Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Design Materials, Roberta Bernabei, Maria Maclennan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

No abstract provided.

Longevitytech Cities: Design For Age-Inclusive Urban Futures, Sheng-Hung Lee, Sofie Hodara, Satu Miettinen, Bruce Hanington, Carla Sedini, Andreas Sicklinger, Miso Kim, Joseph F. Coughlin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The global demographic transition toward longer lifespans is fundamentally reshaping cities, services, and social infrastructures. This editorial introduces the LongevityTech City track at the Design Research Society (DRS) conference, positioning it as an evolution of Design for Longevity (D4L) toward urban-scale systems integration. Building on prior D4L discourse that emphasizes life-stage continuity, service systems, and human-centered design, this track foregrounds the intersection of technology, participatory design, and systemic urban transformation. Eleven accepted papers collectively explore how emerging technologies, multisensory experiences, participatory methods, and service ecosystems can support equitable, meaningful, and sustainable aging across diverse contexts. Organized around three interdependent themes—1. …

Design For Wellbeing And Happiness, Leandro Miletto Tonetto, Siyuan Huang, Ann Petermans, Rebecca Cain, Tiiu Poldma, Anna Pohlmeyer

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This editorial presents the Design for Wellbeing and Happiness theme track at the DRS 2026 conference and reflects on how its contributions relate to the broader development of the field. Since DRS 2024, there has been a shift from establishing the relevance of design for wellbeing toward exploring how it can be put into practice across different contexts, populations, and scales. The papers included this year engage more deeply with wellbeing as what emerges through the interactions among environments, technologies, and the ensuing social relations. Grouped into three areas, namely designing environments, designing technologies and interventions, and rethinking wellbeing, the …

Central But Decentered: Repositioning The Practitioner In Design Research Involving Practice, Luis Vega, Julia Valle-Noronha

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design research involving practice affords a unique mode of inquiry facilitated by acts of making, generative thinking, and iterative experimentation. The practitioner’s perspective is central because it foregrounds the significance of personal engagement with the research problem at hand. Current efforts in the field are nonetheless aiming to expand this inward-looking gaze by attending to the systemic and entangled dimensions of designing. With the increasing turn to relational, posthuman, and decolonial approaches towards that end, it becomes imperative to reconstrue what counts as ‘practice’ and reexamine whose perspectives are included in such a reconstrual. The present track brings together five …

Opening Up Design Impact Assessment: From Singular Metrics To Plural Understandings, Cyril Tjahja, Barbara Predan, Joana Meroz, Petra Černe Oven, Harun Kaygan, Flavia Piancazzo, Ines Tolic, Annamari Vänskä

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The theme track Opening Up Design Impact Assessment: From Singular Metrics to Plural Understandings addresses the limitations of conventional approaches that rely on standardised and predominantly quantitative metrics. The ten contributions in this track therefore explore alternative ways of understanding design impact, considering it as a situated, relational, and interpretative phenomenon. Instead of proposing a single evaluative framework, the papers collectively demonstrate how impact emerges through diverse practices, contexts, and forms of knowledge. The track is organised into two complementary sessions: one that reconfigures structured approaches to assessment, and another that foregrounds lived experience and participatory processes. Together, they point …

Experience As Knowledge Contributions, Nithikul Nimkulrat, Camilla Groth, Spyros Bofylatos, Haian Xue

DRS Biennial Conference Series

“Experience” is at the forefront of the design and making process of artefacts in different ways. In this year’s conference session, we are interested in exploring all the various ways in which experience is informing design and craft practice and processes. Themes presented in the papers closely align with the call, and many refer to either the authors’ own experiences or those of participants or users in the research process for new designs. We could also detect three concurrent orientations and have consequently divided the presentations into these themes. The first orientation concerns sensory experiences and how they lead to …

More-Than-Human Design In The Real World: Resistance, Regeneration, And Radical Solidarity, Cristina Zaga, Iohanna Nicenboim, Elisa Giaccardi, Joseph Lindley, Arne Berger, Claudia Garduño García, Laura Forlano

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In Capitalocene, humanity faces the intertwined crises of technological advancement and ecological collapse. These urgent challenges require us to question the power structures embedded in design, technology, and society. As a response, More-than-human design (MthD) recognizes the agency, sentience, and mutual influence of nonhuman species, materials, and environments, foregrounding principles of care, reciprocity, and collaborative co-shaping to foster multispecies cohabitation, ecological justice, and planetary well-being. Yet, it remains unclear how MthD can move beyond academia to influence policy, industry, and communities for ecological and social regeneration. Practicing MthD in the real world means proposing different ways of knowing and ways …

The Transformative Nature Of Food – Adaptation, Connectivity And Identity, Dolly Daou, Claudia De Souza Libanio, Juan Montalván Lume

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This theme track examines the transformative role of food migration in shaping cultural identity, ecological systems, and practices of belonging through a food design lens. Building on The Transformative Nature of Food: Adaptation, Connectivity and Identity (Daou & Sarantou, 2026), it conceptualises food as a dynamic, designed system that evolves across geographies through processes of adaptation, connectivity and identities. As food travels, it connects people to both their original homeland and to the existing and emerging cultural identities, to develop a sense of belonging to local ecosystems. Food migration reinforces cultural continuity, political and social cohesion and belonging while influencing …

Designing More-Than-Human Climate Futures: Affect, Aesthetics And Relational Practices, Rachel E. Clarke, Michelle Westerlaken, Sara Heitlinger, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This track brings together papers that explore more-than-human design practices that generate alternative, plural, situated, and relational approaches to climate futures through affect, aesthetics, and care. Framing climate crisis as a polycrisis of interconnected ecological, political, cultural, and epistemic conditions, the track foregrounds how designers are working across contradictory, incommensurable, and unevenly recognised and experienced impacts of climate change. The included papers examine how more-than-human design can attend to embodied, felt, and sensed worlds of multiple species and digital-material entities, infrastructures, and their environments. Across landscapes, waterscapes, governance, microbial growth, and multiple intelligences, the contributions reveal both the possibilities and …

Analysing Language Use In Designing: Practices And Performance, Senthil Chandrasegaran, Lisa Perez Elzey, (Eric) Heng Gu, Nathan Crilly, Terresa Hardaway, Vivek Rao, Peter Lloyd

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The role of language in designing is manifold, including but not limited to representing all aspects of design, enacting roles in design processes, and establishing shared meaning. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the role of language has further expanded, affording new ways to perform and represent design. This theme track presents five papers that explore how designers use language and language models. We identify themes that cut across these papers to show how language can be used, constrained, adapted, and supplemented in different stages, processes, and domains of designing.

What Is Regenerative Design, Anyway? Foundations, Lexicons, And Interdisciplinary Intersections, Angela Kilford, Inge Panneels, Iohanna Nicenboim, Sonya Withers, Rob Phillips, Chris Speed

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This theme track seeks papers that establish foundational understanding of Regenerative Design as an emerging paradigm in design research and practice. Moving beyond sustainability approaches focused on harm reduction and consequences, regenerative design actively fosters ecological and cultural renewal through relational, more-than-human perspectives. Recent work across biodesign, materials research, and ecological design demonstrates growing interest in regenerative approaches, yet the field lacks conceptual coherence and metrics of success. Existing papers span diverse domains—living materials, Indigenous design methodologies, multispecies interaction design, and data practices that challenge extractive digital economies and ecological restoration—often using inconsistent terminology and theoretical frameworks. This fragmentation limits …

Innovating Scientific Publishing Of Design Research: Promoting Plurality And Equity, Eleonora Lupo, Lorela Mehmeti

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This track aims to investigate the epistemological and ethical framework of scientific publishing in design research, from a pluriversal perspective, that challenges dominant and Western models of knowledge production and dissemination. The track aims to approach some of the current tensions in the design publishing landscape as starting conditions for the discussion. We observe that technoscientific advancements (digital infrastructures, open access platforms, business models) are transforming academic publishing by enabling more transparent, collaborative and accessible models of dissemination. At the same time, the design research community continues to rely on traditional publishing models that are shaped by ethnocentric editorial norms …

Critical Reflections On Systemic Design Participation: Ethics, Care And Justice, Cecilia Landa-Avila, Josina Vink, Sine Celik, Simon Downs, Peter Jones

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This theme track examines how participation is conceived and practised within systemic design for complex challenges. Designing for interwoven systemic crises requires the participation of those who both affect and are affected by these systems. Participation is reframed here not as a discrete event, but as a dynamic, ongoing meta-process that reconfigures power relations and influences what is recognised as meaningful data. Synthesising fifteen papers across three sessions, this editorial explores the tensions between care, justice, and ethics, moving beyond performative co-creation toward sustained, power-sharing partnerships.

Temporalities Of More-Than-Human Design, Larissa Pschetz, Gizem Oktay, Valentina Nisi, Jiwei Zhou, Doris Kosminsky, Keili Koppel, Fiona Bell, Katharina Vones, Marta Ferreira

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This theme track builds on emerging research that foreground time as relational, situated, and plural, while examining how a shift towards more-than-human temporalities could reshape design practices, material engagements, and ethical responsibilities. The track proposes five areas of exploration: a) experimental representations of entangled temporalities; b) material transformations, geological formations, and temporal scales of planetary life; c) accounts on practices of noticing, attuning, and orchestrating more-than-human times; d) designerly ways of negotiating and coordinating rhythms; and e) etico-onto-epistemological reflections on time and design. The contributions engage these areas across contexts such as coastal ecologies, plant systems, and bio-based materials, framing …

Design And The Public Sector: Contemporary Methods And Practice, Scott Schmidt, Sabine Junginger, Marzia Mortati, Federico Vaz

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The DRS2026 track titled “Design and the Public Sector: Contemporary Methods and Practices” examines the expanding relationship between design and the public sector, situating design as an active process in shaping public services, institutional change, and governance practices. Building on a trajectory established across DRS2022, DRS2024, and now DRS2026, this third Design for Policy and Governance Special Interest Group (PoGoSIG) hosted track reflects a shift from foundational and integrative concerns toward a more systems-based orientation. The following contributions are organised around four central themes: AI and New Technologies, Design and Infrastructure, Hope and Imagination, and Participation in Policymaking. Drawing on …

Design Research During And After Artificial Intelligence, Matthew Lee-Smith, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Mafalda Gamboa, Stephan Wensveen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The shift in design research caused by the escalation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking considerable space in the field. In a mixture of potential and undeniable risks, we looked for a blend of critique and practice, of analysis and foresight. In the set of papers to be published, we see a span of precisely that: reflexive re-orientations in the evaluation of what AI is doing to design, mirrored in current practices; and speculations on the after (en)during AI. In this editorial, we contextualize the research in the world it was produced in, exposing the during that unfolded hand-in-hand with …

Making Theory With Textiles: Theories Of Designing And Designing Theory, Elaine Igoe, Anne Louise Bang

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Textiles have long nurtured philosophical positions and metaphors, inquiries, as well as investigations of making and everyday life aesthetics and processes. Performing ontologically and epistemologically at different scales, textiles are often used as case studies in interdisciplinary research. This track presents a varied selection of papers that take textiles as starting points for critical and theoretical investigations of our world, our modes of production and conditions of living, as well as their intersections. These papers focus on the way that practice, perception, usability and critical inquiry are theorized through the lens of textiles, and the way that textiles inform and …

Play Design Materials: Entangled Matter And Making, Helle Marie Skovbjerg, Mathias Poulsen, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Sofie Kinch, Hyunjae Daniel Shin, Ricardo Conçalves Dutra, Eun Sun Park, Louise Ravnløkke, Jennifer Ann Skriver

DRS Biennial Conference Series

To design for play is to engage with materials, whether physical, virtual, symbolic, or ephemeral. In design for play we don’t just select materials; we shape and are shaped by them. Yet within design research, we must explore how materials do play, not merely support it. This theme track invites contributions that consider materials not as passive tools, but as active collaborators in a relational field where matter, mood, meaning, affect, and politics entangle. We are interested in how materials act not only as substrates for play, but as collaborators, provocateurs, and agents in the making of play, relationships, and …

Designing Preventive Health Technologies And Practices, Ayşe Özge Ağça, Teresa Almeida, Armağan Karahanoğlu, Anna Vallgårda

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This track explores how design influences preventive health technologies and practices, considering them as spaces for care, negotiation, and future planning. While preventive health is often examined through medical and technological lenses, design offers a unique perspective by focusing on lived experiences, care relationships, and the processes of making sense of things. In this editorial, we outline five contributions that investigate preventive health across diverse contexts, including behavior change, immersive care technologies, critical perspectives on healthcare systems, health communication, and bio-inspired design frameworks. These findings together show that designing for preventive health goes beyond just predicting or reducing future problems …

Counter Design: Changing Perspectives In Design Action, Yekta Bakırlıoğlu, Claudia Garduño García, Nicola Morelli

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design continues to operate through assumptions inherited from its industrial and epistemic origins, yet the contributions gathered here unsettle those defaults and propose alternative orientations for practice. They examine how design problems are framed, how publics are organised, and how designers themselves are produced under specific historical and political conditions. Spanning urban governance, feminist methodologies, grassroots archival infrastructures, digital representation, relational approaches to AI, and critiques of universalised design expertise, the papers illuminate how counter-practices cultivate alternative publics and expand the epistemic boundaries of design. Counter Design appears not as a unified method or approach but as a constellation of …

Design Principles, Bianca Kóczán, Bianca Herlo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The theme track “Design Principles” includes twelve papers that frame design research as a situated and relational practice. Across the papers, design is understood as a way of generating meaning, mediating emotions, negotiating power, and shaping collective learning and action. Through collage, play, activism, empathy, process models, and rural cultural co-creation, the two sessions inquire how design frameworks, methods, and metrics actively produce relations between people, environments, institutions, cultures, and forms of knowledge. Together, the papers challenge neutral or universalising accounts of design, showing how design meaning emerges through language, context, bodies, affect, participation, and lived experience.

Bodies In Design: Rethinking Norms, Materials, Technologies, And Methods, Gözde Göncü-Berk, Sarah Kettley, Elif Ozden-Yenigun, Theodore Hughes-Riley

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The Bodies in Design track deals with the ways design engages with the human body with an emphasis on critical and creative investigations into the role of the body in contemporary design. While the body remains implicitly central to design thinking, it can be rendered invisible by a focus on the rational user or the cognitively motivated actor, and unreflexively normalized through forms of conservative and market-driven design agendas. Advancements in wearables and soft systems however, are reshaping design as a practice that engages the body in more considered and complex ways. We therefore sought contributions across material domains that …

Design Technologies, Beatriz Itzel Cruz Megchun, Michael Stead

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The theme track, ‘design technologies’, includes eleven papers covering a wide range of approaches to human-AI collaborations, reflections, and resistances in the design realm, process, and outcomes. In this editorial, we identify two broad themes, human-AI design collaborations and critical discourse on AI in design, to unfold the different design stances and intents with regard to AI in praxis and education. We want to ignite a conversation in which we reflect on our stances as designers, while respecting and honouring the poise of other humans, on the AI emerging landscape, and question how each of us uses design-AI exchanges in …

Regenerating The “Sustainability Project”: Transitioning Design And Sustainability Research Into The 21st Century, Michael Stead, David Sánchez Ruano

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design has been a key protagonist in the story of the “Sustainability Project.” Yet, with capitalism, emissions, biodiversity loss and social injustice increasing, it might be argued that ‘the project,’ and design’s role in it, have failed to engender the sustainable transitions the planet and its people urgently require – and indeed deserve. This theme track aims to counter this defeatist narrative. Emphasising the ever-evolving relationship between Design and Sustainability, the track reflexively recognises that although design can often find itself a main driver of environmental unsustainability, it can similarly be harnessed as a critical conduit for positive planetary change. …

Practical Ways Of Staying With The Trouble: Enacting Posthuman Ethics Through Design Practice, Marta Ferreira, Ana Henriques, Angelika Strohmayer, Valentina Nisi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores how posthuman design researchers operationalise the values inherent to their research as an everyday practice of care, messiness, and partiality. Drawing on five in-depth interviews and employing diffractive analysis through posthuman and feminist care ethics lenses, the study highlights how practitioners enact plural, situated, and reflexive approaches to method. The findings distil theoretical commitments into actionable suggestions and everyday ethics, underscoring the significance of relational accountability in design research. Implications are discussed for legitimising care-centred methods, reframing design research, and supporting systemic change. In foregrounding posthuman approaches and ethics as ongoing attunement, this research offers practical strategies …

Reframing Narratives: Remedies For Improved Human Trafficking Coverage, Stefanie Henriques

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

The global rise in human trafficking is not receiving adequate media attention. While newspaper coverage of the topic has increased, current research argues that the issue is framed with a lack of diversity, limiting audience understanding of its complexity. Some researchers also note that coverage disproportionately focuses on sex trafficking, with minimal attention directed to other forms of trafficking such as the labor or organ trade. This paper conducts a narrative literature analysis of media research on human trafficking, drawing on framing theory to identify dominant frames in media messaging and synthesize cross-cultural factors that impact how the issue is …

They, The People, Ammel Sharon

Socio-Legal Review

This essay engages with Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution by situating it within a broader conceptual history of “the people.” While the book offers a compelling account of participatory constitution-making, the essay suggests that it opens up further questions about the conceptual and historical conditions shaping the people as a political subject. Drawing on contemporary political theory on populism, the essay explores how politics invokes the people through affective and performative practices alongside constitutional forms.

From Peril To Perseverance: Dr. Arthur C. Parker And The Seneca Arts Project, Brennan Ciccolone

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Like many Native people, the Haudenosaunee were subjected to culturcide and assimilation using residential schools like the Thomas Indian School in the late 19th and early 20th century. During this time, in 1925, the Seneca archaeologist Dr. Arthur C. Parker was hired as the director of the Rochester Museum and Science Center. Parker used his museum position to uplift and preserve Haudenosaunee arts and culture. This paper focuses on his Seneca Arts Project (1935-1941), which gathered art and artifacts from both ancient and contemporary Haudenosaunee members. This project explores how Parker’s work was used to help revitalize and honor Native …

Faculty Perceptions Of Lgbtq+ Students In Higher Education, Serena Gramling, Laura E. Barrow, Stacy Mikel, Mark J. Sciuchetti Dr., Falynn Turley

Higher Learning Research Communications

Objective: Limited faculty understanding of LGBTQ+ student experiences may contribute to exclusionary campus climates and discriminatory practices. This study examined faculty perceptions to identify ways to improve support for LGBTQ+ students and promote inclusive environments.

Method: A descriptive quantitative design was used to examine faculty perceptions of LGBTQ+ students and differences across geographic regions. 142 participants completed the 20-item instrument.

Results: Although regional differences in acceptance were observed, geographic location did not significantly predict faculty attitudes. Faculty acceptance played a key moderating role in the relationship between awareness and engagement in inclusive practices. Findings indicated that faculty attitudes alone are …

Minimizing The Gap Between Church And Disability In Churches Of Christ, Paris Freeman

Discernment: Theology and the Practice of Ministry

Church members with intellectual and developmental disabilities often experience disconnection from their churches. This qualitative study examined this disconnect in three suburban Church of Christ congregations within the North Texas area. Using an ethnographic approach, data was collected through interviews with ministry leaders, participatory observation, and a literature review. The analysis of the data, in conjunction with family systems theory, was utilized to construct a model for disability ministry which validates personhood and promotes awareness of self and others. The impact of the church growth movement on disability was also examined, but no definitive correlation could be determined. Further research …