Conference Agenda

In a world grappling with ongoing food scarcity, the issue of food waste in US school cafeterias remains a pressing concern, often without sufficient attention given to recycling. School communities play a pivotal role in shaping behaviors, as individuals are significantly influenced by their peers' actions and opinions, making them more open to positive reinforcement. This research explores design opportunity to raise awareness and encourage food waste recycling behaviors through a co-design approach. Students are invited to participate in the interactive exhibitions, where they learn and provide feedback about the pigment-making process from food waste using a toolkit for art painting. Through sharing their experiences, students help spread awareness and foster a commitment to recycling behaviors among their peers. Engaging students as active participants in these activities shows promise as a strategy to increase awareness of food waste recycling opportunities and empower school communities to support circular food systems.

This paper explores the evolving role of architects in cohousing projects in response to environmental, economic, and social challenges. This research incorporates insights from semi-structured interviews in three Belgian case studies. The foundations and values of cohousing communities are tackled, highlighting shifts in architects' roles and challenges in working with groups of user-clients. In these cohousing processes, we found that the representatives of these user-client groups may not always share the full breadth of their negotiations with architects. Architects seem to miss out on some of the nuances, and some participants found that this approach left their voices unheard. Amidst pragmatic concerns and other value-based issues, this paper reimagines some aspects of the ar-chitects’ role in cohousing projects. This paper aims to help architects balance stakeholders’ viewpoints within budget, timeline, practicality, and values constraints.

This exploratory qualitative research underlines architectural properties of a res-idential house that was repurposed as a temporary creative space. Findings were compared against existing theory on third places (particularly creative spaces) and their relationship with citizen participation, empowerment, and social change. Overall, the “homey” character creates a sense of belonging and occu-pants seem eager to decorate and furnish with personal effects. Findings reveal tensions between large open and smaller closed spaces to reflect on how flow, accessibility, occupancy, and intimacy are affected. Occupant behaviors lead to wonder about the tensions between community, codesign, empowerment, and ownership. Findings help question how temporary third places could play a role in the design of new creative spaces. Further insights could lead to explore be-yond interior architectural properties and consider how the outer shell and loca-tion of a building influence community participation, or how successful recruit-ment is impacted by the community’s personal social networks.

The Bauhaus of the Seas (BoS) is one of the Lighthouse projects of the New European Bauhaus initiative (NEB). The project promotes the application of the NEB values – sustainable, beautiful, together – to develop locally grounded De-monstrator Pilots and focus cities’ attention on the future of the oceans. A co-design approach is being applied in a series of participatory sessions with stake-holders, including nature/ecosystem experts, cultural institutions, local authori-ties and civic organizations, aiming at a consolidated collaborative approach. In this report we present the results from the co-design processes under develop-ment in Oeiras and Lisbon – two coastal territories involved in the BoS. Our findings reveal that co-designing in a multi-stakeholder participatory process pre-sents challenges, ranging from the discomfort of working in bottom-up decision-making settings to the difficulty of amplifying underrepresented voices, as well as the ethical, philosophical and practical challenges of involving other-than-human beings.

The pandemic has led to increased social distancing and feelings of depression among youth, a significant shift from their previous engagement in activities that enhanced their social skills and community involvement. With the easing of the pandemic, youth re-engaged with their social contacts and skills by participating in new interest-based activities, such as urban camping and frisbee sports. However, the process of how these activities foster youth social behavior changes remains under-explored. This study investigates how emerging interest-based activities facilitate youth social behav-ior and community identity, providing guidance for youth community design. Through a cross-disciplinary sociology-design framework, the "Youth Social Action Reconfigura-tion Framework," implemented via co-design, this study reveals that youth with new in-terests can establish new community connections under the prolonged impact of COVID-19. This study suggests an interest group service system as a community build-ing scheme that can motivate youth social action and community engagement.

The development of internet and artificial intelligence technology promotes the dissemination of artworks but also increases the possibility of infringement. Designers who selflessly share their work risk having it stolen, plagiarized, sold, used directly as NFT, or used for AI training. In this paper, we conducted an exploratory study to investigate desingers' needs and solutions when faced with online artwork-sharing infringement. We held two workshops to discuss design plagiarism and illegal AI-art data training. Ultimately, the team arrived at seven solutions for addressing potential infringement issues that arise when sharing artwork online. Synthesizing the participants' evaluations and related research, we propose an ideal path for safeguarding copyright. We hope this path will help designers and platforms protect intellectual property rights and foster a positive network-sharing environment.