of body mapping that draws from Indigenous Lenca ontologies, which understand matter as animate and relational. It expands body mapping to account for culturally specific contexts and ways of knowing. The proposed method invites participants to (1) link each felt experience to a worldly source (the non-human agent or co-actor) and (2) visualize the direction of these sensory flows. Using an autoethnographic approach, iterative body mapping sessions revealed recurring patterns of exchange between the body and its material environment. This informed the development of Reciprocal Sensing as a culturally situated, more-than-human perspective to soma …

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Designing The Service Exposome: Applying The D4l Unclock Framework To Longevity Challenges, Sheng-Hung Lee Jun 2026

Designing The Service Exposome: Applying The D4l Unclock Framework To Longevity Challenges, Sheng-Hung Lee

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In an emerging longevity society, reimagining social infrastructure has become increasingly essential. The World Health Organization (2025) projects that the global population aged 60 and over will nearly double from 12% in 2015 to 22% by 2050, raising urgent questions about how people live and interact with services over time. This study introduces the service exposome, extending Wild’s (2005, 2012) exposome concept to consider the cumulative service-related exposures that shape well-being across the lifespan. Using the Design for Longevity (D4L) Unclock Framework—a tool that helps designers explore intersections across longevity, service, system, design, technology, and society—the research examines how early-stage …

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A Design Continuum For Autographic Sonification, Kajetan Enge, Dietmar Offenhuber, Sara Lenzi Jun 2026

A Design Continuum For Autographic Sonification, Kajetan Enge, Dietmar Offenhuber, Sara Lenzi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Sonification and visualization practices usually take "data" as a given, without considering the complex ways in which data is collected or the complexity of the phenomena that data represents. Autographic design is an emerging field approaching this issue by starting the design process before data collection with the phenomenon itself, treating data as a material trace rather than an abstract reference. An autographic display uses a phenomenon's self-inscription, rather than its mediation and representation in symbolic encodings. While the existing framework of autographic design has a strong relation to the visual domain, a phenomenon may also reveal itself through its …

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From Citizen Innovation Labs To Social Transformation: Analysing The Conectando Cozinhas Case Through The Lens Of Infrastructuring, Laryssa Tarachucky, Diego Hernando Florez Ayala, Aksel Ersoy Jun 2026

From Citizen Innovation Labs To Social Transformation: Analysing The Conectando Cozinhas Case Through The Lens Of Infrastructuring, Laryssa Tarachucky, Diego Hernando Florez Ayala, Aksel Ersoy

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Citizen Innovation Labs (LabICs) have emerged as experimental infrastructures for collective design and civic transformation. Operating in close partnership with public institutions, these laboratories create collaborative spaces where urban publics co-design responses to issues of shared concern. Yet, little is known about how these laboratories operate as long-term supports for community-driven initiatives beyond their initial phases of experimentation or incubation. This paper investigates how LabICs mobilise processes of infrastructuring to support broader cycles of social transformation by analysing the case of Conectando Cozinhas, a citizen-led initiative developed within LabIC Novale (Brazil). Using a retrospective qualitative case study, the research reconstructs …

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Cultivating A Teaching Mindset: Persuasive Strategies For Developing Design Thinking Skills, Min-Yuan Ma, Eric Chen-F Hsieh, Pin-He Huang, Jia-Chi Chih Jun 2026

Cultivating A Teaching Mindset: Persuasive Strategies For Developing Design Thinking Skills, Min-Yuan Ma, Eric Chen-F Hsieh, Pin-He Huang, Jia-Chi Chih

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study proposes a cognitive framework for design thinking education that translates expert-derived strategies into systematic, classroom-ready moves. Drawing on in-depth interviews with experienced design thinking educators in higher education, a reflective thematic analysis surfaced seven themes and sixteen persuasive strategies from teaching practices developed through university-level design thinking workshops and courses: simplifying processes, bridging gaps, constructing repetitive experiences, providing contextual empowerment, adding evaluation criteria, changing perspectives, and introducing breakthroughs. Three teaching mindsets anchor these strategies: lowering the entry threshold, expanding engagement with complex, public-facing issues, and foregrounding authentic, first-hand experience. Integrating these strategies with pedagogical content knowledge supports plural …

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The Hauntology Of Generative Ai In Design, Michael Heron, Klara Aune, Mafalda Gamboa, Sofia Thunberg, Negin Hashmati, Pauline Belford Jun 2026

The Hauntology Of Generative Ai In Design, Michael Heron, Klara Aune, Mafalda Gamboa, Sofia Thunberg, Negin Hashmati, Pauline Belford

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a fundamentally hauntological technology. This paper interrogates that character of contemporary AI systems and explores why this feature undermines the goals of design research. We argue the need for an exorcism of GenAI, or at least a constructive rebellion against the ghosts it systematically produces. GenAI is convergence-driven and nuance-averse. It aims for reasonableness as a first-order output. Its training data reflects a profound anthropocentrism that extinguishes plurality. As a result, GenAI accelerates the foreclosure of possible worlds by preferentially reproducing that which is statistically probable and culturally dominant. By contrast, design relies upon idiosyncrasy, …

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Make It So(Und): Speculative Sonic Metaphors As Boundary Objects For Design Research, Kc Collins Jun 2026

Make It So(Und): Speculative Sonic Metaphors As Boundary Objects For Design Research, Kc Collins

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper investigates how speculative sound design can employ metaphors as boundary objects to mediate shared understanding across users and designers. Because sound is ephemeral and difficult to describe, participants often rely on metaphor, drawing on nature, human behaviour, or emotion. We surveyed 72 people online to respond to textual prompts with descriptions of futuristic sound objects, and analysed their responses using several methods. We present results and outline suggestions for re-deploying sonic metaphors as design prompts, and discuss their potential to support sound design.

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