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More-Than-Human Data Practices, Elisa Giaccardi, Sara Lenzi, Chris Speed, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Jiwei Zhou Jun 2026

More-Than-Human Data Practices, Elisa Giaccardi, Sara Lenzi, Chris Speed, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Jiwei Zhou

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Grounded in post-anthropocentric and post-humanist perspectives, this track explores more-than-human data practices that challenge dominant data paradigms and cultivate alternative modes of engagement with the world, from the microbial to the planetary. Rather than treating non-human life as objects of measurement and classification, as data subjects, the contributions in this track ask what it would mean to recognize organisms, systems, and processes as data co-producers, whose perceptual worlds, temporal rhythms, and relational entanglements actively participate in what counts as knowledge. This reorientation carries profound consequences for the designer. Co-producing data with more-than-human others is a political, epistemic, and ontological commitment …

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Tectonic Computation: Crafting Logic Through Material And Geometry, Dimitris Papanikolaou Jun 2026

Tectonic Computation: Crafting Logic Through Material And Geometry, Dimitris Papanikolaou

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper reframes computation as a design practice rather than a technological application. Through the construction of mechanical computing artifacts that harness environmental energy and material constraints, it demonstrates how designing can become a form of computational inquiry. The work positions architecture as a discipline capable of foundational contributions to computation by treating material, geometry, and energy as active agents of logic and memory. The study advances two main contributions: 1) It reconceptualizes computation as a physical and architectural phenomenon rather than a symbolic or digital one. 2) It demonstrates, through a pedagogical experiment, that computation can be enacted and …

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Driving Public Service Innovation Through Internal Ecosystem Development: Reconfiguring The Internal Management And Service System Of Nanhai Bus Station, Liwen Zhang, Yiqi Liu, Zheng Wang, Jingya Li, Yuexi Dong Jun 2026

Driving Public Service Innovation Through Internal Ecosystem Development: Reconfiguring The Internal Management And Service System Of Nanhai Bus Station, Liwen Zhang, Yiqi Liu, Zheng Wang, Jingya Li, Yuexi Dong

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As public sectors worldwide increasingly adopt design-driven approaches to address complex public service and management challenges, existing research predominantly focuses on citizen-facing experiences while overlooking the critical importance of internal ecosystems as the core of service delivery. This paper examines the Nanhai Bus Station Design Consultation Project in China as a case study, exploring how systematic design interventions originating from within can drive holistic public service innovation through the internal ecosystem. The research conducted in-depth participatory action research through blended research, co-design, and stakeholder engagement methodologies. Addressing challenges such as fragmented internal workflows, ambiguous division of responsibilities, and outdated service …

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Re-Configuring Body Perception: Colour And Dynamic Pattern Strategies To Challenge Aesthetic Norms, Hongyi Xiao, Dongdong Zhang, Yitong Zheng Jun 2026

Re-Configuring Body Perception: Colour And Dynamic Pattern Strategies To Challenge Aesthetic Norms, Hongyi Xiao, Dongdong Zhang, Yitong Zheng

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This research frames colour and print as responsive strategies to challenge entrenched aesthetic norms and empower diverse bodies. It explores how dynamic visual patterns and colour psychology can disrupt static perceptions of body shape, moving beyond the confines of normative ideals. Through an iterative, research-through-design process, the study develops motifs and colourways that foster aesthetic agency, self-confidence, and vitality. By treating surface design as an embodied material interface, dynamic visual elements (such as moiré effects and gradients) are integrated to sustain novelty and reduce aesthetic fatigue. This approach re-frames emotional durability not just as longevity, but as the capacity for …

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Queer(Ing) Design Research/Practice, Jess Parris Westbrook, Jessica Meharry, Valentina Ferreri, Chenxi Cui Jun 2026

Queer(Ing) Design Research/Practice, Jess Parris Westbrook, Jessica Meharry, Valentina Ferreri, Chenxi Cui

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Paper track Queer(ing) Design Research/Practice, explores how Queer(ing) operates in design as a mode of inquiry, intervention, and worldmaking. Queer(ing) is positioned as a critical practice that challenges normativity, resists fixed categories, and generates alternative possibilities across intentions, processes, and outcomes. The track is organized into three interrelated clusters: Queer(ing) Method/ologies, Queer(ing) Experience, and Queer(ing) Complexity. Together, these clusters trace an expanding arc: from transforming how design is done, to examining what design generates, to engaging dynamic, entangled, complex phenomena. Across diverse contributions, authors use a range of approaches: activist, practice-based, experimental, and theoretical approaches to reimagine epistemologies, change experiential …

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Exploring Designing For Dignity In The Context Of Digital Community Platforms, Fatima-Zahra Abou Eddahab-Burke, Katharina Bauer Jun 2026

Exploring Designing For Dignity In The Context Of Digital Community Platforms, Fatima-Zahra Abou Eddahab-Burke, Katharina Bauer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Digital community platforms have transformed civic participation, enhancing social belonging and shared responsibility. Yet, they intensify the digital divide between people. This can be a risk to their fundamental human value of dignity. This paper explores designing for dignity within digital community platforms through a qualitative study conducted in South Holland, The Netherlands. Twenty citizens participated in semi-structured interviews to investigate their understanding, experiences, frustrations and expectations of dignity in digital interactions. The study confirmed dignity’s multifaceted nature (14 distinct definitions), varied expectations of respectful treatment, and common challenges in using government digital services. Only 30% of participants felt these …

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Historicising Speculative Design With Mcluhan’S Tetrad, Soyoun Jang, Jay David David Bolter Jun 2026

Historicising Speculative Design With Mcluhan’S Tetrad, Soyoun Jang, Jay David David Bolter

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper introduces and applies Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad model, grounded in critical media studies, as an interpretative framework for analysing corporate concept videos as design fictions. Through a close reading of seven videos, we identify three recurring themes: present as future, the rhetoric of the new and socio-economic utopia. In parallel, the two diagonals of the Tetrad reveal contrasting orientations: the enhances-obsolesces diagonal reflects a corporate anticipatory (non-radical) future, whereas the retrieves-reverses diagonal is more critical and disruptive. We discuss figure-ground reversal as a key strategy for historicising corporate concept videos and suggest how the Tetrad can foster historical reflexivity …

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Constructing A Scenario-Driven Model For Contextual Brand Experience: The Case Of Chain Coffee Brands, Yi Jui Hsu, Yu Ting Zeng, Hsien Hui Tang Jun 2026

Constructing A Scenario-Driven Model For Contextual Brand Experience: The Case Of Chain Coffee Brands, Yi Jui Hsu, Yu Ting Zeng, Hsien Hui Tang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Brand experience is frequently theorized as a set of fixed domain attributes, yet how consumption context reorganizes the structural priority of these domains remains largely unmeasured. This paper argues that brand experience is a contextually generated design phenomenon that cannot be adequately addressed through static frameworks or single-context evaluation. Focusing on chain coffee brands in Taiwan, we conceptualize dine-in and take-out as distinct behavioral ecologies and apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to construct comparable experiential hierarchies across both contexts. Our findings reveal divergent experiential logics—dine-in privileging environmental immersion, take-out foregrounding product reliability and service rhythm—and non-obvious sub-criteria priorities only …

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Narrataive: Using Narrative For Human–Ai Co-Creation In Intelligent Cockpits, Danhua Zhao, Yufei Liu, Yuhao Jiang, Zhongjie Xue Jun 2026

Narrataive: Using Narrative For Human–Ai Co-Creation In Intelligent Cockpits, Danhua Zhao, Yufei Liu, Yuhao Jiang, Zhongjie Xue

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As intelligent cockpits transition toward experience-centered scenario design, designers must organize increasingly complex relationships among users, behaviors, and system responses. While Generative AI (GenAI) accelerates early-stage exploration, it often struggles to interpret designers’ intentions, resulting in semantic drift and inconsistencies. This study proposes NarratAIve, a structured narrative–driven framework for human–AI co-creation in intelligent cockpit design. The framework encodes users, actions, contexts, and feedback into computable narrative units that serve as clear semantic inputs for cross-modal AI generation. Through two workshops with 24 participants (including graduate students and industry experts), six cockpit concepts were produced, demonstrating how narrative acts as a …

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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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A Gentlewoman’S Agreement: Designing Relational Frameworks For Phd Supervision, Helen Milne, Kristina Andersen Jun 2026

A Gentlewoman’S Agreement: Designing Relational Frameworks For Phd Supervision, Helen Milne, Kristina Andersen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines the PhD onboarding process as a site of co-creation and relational design between supervisor and student. Drawing on first-person experience, we present a series of collaboratively annotated and devised documents - The Table of Supervisory Style, Competency Profile Form, Competency Development Trajectory, A Gentlewoman’s Agreement, and Marching Orders - as performative artefacts that structure dialogue, reflection, and trust-building in supervision. These practices have emerged within an industrial design context at a university of technology, where institutional expectations intersect with creative and emergent modes of inquiry. We argue that onboarding can function as a design-led intervention: a process …

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Caring For Memory: A Neuroscientific Framework For Commemorative Exhibition Design, Caterina Vettraino Jun 2026

Caring For Memory: A Neuroscientific Framework For Commemorative Exhibition Design, Caterina Vettraino

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Contemporary memorial exhibitions presume emotional intensity produces durable memory, employing affective saturation strategies that neuroscientific research reveals as counterproductive. Emotional arousal consolidates central affective impressions whilst compromising contextual understanding: visitors retain visceral sensations but lose historical processes. This paper develops a theoretical framework integrating Assmann's cultural memory theory, neuroscience of memory consolidation, and care ethics to inform commemorative exhibition design. A four-modality taxonomy, individual, collective, spatial, and sensory, translates psychological memory categories into operationally distinct design approaches. Digital mediation constitutes a transversal narrative apparatus serving memory transmission across all four modalities, functioning as infrastructural support. Design parameters specify spatial configurations, …

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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Designing The Echo. Practices For Oral Heritage In The Digital Age, Ilaria Bollati, Luisa Collina, Alice Biancardi Jun 2026

Designing The Echo. Practices For Oral Heritage In The Digital Age, Ilaria Bollati, Luisa Collina, Alice Biancardi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Oral heritage is inherently unstable: unlike written records, it persists through repetition and reinterpretation rather than through the conservation of a stable object. In post-digital cultural heritage contexts, safeguarding oral memories therefore cannot be reduced to storing audio files; it requires the socio-technical conditions to be designed that make voices interpretable, discoverable, and reactivatable. This paper develops and applies a three-phase framework ̶ Listening / Composing / Amplifying ̶ as an analytical and methodological lens for tracing how oral material is collected, translated into an questionable structure, and returned to the public through differentiated formats. The paper grounds the framework …

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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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Nature-Centred Biodesign For Regeneration. Design Understandings In Europe., Nina Costa, Pierre Oskam, Helen Charoupia, Fátima Pombo Jun 2026

Nature-Centred Biodesign For Regeneration. Design Understandings In Europe., Nina Costa, Pierre Oskam, Helen Charoupia, Fátima Pombo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study explores how design researchers in Europe understand and enact nature-centred biodesign for regeneration: an emerging approach that bridges design, biology, and ecology to foster regenerative futures. It proposes an evolutionary framework of design agency, mapping the transition from imitation to co-evolution and from instrumental ethics to ecological justice. The framework highlights four paradigmatic quadrants: Anthropocentric Planning, Emerging Bioeconomy, Socio-Ecology, and Regenerative Biodesign that capture how ethical, ecological, and material orientations shape practice. In parallel, it employs a qualitative analysis of a questionnaire with 32 researchers from COST Action DESIGNAE (2025), which investigates how design operates between scientific, material, …

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Ddenso: An Evaluation-Driven Methodology For Information Visualisations, Michele Mauri, Elena Aversa, Anna Cattaneo, María De Los Ángeles Briones Rojas Jun 2026

Ddenso: An Evaluation-Driven Methodology For Information Visualisations, Michele Mauri, Elena Aversa, Anna Cattaneo, María De Los Ángeles Briones Rojas

DRS Biennial Conference Series

When designing Information Visualisations for Media and Information Literacy (MIL) initiatives, a significant challenge lies in ensuring that they effectively transmit and consolidate knowledge, particularly when the Information Visualisation literacy of the audience is unknown. Applying a Research through Design approach, this article describes a meta-process: the reflective and iterative path that led to the definition of DDENSO, a replicable design methodology for creating and evaluating Information Visualisations that allow for knowledge retention. Grounded in prior theoretical and practical experience in Information Design, DDENSO emerged through the development of the artefacts for a MIL exhibition exploring the social implications of …

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More-Than-Human Oversight: Designing A Somaesthetic Space For High-Risk Ai Systems, Mariana Morais, Joaquin Santuber, Kristina Tica, Pablo Hermansen, Marcos Chilet Jun 2026

More-Than-Human Oversight: Designing A Somaesthetic Space For High-Risk Ai Systems, Mariana Morais, Joaquin Santuber, Kristina Tica, Pablo Hermansen, Marcos Chilet

DRS Biennial Conference Series

European AI regulation (EU AI Act) has assumed that humans will remain in control of AI systems, thanks to human-machine interfaces and a stop button (Art. 14 of the EU AI Act) as two separate static entities. This ontological blindness in legal institutions leads to a problem of making illusory mechanisms through which people relate to the more-than-human agency of AI systems, foreclosing any possibility of coexistence. Against this context, somaesthetic and affective interaction design practices can offer new possibilities of inter-relations between the more-than-human AI-data operations and the human and social institutions’ fixations on representations. This paper provides an …

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Holding Paradoxes Together: Navigating Institutional Complexity In Public Design, Luis Garcia, Geert Brinkman Jun 2026

Holding Paradoxes Together: Navigating Institutional Complexity In Public Design, Luis Garcia, Geert Brinkman

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores the evolving practice of design in the public sector. To do so, we initiated a reading group that brought together academics and practitioners from around the globe to discuss how public design is understood and practiced in different contexts. The common thread across the six reading groups held so far was that public design is inherently paradoxical. Three core paradoxes appear to characterize its practice: the identity paradox (blending in to stand out), the enablement paradox (constraining design by enabling it), and the political paradox (designing apolitically while designing politically). These paradoxes highlight the need for strategic …

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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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From Conflict To Care: A Design Learning Experiment On Food Justice In Rio De Janeiro, Laura Cipriani, Claudio Magalhães, Stefano Maffei Jun 2026

From Conflict To Care: A Design Learning Experiment On Food Justice In Rio De Janeiro, Laura Cipriani, Claudio Magalhães, Stefano Maffei

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper discusses the Design for Peace Ecosystem: Urban Conflict and Food Justice course as a situated experiment in transformative design education. Conducted in Rio de Janeiro, the course combined participatory mapping, desk research, and fieldwork to explore how design can reveal and reframe tensions and hidden structural injustices within urban Food Systems. Students first developed urban food conflict maps to visualise inequalities in access, labour, and cultural recognition. Through desk research, they identified local “food care” initiatives that address food conflicts and promote the right to an adequate food culture. Using ethnographic diaries and ethnography techniques, they engaged with …

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