Conference Agenda

This Conversation addresses an emerging orientation in design research toward the concept of ‘design beyond the human’ (Caccavale and Hush, 2026), with a specific focus on how embodied, relational, and more-than-human methods can operate as rigorous and accountable design research practices. This conversation foregrounds practices and rituals around food and water as methodological apparatuses for thinking-with and -through, enabling engagement with epistemic, ontological, and axiological questions that are increasingly central to design research in contexts of ecological transition, and long taken up, by example, by Indigenous Feminist scholars (eg. Moreton-Robinson, 2013). Furthermore, the concept of scale, as proposed by design anthropologist, Jamer Hunt (2020), is leveraged as a methodological lens through which these concerns can be productively examined.

Higher education in prisons remains both insufficiently available and structurally marginalised within the UK prison education system. Prisoners’ Education Trust reports that provision in prisons in England continues to focus predominantly on literacy, numeracy and vocational education, with higher education opportunities largely restricted to distance learning and a small number of fragile prisons university partnerships. These arrangements are widely recognised as insufficient to meet learner needs or support meaningful progression into higher levels of study. Participation in education has also declined in recent years, alongside deteriorating prison regimes and reduced time out of cell (Prisoners’ Education Trust, 2024). While design research has a strong tradition of engaging with complex public services, prison education remains under-examined as a site for systemic design inquiry (University of the Arts London, 2021).This Conversation addresses that gap by bringing together design researchers, many of whom will have little direct familiarity with the prison education policy landscape, to collectively explore how universities might contribute to more inclusive and sustainable higher education provision in low-security prison contexts. The aim is not to propose solutions, but to identify tensions and generate new research questions for the design research community.

The use of ‘live’ briefs and project-based learning models have been widely adopted in design education and are often presented “as best practices in design education” (Noel, 2021:256). DiSalvo (2021) warns us that the uncritical application of design methods to address societal issues risks “reproducing and re-asserting structures of power over [the] communities we work with” (Potter et al., 2025: 2). This conversation seeks to bring together design educators and researchers to discuss the risk of extractive pedagogies in such learning models and explore how these risks might be managed. In particular, it will ask: Can ‘live’ student projects deliver true reciprocity with the communities with whom they partner?

This proposal opens with the term maraña, a Spanish word that resists translation and serves as a conceptual provocateur. Instead of seeking clarity—often presumed as the goal of design—maraña encourages participants to inhabit discomfort, density, and entanglement. Marked by the “ñ,” it signifies complexity as a condition of life, not a problem to solve. Etymologically, maraña relates to material conditions of entanglement: thickets, tangled threads, or intricate situations that cannot be separated without loss (Malkiel, 1948). It names material situations of coexistence where separation is never neutral and never without loss. 

Drawing on the contrast between Prometheus and Epimetheus—anticipation versus understanding after the fact— this proposal rejects fully anticipated futures. Instead, it positions design as a practice of learning to live enmarañados, cohabiting complexity through praxis, staying with unresolved conditions rather than resolving them. It aligns with Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” (2016), using imagination not to escape, but to refuse fixed realities. 

In this Epimethean view, prototyping becomes a research method of learning-after: iterative redesigning with what already exists (in line with panel 1.5 Restaging Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design). Prototypes are seen as incomplete, open to revision, allowing uncertainty and unforeseen relations to persist (Hermansen & Tironi, 2024). This method facilitates staying-with marañas, slowing certainty and fostering situated engagement with resistance to closure. 

This entails an ethical shift away from binary logic toward inhabiting interstices, co-operations, and tensions. The Aymara concept of ch’ixi—heterogeneous elements coexisting without fusion—becomes central: a condition where “something is and is not at the same time” (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015). Designing thus becomes a process of learning to read, touch, and hold knots—accepting tension as an epistemic and coexistence mode (Sánchez-Aldana, 2025). 

Textile-thinking matters here as a material mode of perceiving and composing entanglement (Barad, 2003; Sánchez-Aldana, 2025). Maraña shifts from a word to a practice, emphasizing entanglement as inherent in everyday practices, infrastructures, bodies, and technologies —especially within the Capitalocene, where separation without loss is unfeasible. 

Participants are invited to collect real marañas—not metaphors or drawings. The session will produce photographic maraña specimens that record entanglements as they exist. These images are not mere documentation but prototypes that can be handled, compared, re-tagged, and reclassified. This photo-prototyping aims to let relations and frictions emerge through cycles of arrangement, testing, and revision. By sharing and handling images and textile marañas, the focus shifts to proximity, contact, and material engagement over abstraction and disembodied reflection. 

Ruderal Definition seeks to co-create a definition of regenerative design through collaborative documentation and critical reflection. Regenerative Design as a theory and a practice is increasingly invoked across a multiplicity of design domains, yet its meaning is fluid and unresolved, and our lexicon is fragmented—inviting both productive plurality and the risk of greenwashing and dilution. Our exploratory workshop treats this disturbed semantic ground as ruderal: a site where meaning can coalesce and stabilise through shared inquiry. The session positions regenerative design as an emergent practice and seeks to produce artefacts, specifically mapping, concepts, and relationships, that will help designers speak rigorously across fields without eclipsing industry- and place-based differences. We aim to surface productive tensions and generate a living, publicly accessible knowledge artefact that captures the multiplicity of regenerative approaches while identifying areas requiring further conceptual development. 

We will address three connected research questions: 

How do researchers-designers understand regenerative design principles across diverse contexts, and what tensions, gaps, or insights emerge when we map our practices against a collective, proposed theoretical framework? 

How can collaborative mapping serve as a rigorous method for recording, verifying, and interrogating design research knowledge beyond traditional textual formats? 

What new relational understandings emerge when place-based regenerative practices are situated in cross- and transdisciplinary dialogue, revealing patterns, absences, and possibilities across cultural, industry, and economic boundaries? 

To paraphrase Randolph Glanville (1981), design research is not just a practice of creative exploration for desired change in products and systems, but a model for better research, a designed process for scientific discovery, as well as the invention of artefacts.  

This workshop seeks to create and test a definition of regenerative design that emerges as a system of looking with, thinking with, and responding with the world we are entangled in. Can this definition hold across academic fields, geographies, and praxes, and can we discover shared phenomenologies of this robust design definition in a collaborative creative exercise?  

Through documentation, word play, critical reflection, and collaborative mapping, we seek to create research knowledge, in real time, among the communities in which it will be used. We will then document these findings through photography, ephemera, and field notes.   

How can rich user scenarios become engineering specifications without losing the user experience they are meant to preserve?

In interdisciplinary product development, user scenarios are often used to communicate context, goals, and lived experience. However, when these narratives are transferred to engineering teams, their experiential intent can become diluted, requirements may become ambiguous, and specifications may lose traceability to the original user need. This workshop addresses this challenge as the experience–specification gap.

In this 90-minute hands-on Explorations session, participants will work in teams to translate an elder-care robot scenario into engineering specifications using the Action Steps method. Rather than treating scenarios as informal design stories, the session uses them as structured evidence for specification development.

Participants will work with Novy, a smart elder-care robot designed to support nocturnal awakening, medication access, safe movement, and nighttime assistance. Through a guided six-step sprint, teams will identify scenario elements, form user–product interaction sequences, derive functional requirements, select components, define target specifications, and evaluate component placement.

The session will conclude with peer review and group reflection on traceability, interdisciplinary negotiation, and artifact quality. Participants will leave with a practical framework, a practitioner manual, a workbook, working examples, and reusable templates for teaching, research, or practice.

This workshop welcomes participants from any background who are interested in human-centered design, engineering design, product design and development, scenario-based design, robotics, healthcare design, interdisciplinary collaboration, or design research methods. No prior experience with the method is required.

This Conversation proposes to bring together MTHD researchers and practitioners to facilitate community articulation and to ask: What actions are needed to sustain a convivial MTHD community at a moment of rapid growth and diversification, within and beyond DRS?

To guide this inquiry, we will explore the following sub-questions:

1. How do we understand the current landscape of MTHD across the multiple DRS tracks? How does it relate to the work that is being carried out in other fields?

2. What shared concerns, emerging themes, and unresolved tensions shape our ability to act as an inclusive and supportive community while maintaining disciplinary plurality?

3. What could a community of practice on MTHD look and feel like to mobilise collective efforts? What organisational, institutional, and territorial infrastructures do we need to build, and who needs to be involved?

4. How can we, as human participants, include and empower nonhuman participants? What would it mean to give them roles not only in local, concrete projects but also in shaping the “constitutions” and governance of our institutions (e.g., a SIG)?

5. How do we work effectively with stakeholders across policy, governance, science, industry, and community contexts to mobilise the change and transformation needed for future practice, while respecting diverse ways of knowing and supporting social justice?

This Conversation offers an opportunity for the growing MTHD community to see itself, speak with itself, and imagine itself, laying groundwork for future collaboration within design and across neighbouring fields (from biology and ecology to law and jurisprudence, to name a few). The field is maturing, but without shared spaces for exchange, the risk of siloing grows.

In a period of rapid change, this conversation will provide an opportunity for participants to better understand how design instructors are making decisions regarding AI in the classroom. Some might fear repercussions for their actions or feel pressure to implement AI against their judgment. Are individuals actively rejecting recommendations? Teaching against their values? How much do they agree or disagree with policy that trickles down from leaders in the school? How are these difficult questions and the confusion caused by the unleashing of AI into the university affecting teaching in general, not only for students but for instructors as workers? Our objective is to enable design faculty to compare notes on this topic and share resources in order to dispel confusion and offer more clarity for those facing difficult decisions and potential consequences. Through this session, design educators will not only learn about the range of others’ experiences negotiating the gaps between their course policies and institutional stances, but also leave with potential strategies to alleviate the confusion of this volatile period in order to confidently teach. We especially hope to unearth tactics that educators are adopting when their attitude toward AI differs from that of their institutions. Design education is uniquely positioned: it values creativity, critique, and ethics, yet faces industry pressing demands to incorporate emerging technologies. Our conversation will support reflection on this situation in relation to the particularities of design in higher educational institutions, and to offer design educators a supportive place in navigating this complex new terrain.

‘Ethical regime’, a concept introduced by Radin and Kowal (2015) within that scholarship, articulates that underpinning supposedly ‘universal’ ethical principles there are specifically and historically situated moral, political and economic stakes. Examples of ethical regimes include US and Australian scientific research ethics with roots in post-war responses to the atrocities of Nazi science and other infamous medical experiments. Importantly, they highlight ethical regimes critical of Western research, for example alternatives emerging since the 1980s from pan-indigenous rights movements in Australia.

Alternative ethical regimes are also evolving elsewhere, with notable examples including frameworks for research involving indigenous peoples and/or their land. For example, in New Zealand, ‘Te Ara Tika’ is well-recognized (despite uneven progress, Smith 2021). Canadian examples are seen as possible models across Sápmi (Drugge 2016) - while the Nordic countries have various stringent and advanced ethical research guidelines, the Sami perspectives is missing. While the UN-backed principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is widespread, it has never been ratified in countries such as Brazil and Colombia (but can be part of challenges brought by the indigenous peoples’ organization APIB to the International Criminal Court in the Hague).

Design researchers have engaged critically and creatively with ethical regimes. Critical studies trace design within medical science ethics abuses of colonial subjects and women (e.g. Prado 2015). This conversation will engage critically and creatively with diverse ‘ethical regimes’, specifically our universities’ ethical regulation of research in relation to principles developed with/within indigenous contexts.

Disability research has long grappled with questions of power, voice, participation, and representation. The disability rights movement’s foundational demand—‘nothing about us without us’ (Charlton, 1998)—challenged centuries of research conducted on rather than with disabled people. The social model of disability shifted focus from individual impairment to disabling environments and attitudes (Oliver, 1996), while emancipatory disability research (EDR) insisted that disabled people must control research agendas, methods, and outcomes (Oliver, 1992; Barnes, 2003). Hamraie and Fritsch's Crip Technoscience Manifesto (2019) argues that disabled people are already designers and expert knowledge-makers of their own access—hacking, adapting, and innovating in ways that formal design rarely recognizes. 

Participatory research methods—Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR), and community mapping—have transformed how researchers engage with marginalized communities, shifting from extractive models toward collaborative knowledge production. These methods offer rich foundations for disability research, yet their application in disability contexts remains underdeveloped. This 

Exploration asks how design can contribute to adapting these participatory methods. Design brings distinct capacities: material and spatial thinking that reshapes how participation physically happens; prototyping approaches that allow iterative testing of engagement formats; multi-modal communication strategies that expand beyond text-dominant research; and attention to embodied experience that foregrounds how bodies interact with research processes. These design opportunities can extend participatory methods’ emancipatory potential, centering disabled expertise and deepening meaningful participation across diverse access needs and capacities. This Exploration is co-led by disabled and non-disabled researchers, reflecting a commitment to accountability structures that keep research answerable to disability communities (Stone & Priestley, 1996). 

Artificial Intelligence is now part of design education, which raises the question of whether these tools build students' critical thinking and creative voice, or quietly erode them. This workshop treats participants' own tool use as the object of study. In small groups, students, educators, and practitioners work with NotebookLM environments that are preloaded with research, institutional AI policies, and classroom resources. They will use the system as a thought partner while documenting their exchanges. They isolate sources, capture notes, and participate in a structured reflection during which they examine how that mediation shaped their reasoning and discussion. The aim is to test our understanding of how AI tools can cultivate authentic creative voices and critical thinking skills.

Note: This workshop is best experienced with a Google account. Facilitators recommend that participants bring a laptop that is logged into a personal Google account or a mobile device with the NotebookLM app already downloaded and logged into.

To address the persistent gap between the acknowledged relevance of images and their practical implementation in research communication, this exploration asks: How can design scholars write with and through images? Through a workshop format combining critical analysis, discussion, and hands-on exploration, we will articulate possible frameworks for producing, evaluating, and publishing visual essays within design research contexts. In doing so, we aim to address the implementation gap by moving from theoretical justification to practical capacity-building. Specifically, the workshop seeks to identify and experiment with ways of communicating academic knowledge in design with and through images. Following the workshop, insights on how to provide evidence and argumentation in visual form and how peer-reviewers can balance evaluating scholarly rigor alongside visual experimentation will be summarized in a reference paper. Participants and the wider community will be then invited to contribute to a special issue on visual essays for Design and Culture. 

Jamie Donaldson (OU); Brandon Lenoir (Edinburgh); Peining Sheng (Edinburgh)

In the context of a competitive and changing job market, PhD students often find themselves at a crossroads, where they need to explore a diversity of career paths by reflecting on and reconfiguring their existing skill sets. This workshop provides an opportunity to co-create a toolkit that supports the opening up of a new space for PhD students to consider positions “in between” academic and non-academic pathways in their post-PhD careers. Join us for a hands‑on, creative workshop where we’ll work together to identify the skills you’ve developed or will develop during your PhD and learn how these can open up opportunities at the intersection of academic and non‑academic careers.  Expect creative activities, practical mapping, and a fresh way of seeing your strengths to prepare you for what is next. 

Holding the Question offers a pause in the rush toward answers: a space to stay with questions long enough for something honest to surface. Design research has strong conventions for stabilising knowledge, but fewer shared practices for working with fragility,  taboo, or emotional charge. Many questions collapse when pushed too quickly into clarity, losing texture, stakes, and lived complexity.

The conversation builds on The Young Questions, , a long‑term editorial research practice by The Young in Rotterdam. The series emerged from repeatedly encountering topics that are clearly alive in culture yet consistently postponed and only addressed when they become personal, bodily, or politically unavoidable. The Young Questions exists as physical publications that circulate between clients, collaborators, and the public; publishing is treated as a research method rather than a final output. Across editions on vulva, death, union, and denim, we work with interviews, fragments, contradictions, and careful editing to hold questions open rather than close them down.

This conversation will run in dialogue with Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS Some Reservations Exploration session, which examines how design artefacts mediate research on taboo topics. Holding the Question serves as a conceptual prelude, focusing on the pre‑artefact phase when taboos are still emerging and forming language. Together, both sessions trace the movement of a question – from sensed, to spoken, to materialised – bridging conversational and artefactual mediation.

In recent years, Transition Design and Systemic Design have both emerged as prominent design-led responses to complex, interconnected societal challenges such as climate change, social inequality, and long-term sustainability transitions (Irwin, 2015; Jones & Van Ael, 2022). Both foreground systems thinking, multi-scalar intervention, and the need for design for systems change (Ceschin & Gaziulusoy, 2016). As a result, the two are increasingly referenced together in research, education, and practice.

This conversation proposes an open, collective inquiry into the boundaries, tensions, and field-level implications of Transition Design and Systemic Design. By assembling conveyors and participants from diverse institutions and geographies who bring a multitude of perspectives together from research, education, and practice, the session aims to surface shared foundations, productive frictions, and unresolved questions within and between Systemic Design and Transition Design. In doing so, this conversation seeks to contribute to a more explicit articulation of how these approaches can strengthen design’s future capacity for systemic change, and to identify directions for further research, theory-building, pedagogy, and practice.

As design researchers increasingly adopt generative AI tools across the research lifecycle, questions about when and how to trust these tools have become increasingly urgent to explore and address. From planning studies and generating tasks to analysing qualitative data and communicating findings, AI systems are now integrated into many aspects of design research work. However, these tools are frequently used based more on institutional demands, tool availability, and efficiency perceptions rather than on clear methodological or ethical considerations. This Conversation explores trust as a context-dependent judgment influenced by specific situations, tasks, and associated risks.

Although concerns about AI's reliability and ethics are valid, the increasing interest in these tools is understandable. Many researchers are drawn to AI for its ability to streamline labour-intensive tasks, accelerate workflows, generate new insights, or support accessibility. For instance, transcription tools, automated tagging, and language generation systems are already embedded in research workflows and often seen as low-risk or beneficial. These perceived strengths raise important questions: What value do these tools offer? Under what conditions are they helpful? And when might apparent benefits obscure potential risks?

This Conversation invites participants to examine how trust in AI is experienced, questioned, or withheld across the design research process. Rather than assuming AI tools either clearly belong in research practice or should be rejected outright, we ask where, when, and under what conditions they can play a role, and where they should not.

Reflecting the posthuman shift in Design, More-than-Human (MtH) temporality has emerged as a critical dimension of how we could design with other-than-human beings. Building on theoretical discourses calling to reevaluate concepts of Western time (Bastian, 2009), and to incorporate plural perspectives of time (Eschrich et al., 2025; Rifkin, 2017), this session will explore practical approaches to engage with MtH temporalities through time as an experience of kinship (Vaughan-Lee, 2024; Whyte, 2021). Kinship time, building on the concept of “kincentric ecologies” in which humans perceive all natural elements of an ecosystem as kin (Salmon, 2000), is an understanding of time not as uniform, linear units but as shifts in kinship relationships, calling for an ethics of shared responsibility and interdependence (Whyte, 2021).  

Our session will examine the potential of embodied and in situ approaches to foster reflection on kinship time and temporal interactions with MtH, and identify tensions and opportunities in Design for future engagements, fostering more diverse notions of MtH time. It is part of a broader research that asks how, through collaborative, embodied, exploratory activities, we can develop new forms of attunement to temporalities beyond Western-centric frameworks, and how place-based, kin-centric approaches can support the emergence of new temporal MtH relationships. 

Specifically, the session will build on existing approaches engaging with MtH temporalities, such as visual mapping and participatory design (Zohar et al., 2024), the MtH Temporal Ontologies' booklet (Nisi et al., 2026), and meditation practices on kinship time (Vaughan-Lee, 2024), allowing us to interact with MtH temporalities at multiple scales and accounting for changes over various timeframes, such as historical growth cycles or future migratory patterns. We will introduce participants to an exploratory design-based probe packet for reflecting on MtH temporalities and kinship to ground conversation, exploration and discussion. Together, participants will cooperatively materialize artefacts that represent their understanding of and encounters with MtH temporalities in the form of a mobile sculpture. This kinetic artefact, materialising kinship time relationships in the landscape, will prompt further exploration of time’s materiality and of humans' responsibilities in fostering those relationships, as well as unpack the tensions and opportunities for engaging with MtH temporalities through design. 

Reproductive experiences are deeply shaped by stigma, legislation, and intense emotional dimensions (Mohammadi 2016; Lusi et al. 2024; Stangl et al. 2013). These experiences are navigated within healthcare infrastructures that often prioritize standardized protocols over lived experience (Naghdali 2025; Ross 2020). As a result, dominant representations of reproductive health rely on sanitized and medicalized narratives that flatten complexity, reinforce normative reproductive timelines (Kessler 2008), and marginalize experiences that fall outside idealized notions of healthy or “normal” bodies. Structural barriers, delays in care, and persistent stigma erode trust in healthcare infrastructures and medical advice, as disclosure itself can feel emotionally risky (Fox 2025). Consequently, much of what is lived, felt, and negotiated remains difficult to articulate within existing representational frameworks (Dubriwny 2012). 

This 90-minute exploration adopts a speculative and performative approach, using dolls as material and symbolic media through which reproductive health experiences can be explored, deconstructed, and reimagined through play. Doll-based methods have been framed as design practices of perspective- and role-taking, facilitating empathetic engagement (Jakobsen, 2012). Indeed, Persona Dolls have been used in participatory and educational settings as culturally situated figures to support inclusion and challenge discrimination (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2022). Dolls help participants adopt users’ perspectives and explore scenarios during early ideation (Kagohashi et al., 2020). In therapeutic contexts, dolls support expression through play and making, offering material ways to articulate experiences that may be difficult to verbalize (Krystyniak, 2020).  

At DRS 2026, we invite participants to hack dolls to explore and represent reproductive health experiences, including menstruation, endometriosis, pregnancy, abortion, postpartum, menopause, and many more—across both first-person experiences and those encountered as loved ones or caregivers. We will provide second-hand dolls, props and craft materials, to support sketching, annotation, and reflective note-taking throughout the session. Participants will be invited to use the props to hack the dolls bodies and imagine, or stage interactions to explore bodily change, complications, care practices, unpredictability. We explore how hacking dolls can surface and document reproductive health experiences that resist articulation within dominant biomedical and service representations, extending prior workshops in reproductive health (Ahmed et al. 2025, Gamboa 2024, Hansson 2023, Kumar 2019, Lusi et al. 2024, Reime et al. 2022, Petterson 2025, Tuli 2025). We propose three interrelated thematic areas:  

• how reproductive health experiences such as pregnancy, abortion, surrogacy and more, unsettle the notion of a singular, bounded body, including the material, symbolic, and ethical implications of distributing risk across bodies.  
• how reproductive health stories are shaped collectively, for example in relationships with partners, families, and institutions.  
• how reproductive health experiences might intersect with other health conditions such as chronic illness and mental health, reflecting on bodily and psychological experiences that both shape and are shaped by reproductive health. 

Design landscapes are undergoing a profound transformation, exploring new pathways that embrace new kinds of materialities (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Murphy, et al., 2021; Tilman, 2015), led by alternative epistemologies that embrace post-phenomenological worldviews, such as more-than-human design (Giaccardi, et al., 2025). The rise of complex tailoring in applied design contexts, such as bespoke design (Farrugia, et al., 2023; Campbell, et al., 2003), orpersonalized prosthetics (Whatley, et al., 2023; Zhou, et al., 2023) creates an increasing potential to design for ultra-personalized solutions (Hasani et al., 2025; Ozdemir, et al., 2022), that can attune to post-phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty, 1968), and radical phenomenological (Seyler, 2013; Henry, 2012) understandings of sensitive and intimate qualities of lived body experiences. However, integrative approaches towards understanding lived body experiences through the lens of disability (Siebers, 2013; Mairs, 1986), that are provide a radical rethinking of bodily norms (Kuppers, 2022; 2013) are still under-explored in the context of design, human-computer interaction, robotics (Alonzo and Hassan, 2025; Xu, et al., 2025; Correia de Barros, 2022), or assistive technologies. The domain of Dance has a vast knowledge on choreography, movement practice, dance analysis, but also somatic work (Whatley, 2014; Block, 2021; Hanna, 1995; Eddy, 2009; Imus, 2020; Imus and Young, 2023; 

Joyce, 2023). Hybrid practices at the intersection of disability, dance and/or design (Fdili Alaoui, 2023; De Blanc, 2024; Loke and Robertson, 2010; Ferri and Leahy, 2025) can invite the potential to attend to the hidden layers of bodily experience during dance work, exploring the thresholds between knowledge domains. In our workshop, we shift the conversation from headspace to body-space, cultivating integrative approaches of collaborative design-making. We use the epistemological strategy for embodied knowing (Barbour, 2001) (Figure 1) as a reference framework, which integrates four knowledge paths: a path for scientific inquiry, for artistic inquiry, for the process of creation, and five epistemological positions (silence-received -subjective -procedural -constructed) (Belenky, et al, 1996). These knowledge paths converge at the centre, wherein action, performance, and illumination engage in ‘moving-with’ and ‘making-with’ practices through which interdisciplinary design teams can scaffold experiential, affective, and relational qualities of bodily mattering (Barad, 2007). We employ dance work to advance the knowledge base of ‘embodied knowing’ in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Robotics, and Assistive Technologies.