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From Edgeland To Gentrified-Land: Graphic Communication As Intermediary For Negotiating Place Identity In Hackney Wick, London, Angelina Hang Pan, Jennifer Mchugn, Jingnan Bian Jun 2026

From Edgeland To Gentrified-Land: Graphic Communication As Intermediary For Negotiating Place Identity In Hackney Wick, London, Angelina Hang Pan, Jennifer Mchugn, Jingnan Bian

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Hackney Wick has long been regarded as an urban edgeland, marked by significant poverty since the 1860s, with distinctive topographic and socio- economic features. Yet in the early 2000s, it saw a rapid transformation into a creative space as artists began to occupy abandoned warehouses, building a live- work culture and quickly establishing itself as one of Europe’s most vibrant artistic communities. More recently, the development of the London Olympic infrastructure and government-led urban regeneration initiatives have accelerated gentrification and drive for social capital, whilst intensifying social exclusion and community marginalisation amongst disadvantaged communities. This paper integrates visual ethnography (graphic …

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When Play Becomes Language: Transforming International Student Experience Through Environmental Art And Eco-Social Design, Nina Luostarinen, Melanie Sarantou Jun 2026

When Play Becomes Language: Transforming International Student Experience Through Environmental Art And Eco-Social Design, Nina Luostarinen, Melanie Sarantou

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study explores the Miyanohara participatory land art project in Ōmuta City, Japan, as an innovative teaching method for integrating international exchange students into new cultural and environmental settings within higher education institutions (HEIs). By creating a 74-metre installation depicting the Kasumi salamander at a former coal mine site, eleven international students from Kyushu University's Strategic Design course engaged in embodied learning that transcended linguistic and cultural barriers. Using arts-based methodologies and an eco-social design approach, we demonstrate how land art can serve as a powerful tool for HEIs to foster environmental awareness, cultural integration, and transformational learning experiences for …

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Designing For Learning Rhythms: A Taxonomy Of Trajectory-Aware Interventions In Online Learning, Seulgi Sylvia Kim, Zach Pino, Paige Safyer, August Neyrey, Richa Sharma, Tzu-Chi Huang, Maria Sekyi Jun 2026

Designing For Learning Rhythms: A Taxonomy Of Trajectory-Aware Interventions In Online Learning, Seulgi Sylvia Kim, Zach Pino, Paige Safyer, August Neyrey, Richa Sharma, Tzu-Chi Huang, Maria Sekyi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Online learning platforms give learners unprecedented control over pacing, yet this flexibility often leaves students without support at the moments when they need it most—during transitions between activities, cognitive states, or levels of engagement. Existing self-regulated learning (SRL) interventions tend to rely on fixed schedules or simplistic triggers, overlooking how learners’ trajectories unfold and where they begin to diverge toward productive or unproductive pathways. This paper introduces a framework for trajectory-aware interventions, an approach that integrates temporal design with real-time behavioral diagnostics to identify and support critical transition moments. Through a comparative analysis of major online learning platforms and a …

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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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Learning Design Capabilities In Public Administrations Through Sandbox Experiments: Insights From A 12-City Eu Network, Patricia Csobánczi, Nicola Morreli, Rike Neuhoff Jun 2026

Learning Design Capabilities In Public Administrations Through Sandbox Experiments: Insights From A 12-City Eu Network, Patricia Csobánczi, Nicola Morreli, Rike Neuhoff

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper reports on an EU research project involving 12 cities in a multi-thematic innovation network. The project supports innovation and the testing of innovative procurement practices, and also generates or improves design capabilities in public administrations. Once local challenges were defined and two solution providers were selected for each city, civil servants worked in Sandbox mode, experimenting in their own urban contexts. This paper focuses on the Sandbox phase, which provided an opportunity for knowledge exchange, inspiration, and the diffusion of design capabilities. Given the extreme difference in local practices, knowledge exchange and shared learning must be accurately planned; …

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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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Designing Digital Ghosts: Creative Access To Web Archives, Dorsey Kaufmann, Andrea Kocsis Jun 2026

Designing Digital Ghosts: Creative Access To Web Archives, Dorsey Kaufmann, Andrea Kocsis

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents Digital Ghosts, a practice-based research project exploring how creative and tactile approaches to web archives can reimagine engagement with digital cultural heritage and GLAM collections. Using exploratory visualisation of metadata, the project transforms the digital into interactive multimedia installations. Operating within the “post-digital” condition of GLAM, the project investigates how design can mediate between the technical infrastructures of preservation, traditional archivist practice, and the experiential, interpretive needs of users. Rather than treating messy humanities data as a failure, the project frames absence and inconsistency as evidence of the web’s fluid temporality and of institutional decisions about what …

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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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Exploring Intentions And Use Scenarios Behind Geomatic Data Artefacts For Public Health Policies In Québec From A Co-Design Perspective, Angélique Montuwy, Lorenz Herfurth Jun 2026

Exploring Intentions And Use Scenarios Behind Geomatic Data Artefacts For Public Health Policies In Québec From A Co-Design Perspective, Angélique Montuwy, Lorenz Herfurth

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores the production and intended use of publicly available Geomatic Data Artefacts (such as geo-repositories, maps, and dashboards) and their relevance in the context of public health policies. We are an interdisciplinary team of academics with backgrounds in geomatics and design who began discussing the role of accessing and visualizing geographic data to support participation in public healthcare policy. Specifically, this paper examines questions related to stakeholder involvement in the production and development of use scenarios for Geomatic Data Artefacts that inform public health policies. We reviewed existing artefacts, conducted a first round of conversations, and produced an …

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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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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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Understanding Food Waste Practices In Cross-Cultural Food Adaptation: The Case Of Chinese Students In The Uk, Xuecheng Dai, Emmanuel Tsekleves, Yekta Bakırlıoğlu Jun 2026

Understanding Food Waste Practices In Cross-Cultural Food Adaptation: The Case Of Chinese Students In The Uk, Xuecheng Dai, Emmanuel Tsekleves, Yekta Bakırlıoğlu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Food waste is a global sustainability concern, yet its connection to cross-cultural adaptation remains underexplored. For international students, adapting to unfamiliar food environments involves cycles of trial, error and waste. Among Chinese students in the UK (one of the largest international student populations), cultural differences and short stays intensify these processes, resulting in distinct forms of waste. This study explores how food adaptation relates to waste among first-time Chinese students in the UK, attempting to reveal areas for design interventions. Seventeen students completed seven-day cultural probes, combining daily tasks with self-reflection on food practices. The analysis revealed various types of …

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Designing Hope: Civil Society, Empathy And Peace, Or Avoiding World War Iii, Philip Ely, Ilpo Koskinen, Shelley Mcnulty, Brian Dixon Jun 2026

Designing Hope: Civil Society, Empathy And Peace, Or Avoiding World War Iii, Philip Ely, Ilpo Koskinen, Shelley Mcnulty, Brian Dixon

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In the face of widespread global conflict, this paper explores emergent work on empathic design for peace. We draw on award-winning theory and practice within peace studies and previous work on empathic design to develop a theoretical framework for the practical application of design methods, and illustrate this framework by showing how an analysis of a novel—in this paper, Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)—can lead to a multi-scalar approach to civil society-led peacebuilding which can inform future public sector and policy design work. We view this as a form of ‘literary design fiction’—that can harness the positional difference of conflict …

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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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Winds, Sand, Companions, Humans: Attuning Bodies For Post-Antropocentric Worlds, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Laura Novik, Pablo Hermansen Jun 2026

Winds, Sand, Companions, Humans: Attuning Bodies For Post-Antropocentric Worlds, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Laura Novik, Pablo Hermansen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This Laboratorio de Futuros held in Mar del Plata (Argentina), brought together architecture and design professors and master’s students from Argentina, Chile, and Colombia to explore an Epimethean approach to design—acting after rather than ahead of action, embracing delay, reflection, and care. Rooted in voices and material practices from the Global South, participants engaged in embodied exercises fostering inter-learning through reciprocity and complementarity. We explored the territory holistically with our whole bodies, attuning to wind, sand, sea, and insects, and reframing design as the enactment of relational infrastructures through affective attunement and planetary excesses. Our bodies became sensors, registering the …

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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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Bodystorming Through Disruption: Ai-Assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy, Jiawei Li, Jiayue Wang, Lin Zhu, Jiaxuan Xu, Changran Zhao, Zhiyong Fu Jun 2026

Bodystorming Through Disruption: Ai-Assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy, Jiawei Li, Jiayue Wang, Lin Zhu, Jiaxuan Xu, Changran Zhao, Zhiyong Fu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study presents an AI-assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy integrating artificial intelligence with bodystorming in space design education. Built on a three-dimensional framework—Embodiment, Enactment, and Improvisation—an AI system was developed using Coze to generate emergent scenarios and guide improvisational performance. Validated over three semesters with 16 undergraduate students tackling extreme environment challenges, the system employed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to deliver context-rich, adaptive prompts. Results showed strong correlation between AI support and enhanced improvisational creativity (r = 0.48), especially in spontaneous adaptability. Students often underrated their own performances, with significant gaps in Improvisation (p < 0.01). Material types influenced outcomes, with sound-based tasks producing the largest evaluation discrepancies. Findings highlight AI’s evolving role from tool to creative collaborator, offering a novel pedagogical model that merges embodied cognition, reflective practice, and AI to foster design thinking under constraints.

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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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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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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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Reconfiguring Care: Envision Postpartum Support For Women In Southern China Through The Lens Of Home-Based Iot, Wentao Deng, Yunfei Chen, Yingying Luo, Ying Hu, Yiwen Wang Jun 2026

Reconfiguring Care: Envision Postpartum Support For Women In Southern China Through The Lens Of Home-Based Iot, Wentao Deng, Yunfei Chen, Yingying Luo, Ying Hu, Yiwen Wang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study explores design opportunities to support postpartum mothers during “zuòyuèzi,” a culturally significant confinement practice in southern China, through the lens of home-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Grounded in feminist ethics of care, the research employs a three-phase methodology combining digital ethnography, co-design workshops, and thematic analysis. Participants from multigenerational households shared experiences and envisioned the roles of IoT systems to facilitate postpartum transitions. Findings reveal that users expect technologies to function as empathetic intermediaries that foster emotional well-being, facilitate caregiving management and negotiate relationships. Distinct patterns emerged across care distribution, interpersonal communication, and interaction, underscoring the cultural …

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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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