Conference Agenda

In Western industrialised societies, the times of humans and of other species are often considered as belonging to different realms. While human life is regarded as progressive and accelerated, other species are seen as following cyclical, slow changing timescales. These narratives neglect the multiple interconnections between human and other-than-human times and contribute to increasing temporal mismatches across species, with consequences for environmental and biodiversity loss. In this paper, we use design examples generated through an interdisciplinary workshop to discuss opportunities for design to expand notions of time in more-than-human ecologies. Drawing from the Temporal Design framework and the notion of Designing for Temporal Cohabitation, we discuss how these examples incorporate a call for designers to a) draw attention to multiple ways human and other-than-human temporalities are intrinsically connected, b) expose temporal power asymmetries across ecologies, and c) design interventions that foster care-full ways of reducing impact and promoting temporal reattunements.

Transition design first emerged as a provocation to designers to apply design theory and practice to enable societal transitions, including transitions toward sustainability. This raises questions around the roles that transition design can play in sustainability transitions and the specific capabilities that designers can draw on. This paper seeks to answer these questions via a transition design case study project in agricultural sustainability. Specifically, the project focuses on the growing interest in regenerative agriculture in New South Wales, Australia from 2017 through 2023. Within the case study, the researcher as designer-practitioner works as a change agent, taking part in collaborative initiatives. Through semi-structured interviews, ethnographic immersion and involvement in multiple working groups, the researcher-designer-practitioner tests design-based practices, identifies acupuncture points across the agriculture sector, and co-develops initiatives to address these. This research into practice yields a set of capabilities and methods, as well as key roles for design in transitions.

This paper provides experience feedback from a French consortium gathering academic and industrial partners, to produce quantified scenarios for 2060 that will serve to redirect companies within the frame of planetary boundaries. This setup constitutes a field for action research in design, together with strategic foresight, sustainability, and human and social sciences. Our paper presents the epistemological and methodological choices made, reports on the first year of the project (qualitative scenario-building), and the issues met. We propose in particular to discuss the tension between global societal evolutions driven by macro trends, and the situated processes of transformation initiated by the participants. Discrepancy between those scales challenge our cross-disciplinary reading grids, but also the role of design for systemic change in our approach. This paper analyzes the challenges met, and the initiatives taken to bridge design, engineering, and strategic foresight approaches.

Design practices grounded in the modernist yearning for universalism have often been oblivious to forms of local knowledge, and the situated webs of relations, among humans and with other species, they emerge from. In response to the destructive effects of this inattention, growing research has established that ecology and society must be considered together to ensure fair and resilient development. Here, we develop the concept of ‘design terroir’ to describe existing forms of eco-social design and help designers theorise and realise work that contributes to a relational bioregionalist approach. To inform this description, we extend considerations within the food domain to design, including relation to territory, craft knowledge, multisensory aesthetics, and multispecies relationships. Drawing on examples, we review common epistemological qualities between vernacular architecture and food terroirs. We then illustrate how design terroir can inform contemporary design practice and conclude with considerations of how the concept can be used.

Coastal reef environments foster biodiversity through their complex topographies, which offer substrate and diverse habitats across trophic levels. While artificial reefs can mimic these functions and results, implementation barriers have historically limited their ability to address coastal habitat loss at scale. This research presents a novel method for artificial reef construction that combines hand craft weaving practices with artificial reef construction innovations. The design framework, dubbed “SeaWeaver,” meets the ecological criteria for reef topography through complex geometries inherent to woven forms while retaining the cost-efficiency, material simplicity and parametric variability of weaving crafts. The integration of simple electrochemical processes presents a variety of corrosion resistance strategies for long-term structural durability. Three years of successful pilot testing underscore the promise of this approach in overcoming historical conservation barriers and fostering positive transformation in coastal ecosystems through a low-barrier and accessible design framework.

Transitions towards sustainability involving technological, social, behavioural, institutional, and organisational change are urgently needed to address the complex environmental and societal challenges. While the built environment has a considerable environmental and social impact, design scope for sustainable architecture has been primarily limited to reducing the environmental impacts of individual buildings. To achieve net-positive natural and social outcomes for the built environment there is a need for more systemic approaches and design methodology that allows to reframe the task of design from solving isolated problems to contributing to system transformation. The article reviews transformational, systems-oriented process models and associated tools developed in the fields of regenerative design, systemic design and sustainability transitions, with the aim to define a methodological framework for sustainability transitions relevant for the built environment. A case study from a practice-led research is used to illustrate and discuss how such a process could be integrated in architectural practice.