Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Implications Of Generative-Ai User Prompt Engineering Shaping The Absent Presence Of Latino Women Textual Rhetoric In Llms, Angely C. Suarez Dejesus

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This article examines how large language models (LLMs) generate text that affects underrepresented groups, particularly Latino women, due to limited cultural, contextual, and abstraction training rooted in biases. The research draws on Brock’s (2018) CTDA theory, White et al.’s (2023) prompt engineering framework, Klein’s (2015) computational spatiality, and Anzaldua’s (1987) concepts of cultural, emotional, and gendered borderlands to analyze the outputs. Using narrative prompt experiments, Chat GPT 3.5, 5, Claude AI, Gemini, and Microsoft Co-Pilot produced changes in their textual outputs as evidence of further algorithmic designs. Nevertheless, continual biases embedded in the algorithms’ linguistic representation and misrepresentation through the …

Cooperation, Collaboration, And Community In Horror And Suspense Games, Rachel Kerr, Monica Evans, Cameron Irby, Cheri Tang

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Cooperation has been a staple in video and analog games since their inception. From couch co-op to social deduction games, there are few games that cannot be enjoyed cooperatively in some way. Even games that are not inherently cooperative can be played collaboratively, from single-player games enjoyed by multiple people in the same room to PvP games where players opt for teamwork despite explicitly competitive mechanics. In horror and suspense games, cooperation tends to form strong communicative bonds between players. The four papers in this panel examine how communities form in and around horror and suspense games, and how those …

Post-Digital Creativity In Underacknowledged Communities, Tegan Pyke, Hannah Ackermans, Zahra Rizvi

ELO (un)supervised 2026

In a world marked by polarization and institutional censorship, what we pay attention to matters more than ever. We would almost forget that people, unsupervised, cannot help but be creative. Increasingly, this creativity takes the form of post-digital art and literature, often without awareness of “electronic literature” as a concept or the ELO as an institution. In this panel, we open up the conversation of researching post-digital creativity outside e-lit cultures to learn what role multimodality and participatory cultures (can) play inside e-lit cultures.

To encourage active participation in this online panel, we intend to split our session into two …

(Un)Easily Writing The Future, Stuart Moulthrop, Judith Pintar, John G. Mcdaid

ELO (un)supervised 2026

General Abstract: This panel brings together three experienced digital writers who have recently begun to explore Language Models and transformers in creative and academic practice.  Each of us will comment on recent experience and projects, reflecting on how these technologies alter the way we think of ourselves as writers and teachers.

[1] Judith Pintar, "The Non-applicability of Wishing due to Lack of Capacity".

Pintar will discuss her experience of facilitating Gemini AI in a Rogerian therapy session with an Eliza bot written in the Inform programming language. The session is occasionally interrupted with a meta-conversation with Gemini regarding its responses. …

Quilt Poems: Encoding Craft Traditions As Generative Poetry, Lee Tusman

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This talk presents Quilt Poems, a generative literature project that finds unexpected common ground between quilting, data, and computational poetry. Beginning as a NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generating Month) entry, the project encodes a library of traditional quilt patterns as structured data, pairs them with a curated word corpus, and uses software to produce visual poems whose form is literally shaped by quilt geometries. I'll walk through the process of translating a tactile, domestic craft tradition into a formal data schema — the interpretive choices that entails, what gets lost and what gets discovered — and how that encoded knowledge …

Out Of This World: An Exoplanetary Workshop, Monica Storss, Bart Kuipers

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The workshop investigates how scientific constraints can productively defamiliarize human experience and create new frameworks for creativity and expression. Participants will produce original work while considering broader questions about environment, perception, and cultural formation in speculative contexts, and how the arts, sciences, and technology inform each other in relational multiplicities. This generative workshop explores how astronomical data from confirmed exoplanets can generate new poetic forms and linguistic constraints. Participants will examine how exoplanetary conditions can shape language, metaphor, and narrative structure. We'll develop from writing exercises that respond to non-terrestrial physical parameters: alternative light spectra, gravitational variations, and atmospheric compositions. …

Singulars: Performing The Reverse Turing Test, Halim Madi

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Singulars is an ongoing series of performance systems in which I co-create poetry with a language model trained on an anthology of English poetry alongside my own writing. Across three works—carnation.exe, versus.exe, and reinforcement.exe—I stage live reinforcement loops in which my poems and the model’s responses compete for audience votes. The audience functions as an embodied feedback mechanism, shaping the evolution of both the machine and the human poet in real time.

This paper examines what happens when a poet becomes both author and training data. Drawing from creativity research, metacognition, and social cognition, I reflect …

Making The Writer’S Project, Alex Calderwood

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The Writer’s Project is a series of playful text editors which intervene in the act of writing in unexpected, challenging, and unusual ways. Some of the editors are conceptual experiments in user interface design: What if the editor asked you if you were sure before committing to each word? What if the delete key was not functional? Others editors are provocations that take aim at the conditions and AI-mediated writing, built to create a tension between writerly agency and system resistance. These involve placing writers into different configurations with text streams, for instance by turning prior writings into a Tetris-like …

Connected/Disconnected, Emery Beckman

ELO (un)supervised 2026

With the rise of AI, scholars are grappling with how it fits into their field and determining how authorship plays a role in the assistance of these tools. I argue that AI can be deemed a digital companion to creative and interactive design. Anthropic has recently launched Claude Code, a coding assistant for various projects. This talk explores how agentic AI can offer digital assistance while advocating for human thought to remain at the forefront. This talk will analyze and demo an interactive site and explore a collection of AI-assisted poems built alongside Claude Code titled "Connected/Disconnected." It will explore …

Investigating The Effect Of Gendered Seating Proximity On Classroom Success For Female Engineering Students, Cassandra Savukinas, Kayla D. Taylor

Student Research Symposium (SRS)

This research will examine how aspects of an undergraduate learning environment, specifically seating choices and spatial positioning of female-presenting students, affects classroom success for female-identifying engineering students. Existing literature highlights the underrepresentation of women in engineering and gender disparities in STEM education, which persist from elementary school through higher education. Single-sex K-12 school environments report enhanced academic performance and self-esteem for female students; however, few studies explore gendered seating proximity in coeducational, male-dominated undergraduate STEM courses. Investigating how gendered seating dynamics impact components of classroom success can provide insight into improving retention and engagement for female-identifying students in engineering majors. …

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

Learning From Inexperienced Users’ Early Engagement With Food Tracking, Isil Oygur, Saadet Tikac Andic

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Current food tracking applications are largely designed to support behaviour change among users who track their food intake to meet predefined goals. As a result, individuals who are curious about food tracking but do not have specific goals remain underserved, limiting the potential of these tools for preventive care. To address this gap, we conducted a three-phase interview study using an existing food journaling application as a probe to reimagine food tracking experiences for inexperienced users. Thirty-one participants used the app for 14 days and discussed their views on healthy eating, food practices, and their tracking experiences. Our analysis identified …

Løp Gård: Revitalyzing History Through Food And Performance, Marija Griniuk, Barbro Laxaa, Magnus Sivertsen Sørvig

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The current research explores the intersection of archives, history, food, and performance. Based on a case study from Løp Gård, a museum site within Nordlandsmuseet in Norway, the museum performance director (museumsregissør in Norwegian) Barbro Laxaa has developed a book that presents historical recipes created by former generations of Løp Gård’s owners. Laxaa explores methods of performing memory and the spirituality of place, positioning food as a catalyst that unites the lived experience of audiences with archival material and historical recipes rooted in the site. The method of this study is artistic research, which has led to the development of …

Designing Within Superdiversity: Encountering Forms Of Systemic Participation Through Layered Exploration Of An Immigrant Neighbourhood, Manavi Datta, Carissa Champlin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper offers a critical account of using a layered systemic design process to surface the complexity of a superdiverse neighbourhood - Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. The approach employs systemic design practices through walking and iterative prototyping to encounter a multiplicity of experiences and forms of participation that shape place. Four methodological contributions are presented: critical vignettes from ethnographic walks framing complexity, systemic visualization from walks with residents, three prototypes of archives and across the paper, accounts of systemic participation shaping place. The layered approach is presented as a form of systemic design participation in itself. It reveals how …

User-Centered Dread: A Lovecraftian Critique Of Design, Lewis Urquhart, Emma Lawrie

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper offers a speculative critique of contemporary design practice through the lens of Lovecraftian horror by critically interrogating assumptions embedded in user-centered design theory. Drawing on the oeuvre of 'weird fiction' author H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmically pessimistic mythologies, this paper explores three thematic dimensions - control, user unknowability, alien materiality - to reveal the limitations of human-centred design paradigms. Utlising examples from literature, film, and everyday experience, this critique demonstrates how design’s aspirational narratives, centered on mastery, empathy, and progress, are increasingly inadequate in addressing the complexities of a more-than-human world. The concept of 'user-centered dread' emerges as a central …

Designing For Transversal Play: Experience, Materiality And Connection, Kim Holflod

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper introduces transversal play as a material, experiential, and relational mode of playful inquiry and connection that traverses disciplinary, institutional, and cultural worlds in pedagogy and education. Drawing on design philosophical, posthumanist, and play theoretical perspectives, transversal play is framed as a situated, collaborative, and world-travelling practice of interbeing, where difference becomes a generative site for collective experimentation, care, and transformation. Through four design-based research examples, the paper explores how transversal play emerges in tangible engagements with materials, experiences, and agencies. These examples illustrate how transversal play can reconfigure roles, soften boundaries, and support speculative, caring, and ethical pedagogical …

Scaffolding Transition Pathways: Integrating Ses Resilience As A Dialogic Tool For Community-Based Co-Design, Jiarong Hu, Angus Donald Campbell, Gabriela Baron

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper addresses a challenge for Transition Design (TD): how to make long-term, systemic frameworks tangible and actionable in small-scale, community-led practice. We introduce and evaluate the preliminary results of a methodological framework that scaffolds TD backcasting with seven principles of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) resilience for urban gardens. Grounded in a community garden case study in Shanghai, we analyse data from semi-structured interviews and a co-design workshop to evaluate this method in practice. Our findings reveal that this method functions as a dialogic tool, enabling participants to diagnose systemic issues, negotiate trade-offs, and co-create near-term actions with a longer-term vision. …

“I Didn’T Choose To Write My Life”: Trauma-Informed Values In The Design Of Social Care Records, Marissa Cummings, Gemma Teal

DRS Biennial Conference Series

While there has been a recent interest in trauma-informed design approaches, there is still a need for further research on its use in participatory design (PD). This paper discusses the methodology of a values-driven, trauma-informed PD project which explored how social care records could be redesigned to meet the needs and aspirations of young people (YP). Care-experienced people have often lived through traumatic experiences closely associated with their experiences of care, resulting in a lack of trust in social care professionals. While foregrounding the views of care-experienced people, this project also engaged with professionals, revealing systemic tensions which needed to …

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

Framing The Fuzzy: Mapping Expert Designers’ Problem Framing Through C–K Theory, Die Hu, Thomas Woods, Wendy Zhang, Zehong Li, Hongyao Li

DRS Biennial Conference Series

During the Fuzzy Front End (FFE), the early and uncertain stage of the design process, creatively framing design problems plays a critical role in shaping direction and originality of outcomes. While the value of problem framing is well established, the cognitive mechanisms for innovation developed through industrial experience by which expert designers navigate ambiguity, remain comparatively underexamined. Guided by the C–K Theory, this study examines how expert designers leverage experiential knowledge when transitioning between concept (C) and knowledge (K) spaces. Using a qualitative approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews and real-time framing tasks with 12 expert designers (5+ years of practice). …

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 …

Designing Safer School Routes In Busan, South Korea: Living Lab Approach To Child-Centered Traffic Safety, Yong-Ki Lee

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Urban traffic environments in Busan, South Korea, often remain poorly adapted to the needs of children, despite infrastructure-based safety measures. This paper reports on a Living Lab project for co-creating safer school commuting environments through participatory service design. Researchers, elementary school students, parents, residents, and local authorities collaboratively identified critical issues, generated design ideas, and evaluated context-specific interventions. This paper synthesizes the Living Lab as both a methodological framework and a civic learning ecosystem by tracing how stakeholders’ perceptions, roles, and capacities evolved through iterative co-design, mapping, and prototyping activities. The findings highlight the potential of Living Labs to bridge …

Value Co-Creation, Co-Displacement, And Co-Destruction In Design: Bridging Value And Values In Human-Data Interaction, Boyeun Lee, Ella Tallyn, Ramprabu Thangaraj, Chris Elsden, Chris Speed

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Data has emerged as a fundamental driver of value creation within design processes, shaping economic, ethical, and environmental outcomes across societies and socio-technical systems. Existing scholarship often frames value in binary terms of co-creation and co-destruction, overlooking the systemic complexities introduced by interconnected, data-intensive systems. This paper introduces the novel concept of value co-displacement to capture how alternative forms of value emerge and displace others within human–data interaction. Drawing on four design research case studies, we investigate how value and values are co-created, co-displaced, and co-destroyed across interconnected, data-intensive systems. We develop a framework that conceptualises the dynamic interplay of …

Emerging Hybrid Human-Genai Workflows To Optimise Human Ideation, Sketching And Design, Mauricio Novoa Munoz, Juan Antonio Islas Munoz, Alejandro Lozano Robledo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article presents findings on the reciprocal relationship between industrial design education and the industry it prepares graduates for. Particularly considering the growing impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on ideation, sketching, design methodologies, and productivity. To inform this research, industry professionals currently integrating GenAI into their practice were consulted to establish benchmarks and highlight critical areas for updated pedagogical approaches and digital transformation, thereby ensuring that design learning and productivity workflows remain relevant. The study arises from an awareness of current workforce shifts that are anticipated to become more pronounced soon. Rapid technological advancements are driving significant cultural and …

Interface Cultures, Forever: Speculative Prototypes For Technological Awareness, Mario Ciaramitaro, Pietro Costa

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As artificial intelligence increasingly takes over the designer’s role in shaping interfaces for services and platforms, a key challenge is how to teach young designers to critically reflect on how design mechanisms shape users and their everyday lives. Interface Cultures, Forever was a design workshop that challenged the conventional notion of the digital interface. Participants were asked to design critical interfaces - concepts that reveal tensions, paradoxes, and invisible mechanisms within digital life. Through speculative and ironic prototypes, students explored how interfaces shape behavior, emotion, and identity. The projects articulate a landscape of cultural critique, where the interface becomes both …

Against The Given: Reframing The Brief For Transformative Design Practices, Roger Paez, James Auger

DRS Biennial Conference Series

While design transition discourse foregrounds systemic change, pedagogy frequently remains rooted in a solutionist mindset, in which the design brief often functions to perpetuate norms. Drawing on the Erasmus+ project Speculative Urban Futures, we reimagine the design brief as an infrastructure for epistemic plurality. Students collaboratively develop and circulate briefs across groups, harnessing divergence as a means of expanding the design space and unsettling normative expectations. We argue that embracing this tension is central to navigating the “growing pains” of design transitions. By embedding theoretical complexity within viscerality, playfulness and speculation, design education can shift from transmission to transformation—equipping students …

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

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

DRS Biennial Conference Series

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

Designing Motion Identity: Exploring The Aesthetic Expression Of Brand Style Through System Motion, Xinyi Xie, Yinman Guo, Zican Chen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study investigates how system motion enhances aesthetic experience and shapes users’ interpretation of brand style. Using Windows 11, macOS, and HarmonyOS as representative cases, the study analyses four categories of system animations through a motor-level framework comprising temporal, spatial, and transformational attributes. Twelve motion samples were coded, and participants evaluated each sample using perceptual adjectives. The results show that consistent attribute patterns across functional categories lead to stable aesthetic tendencies, while differences emerge from how each system repeatedly applies these attributes. These attribute biases create distinct perceptual profiles, indicating that motion can function as a subtle medium for expressing …