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Articles 14941 - 14970 of 572453

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Designing For Relay-Tional Co-Becoming, Alexandra Harder Lindek, Mathias Poulsen Aug 2025

Designing For Relay-Tional Co-Becoming, Alexandra Harder Lindek, Mathias Poulsen

Nordes Conference Series

This paper explores how the relay conversation approach can facilitate designerly co-becoming in rural communities working towards emerging futures. Building on relational perspectives in design research, we engage with the idea that participation in design is not merely about including diverse voices but about fostering conditions for mutual becoming. We examine how this approach unfolds through ongoing engagements and situated moments, where designers and communities navigate uncertainty and collectively shape new potentials. Rather than treating design as a predefined problem-solving activity, the relay conversation approach works with the evolving dynamics of place, social relations, and ecological entanglements. Through autoethnographic reflections, …


The Relational Becoming Of A Participatory Design Commoner, Sanna Marttila, Frederick Van Amstel, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero, Giacomo Poderi, Maurizio Teli, P.D. Commoner Aug 2025

The Relational Becoming Of A Participatory Design Commoner, Sanna Marttila, Frederick Van Amstel, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero, Giacomo Poderi, Maurizio Teli, P.D. Commoner

Nordes Conference Series

This research expands the understanding of the collective designer behind Scandinavian Participatory Design with the Latin American notion of relational ontology, which posits a worldview where everything and everyone are mutually constituted through evolving relationships. Drawing from three thematic workshops with design practitioners and scholars that explored intersections between commoning and designing, this research unveils the relational becoming of a participatory design commoner. This includes the production of a shared subjectivity—the collective designer—as integral to commoning design and designing commons. Specifically, we explore the role of participatory designers in commoning through their subjectivity in their infrastructuring actions and affective engagements …


Journeying With Kala: Exploring Interdependencies Of Material, Land, And Maker In Shaping Textile Practices, Mithila Amy Mohan Aug 2025

Journeying With Kala: Exploring Interdependencies Of Material, Land, And Maker In Shaping Textile Practices, Mithila Amy Mohan

Nordes Conference Series

Accompanied by Kala, an indigenous cotton from Kutch, India, this study examines the interdependencies of land, material, and maker that are fostered in textile practices. It explores materials as companions in practice, shaping the trajectory of making through their processual entanglements with human and more-than-human environments. The research employs a practice-led methodology integrating historical review of cotton in India, ethnographic inquiry into practices related to Kala in Kutch, and hands-on weaving experiments. The weaving explorations with Kala, seen as a process of correspondence, detail the role of materials in making, where environmental conditions, material properties, and practitioner interactions shape the …


Re-Imagining The Landscape Of Future Farming, Martin Abildgaard Padalak, Tom Jenkins Aug 2025

Re-Imagining The Landscape Of Future Farming, Martin Abildgaard Padalak, Tom Jenkins

Nordes Conference Series

This paper explores how participatory design methods can engage future farmers in imagining sustainable agricultural futures in Denmark. Denmark's agricultural sector faces a "crisis of imagination" where dominant paradigms in farming are hard to challenge. Building on Ingold's notion of the landscape as a relational, temporal space for dwelling, we propose a conceptualization of the landscape game that enables farming students to articulate their visions of future farming. The design game creates opportunities for participants to situate their imagined farms within broader social, environmental, and technical contexts while exploring how these might evolve over time. This approach aims to generate …


Designing Relational Space: Towards Adaptive And Interactive Learning Environments, Johannes Pointner, Albert Lang Aug 2025

Designing Relational Space: Towards Adaptive And Interactive Learning Environments, Johannes Pointner, Albert Lang

Nordes Conference Series

This paper investigates relational and interactive principles in spatial design. Drawing from Relational Theory of Space, Actor-Network Theory, and embodied interactivity, it examines space as a dynamic and interactive system rather than a static framework. Using the New Practice Co-Lab as a case study, the paper examines modular architectural frameworks, technological integrations, and participatory design processes that create flexible, multifunctional environments for learning and collaboration. It further explores the ambiguities of relational spatial design, highlighting its challenges and opportunities. Rather than proposing a universal blueprint, this research presents scalable principles for designing situated spaces as emergent, user-driven systems.


Cultural Sovereignty And The Future Of Indigenous Digital Storytelling, Amna Qureshi, Jonna Häkkilä, Pigga Keskitalo, Inker-Anni Linkola-Aikio Aug 2025

Cultural Sovereignty And The Future Of Indigenous Digital Storytelling, Amna Qureshi, Jonna Häkkilä, Pigga Keskitalo, Inker-Anni Linkola-Aikio

Nordes Conference Series

Indigenous digital storytelling extends beyond sharing narratives—it is a practice of cultural sovereignty, self-determination, and knowledge stewardship. Digital storytelling aligns with Indigenous research methodologies, emphasising relationality, oral traditions, and community-centred knowledge production, ensuring that these stories remain rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. While digital media provides opportunities for Indigenous communities to share their narratives, it also poses risks of appropriation, misrepresentation, and external control. This study examines how relational design and participatory methodologies can support Indigenous digital storytelling while respecting cultural protocols and reinforcing community governance. By critically analysing existing storytelling frameworks, we explore whether participatory design …


A Relational Design Framework For Designing Feminist Futures In The Finnish Popular Music Sector, Tomi Rantanen, Tatu Marttila, Idil Gaziulusoy Aug 2025

A Relational Design Framework For Designing Feminist Futures In The Finnish Popular Music Sector, Tomi Rantanen, Tatu Marttila, Idil Gaziulusoy

Nordes Conference Series

Designers often address wicked problems using collaborative tools with stakeholders. Transition arenas are one such method used to co-create future agendas of change that is increasingly used in design research. Building on community organisation, we argue for more critical assessment of participant interrelations to achieve lasting social change. Consequently, we call for a shift of focus from the transition arena tools and processes to consider relational aspects of participation. Our research context is promoting gender equality in the music sector. Based on expert interviews, a pilot workshop, and an expert panel, we identify and elaborate design considerations for effective community …


Lost In Generation: Illustrating Stable Diffusion Ai’S Colonial Bias In Representing South African Communication Design, Kyle Rath, Fatima Cassim, Adrie Haese Aug 2025

Lost In Generation: Illustrating Stable Diffusion Ai’S Colonial Bias In Representing South African Communication Design, Kyle Rath, Fatima Cassim, Adrie Haese

Nordes Conference Series

Generative AI (gAI) image models are increasingly being used as tools for conceptualisation and visualisation in design. These models are, however, not neutral owing to training datasets that prioritise Western aesthetics. Consequently, an emergent challenge is that AI-generated images tend to disregard nuanced representations. Li et al. (2024) echo this critique, acknowledging AI’s inability to comprehend cultural complexity, a critical issue in South Africa’s given its colonial and apartheid past. Accordingly, we use a relational design lens to critically examine how Stable Diffusion fails to engage with South Africa’s diverse cultural makeup; we present a qualitative content analysis of AI-generated …


Slack Lines: Comprehending Grace In Entangled Worlds, Erik Sandelin Aug 2025

Slack Lines: Comprehending Grace In Entangled Worlds, Erik Sandelin

Nordes Conference Series

Designers increasingly celebrate more-than-human entanglement, touch, hybridity and care as antidotes to ecological devastation and animal exploitation. However, embroiling other animals in human realms can be a kiss of death for the animal. How is grace – careful and creative moves away from the other – possible in entangled worlds? Through the design experiment Fishwatching – a reconfigured angling setup where you catch fish on camera instead of on a hook – I articulate four tensors for comprehending grace in interdependent relational design: the taut line of human supremacy, the severed line of emancipation and the constricting net of entanglement. …


Aestheticising Material Imperfections: Diverse Waste, Nikoline Sander, Linda Nhu Laursen Aug 2025

Aestheticising Material Imperfections: Diverse Waste, Nikoline Sander, Linda Nhu Laursen

Nordes Conference Series

Using discarded materials from manufacturing is a design strategy to support a sustainable future by using already circulating resources. This study introduces the visions of pluralism to the design activity of designing an aesthetic unity with materials previously rejected for their imperfections. Drawing on the psychophysical, organisational, and meaningful properties, the research examines a best-case study involving the design of an indoor door made from wasted pinewood. Emphasising the design of joints and transitions internally in the door, the designers achieve aesthetic unity through the deliberate composition of pinewood pieces, characterised by soft, rounded transitions between them. Designing meetings between …


Homework: The Politics Of Participatory Design In Distributed Contexts, Alicia Smedberg, Jens Portinson Hylander Aug 2025

Homework: The Politics Of Participatory Design In Distributed Contexts, Alicia Smedberg, Jens Portinson Hylander

Nordes Conference Series

This paper examines the evolving nature of participatory design as it shifts from co-located, real-time engagements to asynchronous, delegated participation—a transformation conceptualized here as homework. Through two case studies—a toolkit for activist self-organization and a workbook-based remote design process—the paper explores how participation, when structured as homework, redistributes agency, responsibility, and knowledge production across time and space. The analysis of this paper highlights how Participatory Design, when mediated through artifacts such as toolkits and workbooks, can both enable and constrain engagement, shaping power dynamics and the ethics of care in distributed collaboration. The discussion critically examines how delegation impacts environmental …


Attending To Right Relations In Design: Lessons From Foraging, Serina Tarkhanian Aug 2025

Attending To Right Relations In Design: Lessons From Foraging, Serina Tarkhanian

Nordes Conference Series

Despite recognizing the profound relevance of Indigenous knowledges to the relational turn, few posthuman design researchers elaborate on the considerations and implications of working from these rich sources of insight for material practice. In this paper, I develop an attention to the Indigenous relational framework of Right Relations in design from the perspective of studentship, considering how Indigenous ethical frameworks might be engaged with from the position of a non-Indigenous person. Building on insights from my own research experience in foraging for design materials, I use narratives to exemplify part of what attending to Right Relations in design implies. I …


In Relation: Brazilian Indigenous Fashion Design, Julia Valle-Noronha Aug 2025

In Relation: Brazilian Indigenous Fashion Design, Julia Valle-Noronha

Nordes Conference Series

Contemporary applications of indigenous and ancient knowledge systems are seen as an opportunity to reestablish relationships of care and respect. This paper investigates how contemporary indigenous fashion designers in Brazil enmesh indigenous thinking in their practice. The paper starts by laying out discussions on indigenous knowledge systems and its relationships with design. Following, the indigenous fashion phenomena in Brazil is introduced and analysed through data collected via interviews and desktop research. To conclude, possible more than human directions that challenge the current paradigms in western fashion design practices are exposed. They are: relational practices, more than human notions of time …


Design Facilitation Skills: Discrepancies Between Research Focus And Industry Needs In Us Job Postings, Wenqi Zheng, Mauricio Mejia, Catalina Cortes Aug 2025

Design Facilitation Skills: Discrepancies Between Research Focus And Industry Needs In Us Job Postings, Wenqi Zheng, Mauricio Mejia, Catalina Cortes

Nordes Conference Series

In design, designers often act as facilitators, helping cross-functional teams capture, evaluate, and integrate diverse ideas to create improved products. While the broader application of facilitation has been extensively explored, the specific demand for design facilitation in the industry remains understudied. This study bridges the gap by exploring the call for design facilitation in the U.S. job market. Through a content analysis of job postings and a novel approach for tracking skill trends over time, we identify key design facilitation-related skill employers seek, uncovering four patterns. We also discuss implications for design education, proposing curriculum changes to better prepare students …


An Adventure With Ai: A Relational Techno-Life Design Approach, Yue Zou, Shenhuan Lu, Yile Zhang Aug 2025

An Adventure With Ai: A Relational Techno-Life Design Approach, Yue Zou, Shenhuan Lu, Yile Zhang

Nordes Conference Series

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into ecosystems necessitates a paradigm shift in design thinking, moving beyond anthropocentric models to embrace relational frameworks. This paper proposes relational techno-life design, an approach to reconceptualize AI as co-constitutive agents within socio material networks and broad ecological system. Through speculative case studies—LOVOT, LO, and AquaGuardian—we analyze how relational techno-life design can foster symbiotic relationships across human, nonhuman, and AI. An eco-cultural-techno framework reveals the potential for AI to mediate ecological resilience, cultural practices, and ethical co-evolution, while critiquing anthropocentric hierarchies and dualisms. The study contributes to relational design theory by advocating for nondualist …


Co-Creating The Good Life Through Food-Based Inquiry, Danielle Wilde, Leena Naqvi, Mary Karyda Aug 2025

Co-Creating The Good Life Through Food-Based Inquiry, Danielle Wilde, Leena Naqvi, Mary Karyda

Nordes Conference Series

Food and eating (re)connect humans daily with worlds within and beyond us. From the trillions of microorganisms that help make us who we are; through the socio-culturally and tangibly graspable people, animals, plants, fungi and algae that we cohabit with; to decreasingly relatable systems of food production and provisioning across the planet, food stitches us together. We provide four mini cases to consider how using food as a methodology for experimental design research can build relations towards ensuring ‘the good life.’ We explore what the good life is, why relationality sits at its heart, and provide a framework for using …


Designing For Multispecies Affordances: A Poetics Of Control, Martin Avila, Nelly Mäekivi, Erik Andersson Aug 2025

Designing For Multispecies Affordances: A Poetics Of Control, Martin Avila, Nelly Mäekivi, Erik Andersson

Nordes Conference Series

This workshop will engage participants in an exercise that conceives experimental design practices that involve communication with other-than-human species. The process encourages a shift away from human-centred control, creating conditions that allow other species to manifest their own behaviours. This is important since the dominant global material culture of design does not acknowledge the presence and interaction of other species with things designed, erasing biodiversity as human habits repeat anthropocentric and destructive ecological patterns. Building on the work of J. J. Gibson’s concept of affordances, and other work that conform the emerging field that today is understood as posthumanism, the …


Exploring The Entanglement Of Relational Design, Spatiality And Places, Thomas Binder, Jörn Christiansson, Gabriela Quintana Vigiola Aug 2025

Exploring The Entanglement Of Relational Design, Spatiality And Places, Thomas Binder, Jörn Christiansson, Gabriela Quintana Vigiola

Nordes Conference Series

Over the last two decades, we have witnessed a relational turn in design research, embracing the entanglements of human and non-human elements in socio-material arrangements. Despite the foregrounding of relations in these entanglements, little attention has been given to what role spatiality and places may have in relational design. This workshop explores the entanglement of relational design, spatiality and places based on design case studies from participants. Using a design charette methodology, participants will collaboratively (1) map how relational entanglements shape and are shaped by design research and practice; (2) identify and unpack cross-disciplinary tensions and opportunities; and (3) co-create …


Exploring The "Human Norm" In Design: Integrating More-Than-Human And Norm-Critical Design Approaches, Katerina Cerna, Yi Luo, Britta Teleman Aug 2025

Exploring The "Human Norm" In Design: Integrating More-Than-Human And Norm-Critical Design Approaches, Katerina Cerna, Yi Luo, Britta Teleman

Nordes Conference Series

As designers, we design from a human perspective—a position we cannot change but must critically reflect upon. This workshop addresses this fundamental challenge: the invisible "human norm" in design. While norm-critical approaches have explored norms, the most profound invisible norm is simply our existence as humans. This is particularly significant as we confront environmental crises demanding design beyond human needs. We integrate two complementary approaches: more-than-human design, which challenges the assumption that "human-centeredness" represents a neutral viewpoint, and norm-critical design, which makes invisible norms visible. Our 3-hour workshop engages participants in interactive activities analyzing human norms, shifting perspectives, creating norm-critical …


Exploring Affective Dimensions Of The Ecological Crisis In Design: A Reflective Manifesto Writing Workshop, Femke Coops, Anna Schröder, Daphne Hamilton-Jones Aug 2025

Exploring Affective Dimensions Of The Ecological Crisis In Design: A Reflective Manifesto Writing Workshop, Femke Coops, Anna Schröder, Daphne Hamilton-Jones

Nordes Conference Series

This workshop aims to bring together members from the NORDES community interested in work relating to environmental urgency, regenerative practices and the affective dimensions of design. Participants will collectively reflect on the affective dimensions of their design practice when engaging with ecological/sustainability transitions and explore the values in which they root their designerly practice. Through engaging with the relationality between the breadth of angles from which participants might understand the troubling experiences they encounter in this context, this workshop aims to bring participants to draw from their experiences and the epistemologies they work with to craft a Manifesto regarding the …


Design Briefs After Progress, Li Jönsson, Maria Göransdotter, Åsa Ståhl, Kristina Lindström, Thomas Laurien Aug 2025

Design Briefs After Progress, Li Jönsson, Maria Göransdotter, Åsa Ståhl, Kristina Lindström, Thomas Laurien

Nordes Conference Series

Design briefs can be expressions of needs expressed not only by educators but also by external actors and society more broadly. They are where societal needs, expectations, wishes and desires meet the internal, local and situated logic of design and design education. In this workshop, we aim to make an inventory of past and current design briefs and start to re-imagine them by moving beyond the taken-for-granted starting point of continued growth. We are led by the overarching question: what could a design brief become when it is actively intended to shift away from notions of design as formulated in …


Design In Service Of The Pluriverse (Anonymised), Clara Llamas, Pablo Calderon Salazar Aug 2025

Design In Service Of The Pluriverse (Anonymised), Clara Llamas, Pablo Calderon Salazar

Nordes Conference Series

The pluriverse represents an entanglement of cosmologies shaped by coloniality and modernity (Mignolo, 2013). Service design's historical roots trace back to exploitative systems, evident in both slavery's triangular trade and domestic service hierarchies. Even the etymology—'service' from servitus (slavery)—reflects a problematic legacy (Kim, 2018). These historical power dynamics persist in contemporary service design through gendered and racialized divisions, exploitative supply chains, and hierarchical service environments (Prendiville, 2024; Allen 2019; Inikori, 2002; Williams, 1994). Service design practices can either challenge or reinforce these dynamics, as demonstrated in Bitner's servicescapes theory and Clatworthy or Vink’s analysis of design's cultural and social impact. …


How To Talk Of And Evaluate Relationality In Design Research And Practice?, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Ann Light, Andrea Botero, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, Marketa Dolesjova Aug 2025

How To Talk Of And Evaluate Relationality In Design Research And Practice?, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Ann Light, Andrea Botero, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, Marketa Dolesjova

Nordes Conference Series

The damaged and fragmented world is calling for care, hope, and imaginative ways of nurturing dialogues. We need alternative pathways, reflexivity and collective engagements to meet this need. Designers and other creative practitioners are increasingly applying experimental, relational, experiential and participatory approaches to facilitate collaboration, social change and imaginative world-making. Such approaches build on understandings that go beyond rational thinking and involve emotional and personal aspects. To advance these practices with arguments for their relevance, and to develop collective reflexivity, we need ways to talk of and evaluate the relationalities we seek to enact. In this workshop, we engage with …


Mattering Relational Design Pedagogies, Teresa Palmieri, Sonia Cabral Matos Aug 2025

Mattering Relational Design Pedagogies, Teresa Palmieri, Sonia Cabral Matos

Nordes Conference Series

This workshop explores relationality in design education, particularly in the context of design practices that address social justice and climate change. It seeks to create a space for design educators to share and exchange practical approaches for integrating relational pedagogies frameworks into design education and embodying its principles in their teaching practices. Referring to theories on Relational Pedagogies, the workshop will address the dual meaning of “matter” – who matters and what matters – in design education. Drawing from their own experiences and imaginations, participants will be involved in mapping the bodies, objects, spaces, materialities and other non-human bodies and …


Designing With Relationalities: Interweaving Human And More-Than-Human Approaches, Barbro Scholz, Michaela Honauer, Claudia Nuñez-Pacheco Aug 2025

Designing With Relationalities: Interweaving Human And More-Than-Human Approaches, Barbro Scholz, Michaela Honauer, Claudia Nuñez-Pacheco

Nordes Conference Series

This workshop explores the interweaving of human and non-human relationalities through noticing strategies that decenter the anthropocentric perspective. As a starting point, we propose to examine our position of humans as interconnected and entangled with more-than-humans, problematising how this perspective could reshape human-centred methods and practices. We intend to elaborate on how our being in the world –co-shaped by non-human entities– can be experienced through embodying other (human or non-human) perspectives. We thereby explore noticing as a method and start tackling the following questions: How do designers relate in the design process to other humans and non-humans? How does decentring …


Unwrapping The Cube Visual Essay, Arthur L. Loeb, C. Todd Stewart Aug 2025

Unwrapping The Cube Visual Essay, Arthur L. Loeb, C. Todd Stewart

Loeb Design Science: Documents

A visual and conceptual essay illustrating the many faces and properties of the cube.


Prison-Breaking From Plato's Cave, Brennan Mcdavid Aug 2025

Prison-Breaking From Plato's Cave, Brennan Mcdavid

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

This article examines the philosophical significance of nature (ϕύσις) in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The word is used in the protasis of the conditional clause at 515bc where Socrates proposes to inquire into ‘what the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly would be if in the course of nature (ϕύσϵι) something of this sort should happen to them’. This instance of ‘nature’ has been a matter of philological and philosophical debate, with attention paid principally to the narrow passage of the allegory for reconstructing Plato’s meaning. This article argues from the standpoint of …


Idiomatic Compositional Techniques In John Rutter’S Requiem, Marguerite Walsh Aug 2025

Idiomatic Compositional Techniques In John Rutter’S Requiem, Marguerite Walsh

Student Publications

John Rutter is an extremely significant figure in choral music, and his 1985 Requiem is one of his most widely performed works. Despite this popularity, it has yet to be analyzed in a rigorous academic capacity. Requiem is a harmonically rich and sophisticated work, and said lack of previous analysis represents a gap in theoretical research. This thesis analyzes Requiem for significant harmonic structures and idiomatic compositional techniques and applies those techniques in an original composition. Subtopics of note included harmonic non-functionality, modulations, and orchestration. The original work is comprised of two movements for choir and piano respectively titled “Requiem …


Changes In Perspective - A Pov Exercise, Lauralynn Filidoro Aug 2025

Changes In Perspective - A Pov Exercise, Lauralynn Filidoro

Masters Theses

Point of view is an important tool in fiction writing, as is an exploration of how choice of POV affects how a story is experienced by an audience and what to consider as an author when making that choice. Taking the time to study not just the options for point of view, but the profound impact that a thoughtful and considered use of this device can have on one’s writing is not just an exciting endeavor, but an inspiring one.


Sport And Black/African-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity: A Conversation, Joezer Antoine, Sean Jacobs, Munene Mwaniki, Yasmin Elgoharry, Jess Nachman, Chen Chen, Roc Rochon, Anthony J. Weems Aug 2025

Sport And Black/African-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity: A Conversation, Joezer Antoine, Sean Jacobs, Munene Mwaniki, Yasmin Elgoharry, Jess Nachman, Chen Chen, Roc Rochon, Anthony J. Weems

Sport Management Collection

This paper is an edited transcript of an online panel that took place February 11, 2025, exploring the historical and contemporary forms of Black/African solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement in the context of sport. Foregrounding the long tradition of leveraging sport within various anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements worldwide, this conversation emphasizes the urgency of developing sustained and renewed strategies of resistance. First, we outline Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity (BPTS) as a historical movement sustained by shared anti-imperialist principles. For decades, radical and revolutionary Black and African peoples have recognized Zionism as an extension of the racialized Western imperial project …