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When School Culture Excludes: Deficit Discourse, Microaggressions, And The Mental Health Of Marginalized Students – A Conceptual Framework With Implications For School Psychology Practice And Equity Policy, Modupe Mercy Oyewunmi

Publications

Deficit-laden language like ‘behavior problem,’ ‘not college material,’ ‘won’t fit in’, ‘not a cultural fit’, operates as a systemic form of implicit bias and microaggression in school settings. Despite decades of research on school belonging and well-being, school psychology has yet to integrate these exclusionary discursive practices into a coherent health-determinant model that also accounts for the current anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy environment. This conceptual paper proposes a testable framework linking deficit discourse and school-based microaggressions to student identity suppression, academic impostor phenomenon, and educator moral injury, with downstream effects on school mental health outcomes. We situate these …

Comparative Analysis Of Leaflet Materials, Stent Materials, And Stent Cell Density For Bileaflet Transcatheter Mitral Valve Design, Joseph Chibuike Nwokeafor, Joshua D. Hofmeister, Breandan B. Yeats, Lakshmi Prasad Dasi, Charanjit S. Rihal, Juan A. Crestanello, Leigh Griffiths, Mohamad A. Alkhouli, Hoda Hatoum

Michigan Tech Publications

Background: The biomechanical performance of bileaflet transcatheter mitral valves (TMVs) depends on complex interactions between leaflet material behavior and stent design. However, the contributions of leaflet materials and constitutive models, stent materials, and stent geometry to valve function and durability remain poorly understood. Methods: A parametric finite element study was conducted using a CAD model of a bileaflet TMV subjected to physiological pressure loading. Five leaflet material models were evaluated: 3 glutaraldehyde-fixed tissues—bovine pericardium (BP; FBP1, FBP2) and porcine pericardium (PP; FPP)—and 2 unfixed tissues—bovine (UBP) and porcine pericardium (UPP). BP was modeled as a linear elastic (FBP1) and Ogden …

The Effect Of Social Entrepreneurship On Economic Development In Emerging Economies: A Review Of Existing Studies, Samuel Bangura, Princess Thulile Duma, Ntombifuthi Alexia Mthembu

Management Dynamics

Background: Social entrepreneurship (SE) has emerged as an innovative mechanism to tackle persistent societal challenges, such as poverty, unemployment, and inequality, by prioritising social impact alongside sustainable business models. This is particularly relevant in resource-constrained emerging economies like South Africa, where high unemployment (approximately 33%) and weaknesses in the entrepreneurial ecosystem (ranked 49th globally) hinder traditional economic development (ED) pathways.

Objectives: This systematic review aims to examine the relationship between SE and ED, exploring definitions of SE, its interconnections with ED, contextual applications (with a focus on South Africa), associated challenges, opportunities, enabling factors, and contributions to sustainable growth and …

Nature And Nurture In Appreciating Neurodivergent Lives, Peter Smagorinsky

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Review of Neurodivergent, by Nature: Why Biodiversity needs Neurodiversity by Joe Harkness (Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2025)

When Distress Is Misread: Autistic Credibility And The Politics Of Interpretation, Katrine Callander

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Misinformation about autism is often understood as a problem of inaccurate facts, stereotypes or public misunderstanding. This essay argues that misinformation also operates through dominant interpretive frameworks that shape how autistic experiences are recognised, understood and believed. Drawing on participatory narrative research with autistic women, the essay examines how institutions frequently reinterpret experiences of harm as personality dysfunction, emotional instability or individual deficit rather than recognising them as relational and socially produced. Autistic forms of communication and storytelling are often treated as signs of unreliability, shaping whose accounts are considered credible within clinical and institutional contexts. By reframing these patterns …

Techwork: Developing And Validating A Reflective Tool For Impact-Aware Design, Sihui Wu, Marirena Kladeftira, Kim Helmersen, Gudela Grote

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Most assessments of technology impact occur only after its deployment, limiting the ability to address unintended social, cultural, and organizational effects. This paper introduces TechWork, a prospective and reflective tool for evaluating emerging technologies within existing work systems. Grounded in reflective practice tradition, socio-technical systems theory, and contemporary work design research, TechWork guides interdisciplinary teams through structured prompts and impact mappings to examine how their own design choices influence autonomy, skills, collaboration, and job demands. The tool was tested through design-education workshops in an architectural studio, applied to vernacular construction practices where embodied expertise and cultural knowledge are central to …

Opening Portals To The Posthuman: A Pedagogical Framework For Materializing Philosophy, Carlos Henrique Araujo De Aguiar

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper critiques dominant design pedagogies for their alignment with positivist and modernist paradigms, which limit design’s capacity for serious philosophical inquiry. It argues that Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) pedagogy offers an alternative philosophy, functioning as a powerful method for fomenting critical engagement by enabling students to materialize abstract concepts. Drawing on a case study from an undergraduate course on human-robot-cyborg relations, the paper employs the metaphor of 'portals' to analyse three thematic case studies. Each portal opens onto a distinct philosophical debate: the nature of reality and the self, the biopolitics of the body, and the networked subject. …

A Researcher And A Guide Talk Into A Paper: A Dialogue On Being Many Things At Once, Ranjani Balasubramanian, Shweta Srivastav

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper argues that the positionality of the practitioner-researcher often remains centered in the self-reflective question “Who am I?”, fixing identity at the core of a relational web. We propose shifting this inquiry toward “Who can I be?” and “Who can I be in relation?”, recognising identity as fluid, contextual, and co-constituted through relationships. The paper unfolds through a conversational method that unpacks the ongoing PhD research of the first author. The authors navigate this landscape of lived research and practice in dialogue with two simultaneously held identities - the Practitioner-Researcher and the Scholar-Provocateur. Drawing from decolonial praxis, we conceptualise …

Exploring Common Understandings And Bodily Experiences Of Vulnerability In Design Researchers In Sensitive Contexts, Bhakti Moghe, Roberta Antognini, Sofie Dideriksen, Zhuochao Peng, Francesca Toso, Maarten Houben

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design researchers are increasingly being exposed to stressors while empathizing with their participants such as feeling emotionally charged, leading them to feeling vulnerable. Currently, there is a lack of clear consensus on how this vulnerability arises and manifests, hindering both individual and collective awareness and support. To address this gap, we conducted an empirical investigation into the vulnerability of design researchers. We conducted exploratory workshops with PhD students working in the field of design research in sensitive settings. The workshops consisted of three approaches to understand researcher vulnerability: (1) Reflecting on individual and collective vulnerability, (2) Exploring embodied experiences, and …

The Memory Loom: Reweaving Curatorial Power Relations With Source Communities In Virtual Reality Cultural Heritage Exhibitions, Ning Zhao, Ziqiang He, Shijie Ming, Haopeng Yuan, Furui Sun, Ke Jiang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines how to redistribute curatorial power in VR heritage exhibitions by designing actionable governance mechanisms. We conceptualize VR heritage exhibitions as political curatorial infrastructures rather than neutral storytelling media. We employ a two-stage RtD framework: first building a baseline VR stage, then embedding two mechanisms: Parallel Weave (narrative authorship) and Asynchronous Governance Lock (publishing/veto rights). With N=32 participants, analysis reveals four tensions: (1) community narratives increased affective engagement and epistemic recognition, yet (2) parallel inclusion also risked narrative segregation; (3) a visible veto established accountable workflows, but (4) this power redistribution also transferred sociopolitical risk onto community representatives, …

Playing With Possibility: Exploring Materiality, Affordances And Forms Of Participation Through Construction Play, Jesper Falck Legaard

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Material exploration is central to both play and design, where imagination unfolds through tactile and social engagement. This study examines how materials participate as agents in creative exploration through three video-recorded construction-play sessions involving children aged five to six. Using reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies three key findings: (1) expressive form elements augment material agency; (2) affordances are encountered through two distinct relational mechanisms — Affordance Emergence and Affordance Orientation — which mediate between imaginative states and material properties; and (3) participation shifts dynamically between contributing, cooperating, and collaborating. By clarifying how affordances bridge psychological engagement and material structure, …

Weaving Relational Dynamics: Civil Servant Agency In Service Design Collaboration, Annukka Svanda, Martina Čaić, Tuuli Mattelmäki

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines relational dynamics within a programmatic service design collaboration shaping public service development in Espoo, Finland. Over two years, a service design researcher collaborated with civil servants to co-create more inclusive employment practices. Drawing on iterative design interventions, observations, interviews, and informal everyday communications, reflexive analysis identifies three conditions that enabled collaborative design agency: relational alignment, infrastructuring coherence, and reflexive reconfiguration. These relational conditions highlight how civil servants actively advance design work and institutional learning. By bringing forward the concept of collaborative design agency, the study highlights how design in public services is an emergent capacity calling for …

Default Bodies: Challenging Gendered Norms In Fighting Games Through Participatory Design, Shalom Taiwo, Laura Pruszko

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The over-sexualisation of female characters in video games peaked in the 1990s and 2000s and fighting games have been slow to move away from it. Their reliance on visual exaggeration to convey identity and fighting style makes this harder to change. With 48% of players today being women, this raises questions about how these portrayals persist. This paper examines how participatory approaches can be used to explore how women players respond to these designs through a survey, a within-subject evaluation task, and a co-design workshop. Participants recognised exaggeration as part of the genre’s identity but criticised its association with sexualisation. …

Modes Of Being Amid Anthropocene: Living Through The 2024 Rio Grande Do Sul Floods, Natalia Dai Prá Penteado, Guilherme Meyer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper situates the 2024 Rio Grande do Sul climate disaster within the intertwined crises of the Anthropocene, arguing that those impacted developed situated practices to preserve identities and sustain life amidst collapse. Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirteen individuals directly affected by the floods, the research identifies Modes of Being that illuminate strategies of adaptation, care, and continuity rooted in Latin American ontologies. Through the interpretive lenses of Anna Tsing’s concepts of ghosts, monsters, and ruins, these modes reveal how to endure life in the Anthropocene and reconfigure identities and relations to persist. The study proposes a framework of …

“Why Do All The Schools Look The Same?” Exploring Children’S Spatial Design Preferences Through Generative Ai In India, Chinmay Pade, Charu Monga

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly embedded in creative and spatial design processes, transforming how ideas are visualized and interpreted. This study examines how generative AI tools influence children’s imagination and articulation of spatial design preferences for schools in India. In a context where school environments are often standardized and children’s perspectives remain marginalized, participatory workshops with primary-school students engaged them in describing, writing, and generating AI-assisted images to express their visions for school spaces. The process revealed both the potential and the limits of AI-driven visualization. While AI expanded imagination and made ideas instantly visible, it also reproduced globalized aesthetics detached …

Distributed Care Hubs: Rethinking Disability Care Policy Through Participatory Research, Christina Chi Zhang, Kyra Zimmerman, Austin Duncan, Jiin Jung

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper develops the concept of "distributed care hubs" to describe the informal, relational infrastructures through which disabled people sustain everyday life amid insufficient formal care systems. Drawing on participatory research in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—combining community mapping, ethnographic interviews, and computational analysis—we show how community-built care emerges through ordinary social interactions, shared spaces, and reciprocal relationships. Distributed care hubs reveal that disability care and everyday sociality are inseparable; they challenge independence-centered policy frameworks by foregrounding interdependence as a universal human condition. Yet these hubs remain precarious, functioning as compensatory mechanisms shaped by systemic failures that force disabled people into informal survival …

Agnes As A Critical Wearable: Mediating Age, Materiality, And Embodied Expertise, Elisa Cardamone, Taylor Brennan, Sophia Ashebir, Lisa D'Ambrosio, Joseph F. Coughlin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design is increasingly engaging with the body through soft systems, wearables, and responsive materials, exploring how material interactions shape experiences of care and inclusion. This paper examines the Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES) - a wearable suit simulating the chronic physical conditions and functional changes associated with older age - as a critical, soma-focused design intervention. Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflection and participant observation, we present a theoretical and methodological analysis. We argue that AGNES' critical materiality actively mediates how the ageing body is read and made visible, inviting embodied understanding and supporting co-creation partnerships. We analyse how this wearable …

Intermediary Ecologies And Participatory Infrastructures In Wind Power Planning – Towards A Practice Of Design For Just Transitions, Tessa Laven, Ramia Maze, Niki Wallace

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper analyses how transition intermediaries and participatory infrastructures shape an unjust energy licensing process and outlines implications for design for just transitions. Centring on the Fosen Wind Farm in Norway, where wind power development violated Indigenous Sámi cultural rights, it traces how licensing enabled renewable expansion while generating democratic and rights-based conflicts. Using historical case analysis and a synthesis of various literatures, the paper explores the intermediary ecology of licensing and shows how interactions among transition intermediaries structure power asymmetries. In dialogue with design research on infrastructuring, it proposes three practices for design in just transition contexts: unveiling institutional–cultural …

Archives And Graphic Memory: 1980s Brazilian Rock Album Covers As Cultural Heritage, Paulo Eduardo Moretto, Priscila Lena Farias

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The centrality of modernist and institution-centred narratives has narrowed the scope of Brazilian graphic design throughout history, limiting its cultural and epistemological diversity. This article explores the value of researching graphic artefacts normally understood as not pertinent to design research, focusing on album covers from the Brazilian rock scene of the 1980s. Based on the formation of an archive of 155 covers, this study emphasizes the need for appropriate methods to analyse mass-culture artefacts whose wide circulation shapes collective design practices and visual imaginaries. By reflecting on the criteria of selection, interpretation, and preservation that determine what is collected, analysed, …

Revisiting Kansei Engineering Through Japanese Scholarship: Toward Field Kansei Engineering, Liang Dong, Hong Zhang, Chun-Hsien Chen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Japan, as the birthplace of Kansei Engineering (KE), has played a pivotal role in shaping this field, building a solid research foundation and accumulating extensive scholarly experience. A substantial body of valuable Japanese-language studies has been published in academic conferences and journals in Japan. However, current English-language review articles in KE rarely include these Japanese works. To address this gap, this study provides a preliminary attempt to compile and analyse Japanese publications that propose new concepts, theories, models, and frameworks within KE. The review highlights distinctive perspectives developed by Japanese scholars, revealing contextual and situational sensitivity, collective and social understanding, …

Design Research Laboratories: A Historical Review, Lynn Harles

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In recent decades, Design Research Labs have proliferated across design educational institutions worldwide, emerging as dynamic spaces that challenge traditional pedagogical models. However, understanding this contemporary phenomenon requires contextualizing it within the historical origins of the laboratory metaphor in design—a concept repeatedly reimagined over nearly a century. Building upon Hasenhütl's (2018, 2023) identification of two historical generations from the early to mid-20th century, this research extends the genealogy to encompass contemporary developments, with particular attention to socio-ecological themes. The analysis reveals four distinct generations of Design Research Labs that do not follow strictly linear chronological progression but represent "expanding parameters" …

The Act Of Crafting Textile Dialogues, Malene Harsaae, Anne Louise Bang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores how textile dialogues can be crafted within material‑driven de-sign processes in the context of increasing environmental pressure on textile re-sources and forthcoming regulations such as the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. Through observations of professional practitioners and anal-yses of design students’ thesis work, the study investigates how material‑first ap-proaches influence ideation, prototyping and reflection in apparel and textile de-sign. Practitioners naturally engage in reflection‑in‑action, using craft skills to nego-tiate material behavior and technologies, often leading to unanticipated design di-rections. Students, guided by the material‑driven design model for apparel and tex-tiles, deliberately develop similar dialogues, gaining insights …

Mediating Borders Through Sound: Sonic Boundary Objects In Infrastructural Listening, Paula Martin Rivero, Dietmar Offenhuber

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Through Tower of Babel, a spatialized sound installation based on field recordings at the U.S.–Mexico border, we examine how sonic boundary objects translate bureaucratic infrastructures into embodied, perceptual encounters. The installation treats borders as culturally constructed virtual spaces rather than geometric lines, enabling movement across sonic channels and challenging fixed notions of data and identity. We argue that sound-driven artifacts can function as boundary objects in design contexts by mediating knowledge, exposing hierarchies, and fostering collective sense-making. These artifacts support cooperation across diverse stakeholders through sonic habitability: auditory conditions that reframe relations among human, technological, and environmental actors. While auditory …

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. …

Strategic Positioning In Design Agencies: Achieving Optimal Distinctiveness Through Portfolios, Bingqing Tian, Antonius Van Den Broek, Mikko Koria

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The growing recognition of design’s value to business and society has driven rapid expansion in the design industries, intensifying competition among designers and design firms. Despite an increased scholarly attention to the strategic role of design, there is a lack of understanding how design businesses strategize and position themselves in the market. We aim to revitalise this debate by reviewing a diverse range of literatures on strategic positioning of design agencies and suggest a focus on the theory of optimal distinctiveness. This theory argues that to be successful, firms need to find an optimal balance between being different to be …

Support Designer’S Wellbeing: Understanding Resilience In Design Education As A Wicked Challenge, Yilin Quan, Matthew Isherwood, Ji Han

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design students are expected to engage with wicked problems as part of their learning. Since these problems have no definitive solutions, the learning process can be challenging and may negatively affect students’ wellbeing. Cultivating resilience becomes critical. Although the conceptualisation of designer resilience has gained attention, it remains underexplored. This paper proposes a new conceptual model of resilience in design education, suggesting two capacity clusters: one emphasising short-term recovery and balance restoration, and the other focusing on long-term sustained engagement. It further frames resilience cultivation in design education as a wicked problem in itself, characterised by the inherent complexity within …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …