Conference Agenda

Design for older adults in Latin America remains strongly shaped by deficit-based and assistentialist assumptions that reduce aging to decline. Grounded in empowerment-oriented and resource-based design, this study explores how empowerment values can reframe the ideation of solutions for older people. Workshops conducted in five Colombian cities, supported by the Empowerment Nodes tool, enabled the identification of value expressions often overlooked in traditional design approaches. The findings culminated in the Empowerment Framework for Aging Design, a three-layered model composed of seven Silver Goals, fourteen Empowerment Values, and thirty-seven Enhancers, each paired with limiting counterparts that reveal how ageist paradigms subtly persist in design practice. The framework provides designers with a practical and reflective structure for generating situated, inclusive, and agency-oriented solutions. By grounding value construction in a Global South perspective, this study challenges dominant narratives of decline and expands the representational scope of aging in design.

Grassroots sports communities (GSCs) express and impact values through everyday design practices that build belonging, identity, and agency. Adopting qualitative multi-case analysis of representative GSCs (n=10), this study explores how these communities define and reclaim their values through design practice. Four modalities are identified: 1) narrative re-authoring, 2) aesthetic re-coding, 3) collaborative re-making, and 4) ethical re-grounding. These modalities constitute a dynamic process wherein design functions as a relational infrastructure for collective meaning-making. Based on these findings, the study generates a Gearbox Model of Value-Reclaiming Design, theorising how communal design agency is exercised through dynamic and recursive interplay. The model offers a transferable tool to understand how self-organised communities create and keep shared value through everyday design practice. This study defines these actions as 'designing for themselves', showing how community-driven design agency formed and supports more grounded forms of social innovation.

While Smart Home Surveillance Products (SHSPs), such as smart doorbell cameras, promise safety and convenience, they also reproduce asymmetrical power relations, privileging residents while exposing neighbours, visitors, and service workers to unconsented monitoring. Existing legal and technical responses focus on compliance and system design, yet overlook the interpersonal and affective dimensions of being watched. This paper presents a design-led inquiry into speculative re-imaginings of smart doorbells, aimed at surfacing and reflecting the hidden power dynamics embedded in everyday domestic interactions. We base this inquiry on an understanding of interpersonal power from the feminist theory of Matrix of Domination, allowing us to name three dimensions that facilitate power asymmetry: Awareness, Contestation and Care. We make a call for design to further explore smart home surveillance products not just as a systemic issue, but also as a lived experience of the power they facilitate.

Hackney Wick has long been regarded as an urban edgeland, marked by significant poverty since the 1860s, with distinctive topographic and socio- economic features. Yet in the early 2000s, it saw a rapid transformation into a creative space as artists began to occupy abandoned warehouses, building a live- work culture and quickly establishing itself as one of Europe’s most vibrant artistic communities. More recently, the development of the London Olympic infrastructure and government-led urban regeneration initiatives have accelerated gentrification and drive for social capital, whilst intensifying social exclusion and community marginalisation amongst disadvantaged communities. This paper integrates visual ethnography (graphic communication) and participatory methods (interviews) to unpack the transformation of place identity and reveal the social challenges driven by these changes. Finally, the paper reports on the community aspirations, offering insights for future design interventions and providing transferable knowledge applicable to other gentrifying urban contexts, particularly within London.

This article explores the notion of figurations as a theoretical and methodological concept to address tensions between time, presence, and practice in participatory design processes. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s and Rosi Braidotti’s work, we argue that figurations invite more situated practices that acknowledge the relational and material realities emerging in Global South contexts. Methodologically, the paper offers a situated ethnographic reading of participatory workshops conducted in Colombia, tracing the patterns and affections that shape collective action. We propose figurations as embodied, affective, and speculative counter-devices that foster political imagination and community agency in processes of social transformation. The paper contributes to current debates on decolonizing and situated design by positioning figurations as both analytical and generative concepts for re-imaging participation.

Sharing communities challenge traditional models of ownership by allowing their members to temporarily access resources such as DIY tools, workshop spaces, and musical instruments. Although designers and design researchers have previously involved sharing communities in design, there are additional opportunities to engage sharing communities in speculating about their possible futures. This study invited 13 participants from various local sharing communities in Scotland to collaboratively speculate on how developments in technology, infrastructure, the economy, politics, and social and cultural aspects might influence their community sharing practices in the long term. By examining their future scenarios, we gain insight into the possible futures of community sharing and the opportunities for design and research. These include designing shared resources that support community values, amplifying community voices in public-sector design, creating infrastructure to connect communities, and fostering a sharing culture at the societal level.

The digital transformation of museums is reshaping how culture and knowledge are shared, but it also risks creating new accessibility barriers, deepening the digital divide for people with disabilities. Co-design has emerged as a promising approach to embed inclusive participation and mitigate these risks. However, research on its application within this context remains fragmented, needing to address different disability groups and assistive technologies equally. To synthesise knowledge and learn from current practices, this study systematically reviews co-design research within the broader cultural heritage (GLAMs) context. The review maps co-design processes, tools, and technologies, analysing the key benefits and challenges for engaging different disability groups. Based on this analysis, we propose a systematic framework for inclusive digital museum practices, offering practical guidance for museum professionals and designers and a structured agenda for inclusive design researchers. Emerging trends such as AI-supported co-design and a growing focus on empowerment are also discussed.

Game jams have increasingly been adopted as innovative learning approaches to explore and address complex cultural and societal challenges across formal (e.g., university) and informal (e.g., GLAM) educational contexts. However, there remains a lack of pedagogical models and materials that align learning goals, activities, and assessments constructively for such events. Based on an analysis of four cultural game jams (2024-2025) involving 168 young people (aged 14-32) held in an art museum, this paper proposes a pedagogical design model grounded in systematisation and adaptability as core design principles. The model promotes hybrid and inclusive participation that connects young people, museum professionals, creative industry experts, and educators across disciplinary boundaries and digital and physical environments, advancing design as an innovative educational practice within GLAM’s digital transformation. Its primary contribution is a practical pedagogical model for designing and facilitating jam-based learning spaces that strengthen collaborative and cultural innovation across formal and informal contexts.

Today, the growing demand for sound in shaping multisensory museum experiences requires exhibition designers to acquire relevant sound knowledge. However, designers often find it difficult to identify applicable insights across the vast and interdisciplinary fields of acoustics and sound studies. Thus, this paper conducts twelve semi-structured interviews with experts in acoustics and sound-related disciplines. The findings establish a basic sound knowledge framework comprising four thematic areas with related concepts: fundamentals of acoustics, sound and space, sound and audience experience, and sound control and technology. In addition, the paper explores interdisciplinary communication and collaboration in sound design practices within exhibition productions. These discussions reveal the underexplored potential of sound in museums and underscore the importance of fostering sound sensitivity and collaborative methods in design education, in order to support designers in creating more experimental sonic experiences in museums.

This research explores how design mediates the digital transformation of cultural heritage through hybrid and multisensory installations in archaeological contexts. Using the Case Romane del Celio in Rome as a pilot site for the European project HeritAdapt, it aims to redistribute visitor flows and promote sustainable tourism by enhancing the intangible value of minor sites. The study contributes to the post-digital museology debate by framing design as a critical, participatory practice operating across physical and virtual dimensions, fostering collaboration among engineering, management and restoration. Combining Service Design, Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence technologies, qualitative research and iterative prototyping guided the creation of an integrated experience along the entire visitor journey. The approach seeks symbiotic interventions that ensure long-term sustainability, stakeholder involvement, storytelling-based engagement, heritage preservation and promotion. Following a testing phase, the project will develop toolkits and guidelines for GLAMs, enabling adaptable, accessible, and context-grounded digital interventions in heritage scenarios.

Oral heritage is inherently unstable: unlike written records, it persists through repetition and reinterpretation rather than through the conservation of a stable object. In post-digital cultural heritage contexts, safeguarding oral memories therefore cannot be reduced to storing audio files; it requires the socio-technical conditions to be designed that make voices interpretable, discoverable, and reactivatable. This paper develops and applies a three-phase framework ̶ Listening / Composing / Amplifying ̶ as an analytical and methodological lens for tracing how oral material is collected, translated into an questionable structure, and returned to the public through differentiated formats. The paper grounds the framework in the CHANGES programme and in the case study Around the Clock, outlining the project’s selection and validation steps; its qualitative corpus of oral and archival materials; and a multi-format public restitution. We argue that “designing the echo” reframes digital oral archives as infrastructures of reactivation for Futuring Digital Cultural Heritage.

This project reimagines tartan as a data-physicalization of Scots Gaelic. Extending ‘Radical Gaels’, a psycho-geographic soundscape that maps the identity, geographies and material history of Contemporary Gaels. Weaving Visual Language translates Scots waulking songs and geographies through cryptographic mapping to weave structure, using a Python-based binary matrix encoding system, illustrating the loss of Gaelic oral traditions. The resulting textiles act as linguistic archives and objects of cultural dissent. The project proposes a framework for museums to engage audiences through preserving information within the artefact itself, rather than exterior labelling. Theoretically, this work develops the idea of ‘culturally constrained physicalization’, where cultural legibility, provenance and the anthropology of making are treated as primary constraints that may legitimately override data fidelity. We propose a new methodology to combine the material and immaterial object, creating embodiment. It demonstrates how material–digital artefacts can preserve and perform intangible heritage, communicating the anthropology of making.

This study examines how present-day smell encounters stimulate participants to reflect on possible futures and those scents that are emergent or susceptible to becoming transformed or lost altogether. We describe our speculative design setup whereby participants assumed the persona of an olfactory researcher from the year 2100, armed with a smell passport and set of vials, and tasked with time-traveling back to 2025 to capture scent samples. Smellwalk observations span three themes: environmental awareness of scent, the functional role of future scents, and social and cultural dimensions of olfaction. We discuss those scents which participants found to be particularly salient or at risk of becoming extinct, along with those which were perceived as 'natural', culturally relevant, and worthy of preservation. This work positions the smellwalk as a novel sensory method for doing active futuring research, while contributing to an emerging set of approaches for facilitating smellscape experiences as knowledge contributions.

Disappearing tacit knowledge in high-end craft industries and expert industries, stresses the need to examine the workings of crafting to maintain and gain competitive advantage. To pursue this study, we have been conducting interviews with craft professionals and apprentices to gather insight into their rapport with their practices. Using quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods, we have identified specific moments of a craftsperson’s discourse when relating to their practice, revealing distinct emotional states during the interaction with the material. These findings support enquiry into the craftsperson’s emotional states during the craft practice, to expand knowledge transfer.

At the early design stage, users’ verbalized thoughts lack in-depth analysis due to technological and cost constraints, hindering designers' creative future design. This study presents the results of a co-creation workshop with eight designers. Taking autonomous eVTOL flight as an example, this study developed the VR eVTOL cabin—an immersive experiential space where participants experienced story scenarios spanning boarding, flight, and landing. Participants’ verbalized thoughts about safety are collected through the think-aloud method. Subsequently, this study presents the reflective inference card to help participants comprehensively analyze the triggers behind these thoughts, their mental mechanisms, and propose design strategies for enhancing perceived safety. The results show that verbalized thoughts, as raw experiential knowledge, can be transformed into static and dynamic experiential knowledge. We hope that this method can help designers achieve multi-dimensional creativity at the early stage of design.

This article introduces Attuned Design Practice (ADP) as an umbrella term for studying embodied knowledge at the intersection of artistic and scientific inquiry. It addresses an epistemological gap across design and human–computer interaction, dance and somatics, and disability studies. Building on an existing framework of embodied knowing, we examine domain-specific traditions and expose the threshold between these knowledge domains. We propose Open Rehearsals as experimental settings for co-performance among human and non-human actors. Within this context, attunement is introduced as a performative materiality that enables relational, situated, and operational forms of understanding across disciplines. An eighteen-month field study in design, performing arts, and engineering reveals recurring dynamics and patterns of interaction. Rather than defining a fixed framework, ADP is presented as a sensitizing approach, offering provisional vocabularies and analytical entry points for future research toward inclusive and transferable embodied knowledge.

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). Visual mapping and temporal-bracketing analyses reveal three experience-mediated reasoning modes of alternating exploration and consolidation. The findings advance understanding of experiential design cognition gained from practical industrial experiences, offering insights for adaptive AI-supported design tools that respond to shifting cognitive modes, and new pathways for structured design thinking education.

This study examines critical feedback shared by arts festival participants on social media. These posts, as a unique form of reflective user experience data, can spark dialogue and spread widely, helping to identify potential needs and key service touchpoints in the design of cultural and creative activities. Using purposive sampling, 104 relevant posts were collected and analysed thematically based on Buchanan’s four orders of design as a framework. The findings indicate that participant discontent stems from overlapping conflicts across different design orders, characterised by a lack of authenticity, value conflicts, and service limitations. Furthermore, the study emphasises the pivotal mediating role of creators in reconciling these orders, offering empirical insights for the experience design of cultural and creative activities.

The shift from analogue to digital-first government service delivery positions design as a central gatekeeper of welfare access and civic recognition. However, these systems frequently act upon blanket assumptions regarding trust, digital literacy, and engagement, inadvertently marginalizing the most vulnerable of society. This paper examines how digital welfare interfaces produce forms of non-response, interpreted both as user disengagement and systemic erasure. Grounded in a qualitative, design-led study with marginalized young adults in Ireland’s Youthreach programme, alongside the perspectives of frontline support and service providers. The study documents how these users navigate and resist platforms that presume universal digital competence. Their experienced ambivalence exposes the limitations of public-sector digital transformations, driven primarily by efficiency. In response, the paper advocates integrating an ethics of care and attentiveness into design practice. This approach would treat non-participation and uncertainty as meaningful data. Thus, fostering the development of more human, trustworthy, and inclusive digital systems.

The implementation of e-participation platforms in policymaking has removed spatial and temporal barriers to citizen engagement; however, digitalisation also introduces new challenges which undermine democratic values and risk participation outcomes becoming symbolic and superficial. In this paper, we conducted a narrative literature review and examined barriers in e-participation through the framework of narrow and broad sense tokenism. Through a theoretical discussion, we position participatory design (PD) as a steward in addressing tokenistic participation, focusing on PD’s notion of creating carefully designed participation ‘spaces’ and ‘approaches’ that foster more democratic, deliberative, and inclusive forms of digital participation, thereby countering tokenistic tendencies.

Applying participatory design in the public sector is both challenged and fuelled by the diversity and dynamism of changing populations, particularly with institutions looking to engage and integrate their migrant residents. We examine the capabilities of Participatory Design (PD) in a Finnish municipality, providing empirical evidence of the frictions and constraints of institutioning efforts towards equitable participation. Through the lens of institutioning, we analyse the political and social nature of institutional participatory approaches by the municipality. By engaging NGOs as civic intermediaries in between migrants and the public sector, we unpack the metacultural discourses, institutional strategies and policies that may promote or hinder participatory efforts by the city. Analysing the frictions in institutioning participation, we posit learnings for how PD practitioners can understand and mitigate the related challenges.

Human-Centred Design (HCD) is increasingly proposed as a way to align government policies and services with citizens’ needs and capabilities. However, embedding HCD in everyday government practice remains challenging. This paper reports on a 2.5-year longitudinal action research study within the CGDC programme, where eight national agencies jointly redesigned debt-repayment services. The study combines observations, interviews and workshop data to analyse barriers and enablers for HCD practices in a politically and organisationally complex environment. Findings identify six recurring mechanisms: 1) Normalising user involvement, 2) Organising mandate for user needs, 3) Building multidisciplinary collaboration, 4) Creating facts on the ground, 5) Introducing recurring windows for user-centred policy change, and 6) Re-aligning the system around the citizen experience. These mechanisms show what stimulates and prevents the anchoring of HCD in government organisations, and how HCD in governments can move from innovation labs into the governmental “line”.

This article presents a methodological model for innovation in public services centred on a deep understanding of service users’ expectations and needs. The model was developed through a University–State co‑design process involving the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana and Chile’s Government Lab (Laboratorio de Gobierno). An applied research and collaborative design methodology was employed, using a mixed‑methods (qualitative and quantitative) approach. Data were collected through semi‑structured interviews and documentary review, complemented by co‑creation workshops and expert validation sessions. The resulting model enables the identification and closure of gaps between institutional perceptions and the public’s actual needs. Although its application is still at a pilot stage, its comparative use is envisaged across public agencies in Chile and Latin America as a pathway to strengthening participatory and inclusive governance.

As public sectors worldwide increasingly adopt design-driven approaches to address complex public service and management challenges, existing research predominantly focuses on citizen-facing experiences while overlooking the critical importance of internal ecosystems as the core of service delivery. This paper examines the Nanhai Bus Station Design Consultation Project in China as a case study, exploring how systematic design interventions originating from within can drive holistic public service innovation through the internal ecosystem. The research conducted in-depth participatory action research through blended research, co-design, and stakeholder engagement methodologies. Addressing challenges such as fragmented internal workflows, ambiguous division of responsibilities, and outdated service facilities, the project developed an integrated suite of design interventions. Evaluation findings demonstrate that these design interventions significantly enhance internal efficiency, staff experience, and passenger satisfaction. The research proposing an ‘inside-out’ public service design paradigm, providing a replicable practical model for sustainable governance and systemic transformation within public transport departments.

South Africa is a country which is facing significant textile waste problem. High volumes of second-hand products are entering the marketplace and represent an opportunity to SMEs and micro-businesses. Clothes to Good (CTG), a South African charitable organisation, are working to offset this challenge by creating upcycling programmes which repurpose these products through micro-business models designed to empower mothers of neurodivergent children. Neurodiversity is rising in South Africa and sensory stimuli products are an opportunity to repurpose second-hand clothing to products to support these consumers. This research represents the pilot study of a larger project investigating micro-business programmes creating weighted products from upcycled materials in South Africa. Using an exploratory methodology employing in-depth interviews with two key stakeholders in CTG this work highlights several barriers or areas of concern when implementing these programmes: 1) design expertise, 2) textile challenges, 3) scalability concerns.

The transition toward a more circular economy is closely linked to the extent to which fashion brands incorporate sustainability principles into their retail communication, and operational practices. This paper explores circularity strategies within the fashion industry through a comparative case study analysis and data were collected through a systematic desktop review of publicly available sources. The analytical framework is structured around three key themes (Advocacy, Actions, and Transparency) through which brands engage consumers, implement circular operations, and communicate measurable impact specifically within the distribution and consumption phase. Additionally, the study discusses the role of Design as an enabler of circularity, influencing material choices, product longevity, and systems for reuse and recycling. Findings indicate that while advocacy and collaboration are widespread, transparency and measurable reporting remain limited. Overall, the analysis reflects a sector that is developing its retailing and engagement practices while exhibiting variability in metric standardization and disclosure.

While the fashion industry has accepted, conceptually at least, the benefits of circularity in the context of products and supply chains, little has been written about circularity within the wider context of fashion store design and fit-out. Yet, these aspects of planning and operating retail outlets are central to an industry sector which significantly contributes to local and global economies. This paper comprises an integrated review of academic and industry literature to form themes for future research development. The review revealed four key knowledge gaps: a paucity of data to understand how circularity is implemented in fashion retail design practice; how to measure the effectiveness of circularity related to retail design and fit-out; how and why circularity in retail design and fit-out could reflect a retail brand’s approach to product design and management; and how the changing role of physical stores might influence circularity in fashion retail fit-out design.

In an era increasingly shaped by consumers’ search for meaningful and emotionally engaging experiences, the concept of restorative retail is emerging as a key paradigm in retail and service design. This semi-systematic literature review synthesizes theoretical and empirical research across marketing, environmental psychology, and architecture to examine how physical retail environments can promote psychological restoration and well-being. Drawing on foundational frameworks—Attention Restoration Theory (ART), biophilia, and servicescape theory—the review identifies central design principles such as nature integration, sensory harmony, and spatial openness that underpin restorative experiences. Although evidence supports the restorative potential of retail environments, empirical validation remains limited, particularly across cultural contexts and longitudinal designs. The review concludes by outlining priorities for future research and positioning restorative retail as both a commercial innovation and a societal imperative for enhancing human well-being in an increasingly digitalized world.

Hong Kong’s specialty coffee shops embody a paradox in the city’s cultural landscape. They are products of consumption with atmospheres curated to attract customers while many also draw on “Old Hong Kong” material culture to invoke a sense of care for the past. This paper explores the tension between consumption and responsibility by investigating how coffee shops in Hong Kong mobilise adaptive reuse design practices.

Building on a previous survey of 706 coffee shops, the study identifies four interlinked modes of practice: material reuse, spatial staging, narrative framing, and participatory engagement. These modes enact forms of restorative design, revealing how responsibility emerges across multiple dimensions. By situating these findings within conversations on heritage, nostalgia, and responsibility in design, the paper interrogates the role of cafés in negotiating culture. It demonstrates how these spaces can become sites of restorative practice, in a city driven by rapid urbanisation.

As global cities become increasingly transnational, retail environments have become key sites where mobile publics negotiate belonging through spatial and commercial experience. While transnational consumers are widely theorised, the spatial implications of their participation in global retail remain underexplored. This conceptual paper draws from transnational and diaspora studies to argue that retail design operates as a transcultural interface where familiarity and difference coexist, shaping plural modes of belonging. It proposes the concept, ‘Transnationally Resonant Retail Design’, a conceptual framework outlining how affective resonance, cultural mediation, and social recognition foster civic belonging within commercial spaces. These principles are illustrated by the author’s travel vignettes, drawing from their diasporic positionality to relate resonant and dissonant experiences of retail environments. By reframing retail as socially-responsive infrastructure, the research positions design as an active agent in cultivating belonging across borders, extending global retail discourse beyond localisation toward a more inclusive understanding of transnational spaces.

This paper revisits inclusive design by moving beyond its traditional emphasis on individual accessibility, which tends to overlook the relational dimension of inclusion. It proposes a paradigm of trustworthy connectedness, in which inclusion is conceptualised not merely as individual participation, but as the facilitation of relational ties between the designer or researcher and the individual or group. Inclusive design often relies on participatory methods, yet when participation and control become central, they risk silencing the very groups these approaches seek to include. Rather than participation or decision control, trustworthy connectedness, expressed through the designer’s competence and warmth, is central to an inclusive approach. This conceptual paper introduces a framework to distinguish an inclusive approach from a participatory approach and outlines an agenda for future research. This shift invites a reimagination of how inclusion is understood and practised in design research.

This paper presents a disabled researcher’s reflection on communication and power relations experienced through direct participation in an Inclusive Design Workshop in Tokyo. It explores how designers collaborated with welfare facility communities to develop inclusive ideas and practices. The study conceptualises inclusion as a relational process that extends beyond accessibility compliance, shaped through communication, emotion, and care. Through a reflexive ethnography that combined participant observation and multimodal analysis, four key themes emerged: Communication Barriers, Effective Communication, Effective Operation of Design Decisions, and Responding to Communication Strategies. Insights suggest that institutional hierarchies and emotional asymmetries often acted to hinder participation but could also open up opportunities for mutual learning and role reconfiguration. The paper argues that genuine inclusion arises not from removing all barriers but from sustained relational engagement, redefining disability as a source of shared and situated knowledge and ethical collaboration within inclusive design practice.

As new forms of bodily vulnerability emerge, personal objects play a crucial role in preserving identity and protecting everyday routines. In the context of home care, the domestic environment becomes a site of ongoing adjustment, where objects are assessed and modified in response to changing physical abilities. This paper proposes a reflection on the potential of inclusive design when applied to the home environment, and its role in supporting ageing at home. Drawing on observations of domestic situations and interviews conducted with residents and healthcare professionals, we aim to reveal the tension between assistance and autonomy, between the adaptability of objects and the valorisation of the elderly’s capacity, while developing a critical perspective on the role of the designer — situated between supporting vulnerability and recognising the situated knowledge of inhabitants.

This study explores inclusive co-learning strategies in transnational design education, focusing on Chinese students enrolled in a joint program jointly delivered by Beijing Jiaotong University and Lancaster University within China. These students complete their entire undergraduate studies domestically, without the opportunity to immerse themselves in an English-speaking or multicultural environment. As a result, they often rely on translation tools to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers when engaging with British pedagogy. Drawing on classroom observations, student interviews, and reflective teaching practices, the study proposes an Inclusive Co-Learning Framework that integrates linguistic scaffolding and cultural mediation to foster language development, cultural understanding, and creative producing. By analyzing the “localized international classroom” model, the study expands the discourse on transnational education (TNE) and demonstrates how inclusive pedagogical approaches can bridge global curricula and local learning realities, cultivating intercultural awareness and design thinking skills among Chinese students.

Repair initiatives are promoted as policy instruments to foster sustainable consumption practices within circular economy agendas. However, recent studies question their ability to achieve broader societal impact, noting that social inclusion remains limited. The study addresses this challenge by employing a participatory design approach to actively explore fields of action to enhance social inclusion in repair initiatives in Germany. Drawing on a literature review, we first conducted five expert interviews with repair initiative representatives, as well as 53 short interviews with visitors and people who had not previously visited a repair initiative, identifying barriers and opportunities for improvement. Second, we facilitated three participatory workshops with stakeholders to design possible interventions. Through its participatory design approach, our study supported the participating initiatives in reflecting on barriers to social inclusion in order to create more accessible repair spaces. Additionally, the analysis offers methodological insights into how social inclusion shapes circular transitions.

This paper examines how aesthetics can foster inclusion in everyday urban infrastructures, using recycling rooms in residential areas as a case study. Drawing on a design ethnographic study of 27 municipal recycling facilities, three interconnected dimensions – access aesthetics, communicative aesthetics, and spatial aesthetics – were identified. Environments that are neglected, dark, and smelly tend to exclude residents, while those designed with aesthetic considerations foster a sense of shared responsibility and well-being.

By linking perceptions of aesthetics in recycling rooms to broader debates in universal design, this paper highlights how aesthetic qualities influence participation, social connection, and environmental practices. These findings contribute to the theoretical and practical agenda of inclusive design, positioning aesthetics as a dimension for more sustainable everyday recycling environments.

This paper investigates how speculative sound design can employ metaphors as boundary objects to mediate shared understanding across users and designers. Because sound is ephemeral and difficult to describe, participants often rely on metaphor, drawing on nature, human behaviour, or emotion. We surveyed 72 people online to respond to textual prompts with descriptions of futuristic sound objects, and analysed their responses using several methods. We present results and outline suggestions for re-deploying sonic metaphors as design prompts, and discuss their potential to support sound design.

In a ReSilence (S+T+Arts) residency dedicated to the consequences of urban soundscapes on human movement, 36 sound-files and their spectral analyses were considered as examples of auditory intrusiveness (intended as a pre-conscious effect, anticipating conscious behaviors). These 36 sounds were used in three modules: a pilot experiment to study the influence of auditory intrusiveness on human movement; an installation, where the sound-files were triggered by the participants' movement qualities – moreover, their spectral analyses served as prompts to an image-generating GAN network; in the design of a smartphone app, where the 36 analyses allowed to study the spectral features to counteract, in order to lower the soundscape's intrusiveness (generating a background to change surrounding sounds' salience). Unified by the use of the 36 sounds, the three modules recreate the complexity of interactions between the first unconscious bodily reactions to intrusive sounds, and the subsequent unpredictability of behaviors arising from them.

Through Tower of Babel, a spatialized sound installation based on field recordings at the U.S.–Mexico border, we examine how sonic boundary objects translate bureaucratic infrastructures into embodied, perceptual encounters. The installation treats borders as culturally constructed virtual spaces rather than geometric lines, enabling movement across sonic channels and challenging fixed notions of data and identity. We argue that sound-driven artifacts can function as boundary objects in design contexts by mediating knowledge, exposing hierarchies, and fostering collective sense-making. These artifacts support cooperation across diverse stakeholders through sonic habitability: auditory conditions that reframe relations among human, technological, and environmental actors. While auditory perception enables shared recognition of structured and atmospheric information, the experiential knowledge of our sonic memory enables the same acoustic events to acquire different meanings depending on context and setting of the listener.

Sound-driven design requires shared objects to bridge disciplinary divides and support collaboration between diverse expertise. Boundary Objects and Intermediary Objects typically fulfil this need, yet the ephemerality of sound is in apparent conflict with the stability needed for this boundary work. However, we argue for extending the object beyond the ephemeral sound wave to encompass tools, user interfaces, methods, and lexicons that provide material persistence. To support this we develop an analytical framework combining BO and IO properties and apply it to a selection of sound design tools in the literature. We argue that the required interpretive flexibility and perceived stability arises through the inherent plasticity of listening: different stakeholders actively construct stable, relevant meaning through situated interpretation. We propose the term "Soundary Objects" for artefacts and processes where listening's plasticity is the key mechanism enabling boundary work in sound-driven design, suggesting directions for designing effective socio-technical mediation tools.

Soul Song Sensorium examines the negotiation between performer, technologist, and technology in the co-creation of a sound-driven wearable instrument. Initially imagined as a system translating gesture and voice into live sonic layers, the project evolved through iterative exchanges between what the performer envisioned, what was technically achievable, and what emerged unpredictably in practice. The technology frequently acted as a third actor whose behaviours, limitations, and resistances shaped both creative intention and aesthetic outcome. Rather than progressing through linear feature accumulation, the work advanced through attunement—paring back complexity, refining mappings, and learning to work with the system’s tendencies. Through this process, the Sensorium became a sonic boundary object mediating between embodied practice, technical design, and artistic interpretation. Our analysis identifies six interrelated themes characterising this negotiation: intention to attunement, listening as translation, technology as co-performer, evolving design threads, costume and space as ecology, and embodied co-authorship.

Prevailing accounts of co-design remain anchored in Western formal practice. This study repositions Indian folk music as a culturally embedded site of collaborative design. Drawing on Murphy’s anthropology of design and a grounded theory approach, we analysed 1,621 coded segments from interviews with 23 first-generation folk artists across 14 Indian states. We show that musicians function as cultural designers who translate lived experience and shared moral economies into adaptive musical forms through participatory routines: community observation, collective ideation, performance-based prototyping, and iterative calibration through audience feedback. We formalise these dynamics in the Cultural Co-Design Flow model, illuminating how layered semantics, vernacular resources, and formal architectures mediate continuity and situated change. Participants prioritised social transformation over commercial success, foregrounding alternative value systems and collective authorship. We argue for folk music as “co-designed cultural artifact,” with implications for decolonial design theory, plural intellectual-property regimes, and policy frameworks that sustain creative ecosystems.

To innovate stakeholder value, designers, business strategists, and marketers rely on shared understanding to co-create value. While co-creation is established in strategic design, practitioners use related terms interchangeably, including co-creation and Mass Customisation (MC). While conflicting terminology enables stakeholder participation, resources and knowledge are fragmented, obstructing a unified practice and limiting shared understanding of value creation. This paper clarifies co-creation and MC terms, explains why practitioners interchange terminology, and examines how stakeholder value and disciplinary perspectives shape their usage. We analysed 828 academic papers across the design, business, and innovation disciplines, focusing on commonly confused lexicons. We reveal that designers, business strategists, and marketers hold incompatible interpretations —from product creation to strategic value —because each discipline values participation differently, confining fashion practices to existing, repetitive models that limit innovation. To solve this conundrum, we propose Inter-Poly-Creation (IPC), which unifies terminology and bridges participation as a continuum of collaboration.

Problems are not what they used to be. The complexity and scale of today’s challenges require a fundamentally different response from organisations. In this paper we will argue that they effectively need to move from ’problem-solving’ to a design approach. And that they need to move away from a ’one-off’ approach to innovation to creating interventions that move complex system to a better state. This requires a space and infrastructure for continuous innovation. For a model on how to achieve this, we turn to the practices of directors of creative agencies, as they shape environments for ongoing creation. The dynamics of this ’Studio Model’ will be illustrated in a case study of a municipality that has adopted this way of working.

This article discusses an attention-based view of the firm ABV in the context of situated organisational decision making and strategising at the intersection of design and management. To encourage the articulation of contradictions among professionals in strategy making, a speculative approach is proposed with alternative games. An open conversation on the assumptions guiding attention in strategising may benefit from diverse design approaches that create attentional engagement to improve neglected user situations. Harmful consequences among (senior) users of modern technologies are used as examples.

This Laboratorio de Futuros held in Mar del Plata (Argentina), brought together architecture and design professors and master’s students from Argentina, Chile, and Colombia to explore an Epimethean approach to design—acting after rather than ahead of action, embracing delay, reflection, and care. Rooted in voices and material practices from the Global South, participants engaged in embodied exercises fostering inter-learning through reciprocity and complementarity. We explored the territory holistically with our whole bodies, attuning to wind, sand, sea, and insects, and reframing design as the enactment of relational infrastructures through affective attunement and planetary excesses. Our bodies became sensors, registering the relational texture of the shared environment. As speculative outcomes, we collectively imagined temporary and affective structures that challenge anthropocentric and disciplinary boundaries—Radical Pavilions for interspecies coexistence and cosmopolitical encounters. Through gestures of unmaking and care, the workshop positioned design as a situated, reparative practice that weaves futures of shared dwelling.

This paper explores speculation otherwise by tracing how speculative potential emerges from the very first encounters of design research. Rather than viewing speculation as a designer-led projection of possible futures, we propose a shift toward understanding speculation as something to be recognized within already unfolding worlds. Drawing on Tsing’s notion of contamination and Ingold’s concept of correspondence, we show how design engagements evolve through entanglements with speculative forces circulating in the everyday: through material residues, infrastructural rhythms, social negotiations, and more-than-human relations. Through slow alignments, tentative invitations, failed funding applications and walks through neighbourhood sites, we describe how our own imaginaries became entangled with worlds of urban transformation. We argue that what is often framed as a pre-project phase is already a site of speculative formation. Speculation otherwise thus positions design as attuned participation in unfolding situations, engaging not by projecting futures, but by corresponding with speculative possibilities already in motion.

This paper explores how mechanical jewellery can serve as an Epimethean design practice that rethinks human–machine relationships through care, hesitation, and affective engagement. Drawing from post-anthropocentric design discourse and new materialist theory, the research investigates how low-tech, playful, and speculative prototypes can undo conventional narratives of technological progress. Through a practice-based workshop conducted at Fringe Arts Bath 2025, the study examines how wearable artefacts exhibiting unpredictable motion provoke emotional response and relational awareness in participants. The findings suggest that mechanical jewellery can operate as a modest yet generative medium for staying with the trouble of human–machine entanglement, foregrounding absurd materiality, multispecies sympoiesis, and embodied reflection as critical modes of post-anthropocentric design.

Design in Mexico, often disconnected from the local industry value chain, has long relied on arte popular as a self-referential cultural narrative to add value, establish identity, and find its “substance.” While this practice stems from a genuine search for rootedness and authenticity, it frequently leads to stagnation, raises concerns about cultural appropriation, neo-colonial dynamics between designers and craftspeople, neglect of functionality, and lack of innovation. This paper critiques this and proposes a framework for defining functionality, rooted in Mexican philosophy as an alternative value system. Drawing on thinkers such as Emilio Uranga and Grupo Hiperión’s work, it identifies parallels that reveal a more nuanced understanding of the Mexican condition, marked by ambiguity, contradiction, and in-betweenness. Concepts such as relajo, zozobra, and accidentality are reconsidered as epistemological foundations that challenge modernist rationalism. From this perspective emerges Función-Nepantla, redefining functionality beyond utilitarian logic, as illustrated through La Caja de Toques.

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 these processes, demonstrating how design actively redistributes value across socio-technical contexts. This contribution advances a more nuanced understanding of value as dynamic, contested, and relational, highlighting the need for more reflexive and responsible approaches to data-driven design.

Design for Values (DfV) offers a robust approach for embedding values into technology, yet practitioners often face a “principles-to-practice gap” due to a lack of methodological guidance. To bridge this gap, an operational framework is developed, connecting abstract design processes with concrete practical methods. Through a systematic literature review, this research identifies 47 specific methods that explicitly support DfV practice. These methods are analysed from four dimensions—source discipline, methodological nature, operational characteristic, and practical purpose—to map the current DfV methodological landscape. This analysis informs the construction of a six-stage framework integrated with the Double Diamond model: discover, manage conflicts, conceptualise, translate, verify, and monitor. The 47 methods are mapped to their corresponding stages in the framework. The resulting “method map” enhances the practical guidance of DfV by providing clear navigation and highlighting critical methodological gaps for future research directions.

Value has been conceptualized differently across disciplines, while the negotiation of values is inherent to design collaboration. In many multidisciplinary design projects, professionals struggle to articulate or align values due to disciplinary differences, limited value awareness, and imbalanced value prioritisation, which can lead to communication difficulties or even collaboration failure. Reconciling diverse values and underlying motivations is therefore essential. This paper explores how structured dialogue can help participants in multidisciplinary design teams work towards value reconciliation. Using a qualitative approach, six structured value dialogues involving twenty participants were conducted, followed by twenty post-dialogue interviews to capture participants’ reflections. The findings reveal that structured value dialogue helped participants become more aware of their own values as well as those of others. By recognizing value differences and reinterpreting value tensions, participants developed a basis for value reconciliation, thereby fostering more conscious and cooperative communication within their multidisciplinary design practice.

The adoption of generative AI in heritage storytelling has revealed hidden tensions among stakeholders due to competing values. To investigate how design research can negotiate values differences, we conducted a three-session qualitative study surrounding the “Kawagoe Festival” in a bottom-up, three stakeholder-group setting. Session 1 used photo-elicitation to ground memories; Session 2 adopted human–AI image co-creation to explore past representations and speculative futures; while Session 3 facilitated reflective discussion. Grounded theory analysis identifies three values shaping GenAI-mediated co-creation: authenticity as a symbolic baseline, vividness as the enrichment of remembered details, and engagement as enabler of iterative, playful participation. Stakeholders balanced these values differently, thereby demonstrating AI mediation’s multiple affordances. GenAI promoted value transparency, yet also led to group polarisation when competing values such as authenticity and engagement collided. The study contributes a framework for value negotiation and offers design implications for socially engaged AI.

Local news sustains democratic life by connecting citizens to community issues and fostering public deliberation. Yet the global phenomenon of Local News Desertification—the decline of trustworthy local media—has weakened civic discourse, civic knowledge, and collective belonging in local areas. Citizen-participatory journalism enables citizens to report and interpret local issues; however, conventional newsroom hierarchies and insufficient support for community participants without formal journalistic training hinder its democratic potential. This study frames that tension as a Participatory Design (PD) problem concerning power and imbalanced agency in sociotechnical news systems. Through a PD process, the study develops a citizen–AI participatory journalism model that enables citizens to democratically produce, verify, and publish local news with AI-assisted support and humans' collaborative judgment. The findings contribute a framework for Community News Resilience and a value-sensitive design approach that democratizes local information ecosystems through citizen–AI collaboration for future participatory journalism.

Conventional impact assessment tools can overlook subtle sensory, cognitive and interpersonal transformations experienced in participatory design and making interventions by focusing on metrics, often retrospectively, rather than facilitating shared dialogue-based learning. The process of designing the QUILT toolkit discussed in this paper is anchored in a values-based approach that aims to prioritise participant-led narratives of discovery and change. Working with seven researcher-practitioners undertaking active projects in varied interdisciplinary and socially engaged design and making contexts, and their participant groups, we designed and tested questions, presented as a set of cards, for prompting dialogue and co-reflection. Findings highlight a) the significance of moving away from extractive transactions towards reciprocity in generating deeper understandings of impact, and b) the importance of attending to impact emerging at different stages of a project. The paper concludes that designing for impact should aim to be a reciprocal process maximising learning for both participants and researchers.

This paper addresses the question of aesthetics in museums. It does so starting from the work of Hilde Hein, a philosopher who posited that the shifts museums have gone through from classical to new museology has estranged them from their core role in society and brought them too close to other forms of entertainment. This assumption will prompt a discussion on the role technology plays in museums, beyond museum practice but more fundamentally into what the meaning of using technology in museums is and of what the implications of this use are, also from an aesthetical perspective.

What if the future of digital design in museums isn’t found in cutting-edge institutions, but in the often-overlooked ecologies of regional natural history collections? This paper repositions small regional museums not as lagging behind in digital transformation, but as fertile grounds for exploring more-than-human digital design. Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project between the Portsmouth Natural History Museum and the University of Portsmouth, we reflect on the interactive experiences using low-cost holograms and motion-capture avatars as mediators between human and non-human actors within museum ecologies.

Giving collections voices and personalities engaged audiences, yet in attempting to become more-than-human, the collections instead became more human. This tension exposes the limitations of digital museology, where such experiences risk reinforcing anthropocentric ways of knowing. We argue that genuine more-than-human design requires play, provocation, discomfort, and multisensory encounters that decentre the visitor, reframing digital transformation as multispecies collaboration that is not post-digital but posthuman.

In the context of a digitally mature world in which the relationship between Cultural Heritage and digital technologies is under re-evaluation, this paper critically rethink the use of digital technologies for preserving and valorising Intangible Cultural Heritage through a decolonising lens. A criticall literature review is provided and a comparative analysis is conducted on EC funded reserachprojects in order to depict from rhetoric misuses to real transformative uses of digital technologies, in avoiding excluding actors depending on their gender, cultural inclination or digital literacy, generating a genuine capacitation and participation of the whole ecosystem and distributing leadership and agency. This scoping paper acts as preliminary work for further investigation, attempting to provide by four principles and a framework for Pluriversal Design for Digital ICH, initial indications of the potential extent and nature of this emergent topic at the intersection of digital technologies, decolonising design, and cultural heritage policy.

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, creating a burden of power. We consolidate these insights into the Memory Loom principles: Structural Weaving and Protected Accountability. Our contributions include a mechanism-oriented RtD method and transferable design principles for equitable governance in post-digital museum contexts.

Generative AI is increasingly shaping the workflows of digital cultural heritage design practice, introducing new approaches to creative production, interpretation, and collaboration. Existing research has examined how generative AI influences general design workflows and supports creative practices in different domains. However, limited attention has been given to how these technologies participate in the design workflows of digital cultural heritage. Compared with other design contexts, digital cultural heritage design requires balancing creative exploration with the accurate transmission of heritage knowledge, which makes its workflows more complex. To address this gap, this study conducts a systematic literature review to examine how generative AI participates in different stages of digital cultural heritage design practice. It investigates the roles, methods, and impacts of generative AI in these workflows and aims to provide a structured understanding of this evolving field for future research and practice.

This article explores how material properties and sustainability awareness shape aesthetic perception in leather handbag design. Drawing on practice-based research, the study combines memory collection, collaborative designer-led prototyping and user feedback to examine designer and consumer experiences. Findings show that designers focus on structural and tactile qualities—stiffness, thickness, and texture—while aesthetic attributes such as colour and surface finish support conceptual and stylistic intentions. Sustainable tanning methods and innovative leathers introduce new challenges, requiring adaptive strategies. For users, long-term interaction with leather fosters appreciation for durability, patina, and cultural meaning, shifting aesthetic evaluation from immediate visual appeal to qualities signalling longevity and emotional attachment. First impressions are primarily driven by colour and texture, but deeper engagement highlights leather’s role in sustaining meaningful experiences. The study demonstrates that material knowledge mediates between making, perception, and meaning, and that sustainability awareness shapes both aesthetic evaluation and emotional connection with leather.

Working with natural materials can open space for exploratory forms of inquiry. This paper examines how nature influences our approaches to artistic practice and research. Through the frameworks of introspective methodologies and posthumanism, this study examines a case of Icelandic geothermal clays to reflect on possible methodological approaches within artistic research. The author’s ceramic practice serves to trace the processes of developing artworks with natural materials. The acts of collecting, testing, and designing with geothermal clays become both a creative and an epistemic endeavour, a way of thinking with and through materials. Artistic practice emerges as a form of inquiry responsive to the environment. Situated and relational methods, in this context, arise through immersion in a material assemblage, where making is guided by responsiveness and openness to uncertainty. The study contributes to discussions on methods in craft research, suggesting that situated, materially grounded approaches foster relational forms of making.

Research-through-Design (RtD) continues to grapple with how prototypes can generate comparable design knowledge beyond stand-alone studies. This paper addresses that gap by studying how knowledge takes shape in constrained design settings, where limitations themselves become sources of insight. Using the case of affordable dental care in India, chosen for its material, spatial, and procedural limitations, the study shows how constraints can make tacit design understandings more visible. From this work, three categories of knowledge emerged: embodied negotiation of ergonomics, enacted hygiene, and modularity-for-resilience. These categories describe how designers learn through doing, maintaining, and adjusting within limitations. Rather than focusing on healthcare design, the study uses this case as a lens for understanding how situated constraints can strengthen RtD by generating knowledge categories that are both credible and relevant to comparable constrained contexts.

Prototyping offers ways to anticipate futures by supporting people to inhabit futures through hands-on experiences. Prototypes offer “invitations” to suspend disbelief and make believe. A canonical distinction is made between levels of fidelity in prototyping. Here, we critically re-examine “fidelity” by asking: How may fidelity inform prototyping practices and pedagogies? How may prototyping practices be more responsive, generative and ethical? How can fidelity in prototyping contribute to engagements with futures? Building on foundational ideas in prototyping and futuring, we put forward the FIRE (Fidelity/Resolution) map, a framework for distinguishing between fidelity and resolution and for navigating their spread and interplay for more effective and more ethical prototyping practices. Illustrated through sample cases, the map demonstrates how facilitators and educators can anticipate, respond to and reflect upon changes in prototype resolution and experiential fidelity. We conclude by connecting these insights to theory and proposing actionable prototyping strategies for response-able futuring engagements.

Concrete builds the assets and aesthetics of contemporary cities. This research suggests that concrete also shapes emotions and cognition, generating a tacit body of valuable experience. Construction workers, who engage with this material daily, embody expertise through their bodily practices. Yet their insights remain unheard and underrepresented in the design discourse. This study adopts a material engagement approach, using concrete samples as probes and conducting semi-structured on-site interviews with 14 workers in Shenzhen, China. Analysing 280 minutes of video and audio data thematically, the research reveals that workers and materials mutually shape each other. Workers develop their understanding of concrete through multisensory, temporal, and spatial perceptions. By taking this social group as a case study, the paper reveals the agentic - and unrecognized - role of materials and their craftsmen in shaping urban material culture. The goal is to incorporate workers’ tacit knowledge into future design practices.

This practice-based research explores stuckness in creative work not as a problem to eliminate, but as a threshold state where tacit knowledge becomes operative. Drawing on autoethnographic narrative, I examine how attending to stuckness reveals the autonomic nervous system's (ANS) role in embodied knowing. Through a close reading of wood carving practice, I document how physical engagement with materials offered a way to work with, rather than overcome, stuckness. When invited to exhibit this work, I experienced acute stress that led me to adapt a Risk Assessment form—typically used for physical hazards—to map emotional risks such as shame and humiliation. Rather than eliminating uncertainty, this adapted matrix became a tool for aligning conscious awareness with bodily knowledge. This account contributes to practice-based design methodology by offering one practitioner's methods for lingering within stuckness, opening questions about working with embodied intelligence at threshold moments.

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 institutional and citizen perspectives, empower children as co-designers of their environments, and foster social learning toward systemic urban safety. The paper discusses the role of design in facilitating intergenerational civic innovation and proposes a framework for applying Living Lab principles to policy-linked, child-centered urban design processes.

This paper examines Participatory Design (PD) as an epistemic practice that can strengthen how democratic institutions listen and respond to diverse forms of knowledge. Drawing on the PARliament Engagement project, it explores how creative approaches can reveal and reshape the interpretive practices that govern what counts as evidence in parliamentary scrutiny. The research was conducted through a participatory action research process involving ethnographic shadowing, interviews, and co-design workshops with parliamentary staff, creating opportunities for shared reflection on how knowledge is generated, interpreted, and used across scrutiny work. The paper develops the concept of institutional responsiveness to describe how PD can make interpretations of evidence visible, support organisational reflection, and build capacity for more inclusive and accountable decision-making. This positions PD not only as a method of engagement, but as a way of designing the infrastructures through which democratic institutions understand, evaluate, and respond to diverse forms of knowledge.

This paper describes a master’s thesis process in which systemic design

was used to explore how children with a different home language than the national

language can be supported. Using a systemic approach, this research maps the

complex network surrounding these families and identifies key leverage points:

valuing the home language, reducing pressure on the child, and strengthening

family integration. Through interviews, cultural probes, and co-creation with

professionals, insights were translated into a low-threshold product-service system

(PSS) embedded in the children’s living environment. The PSS encourages family

interaction and neighbourhood engagement through playful exploration. The

findings underscore the potential of systemic design in the public space,

highlighting its capacity to generate holistic, interconnected, and context-sensitive

interventions. The systemic analysis in this research uncovers contrasting

perspectives between stakeholder needs and governmental policies. This leads to

a discussion on how municipalities and social workers perceive systemic design.

Citizen participation initiatives often struggle to engage diverse communities meaningfully. 'In-between' spaces are celebrated as sites where power asymmetries can be renegotiated, yet this spatial metaphor obscures critical temporal dynamics. Through reflexive analysis of a ten-month design justice collaboration with Amsterdam's Stedelijk Team Participatie, this paper examines how temporal positioning shapes agency strategies within participatory processes. Applying temporal-relational agency theory, we identify a phenomenon we term "agency drift", the multidirectional movement across agency strategies as participants navigate institutional and community temporal orientations. Our findings show that making these temporal dynamics visible transforms in-between spaces from sites where drift simply happens into spaces where it can be intentionally cultivated. This research offers an analytical framework and design strategies to support diverse agency pathways and equitable engagement.

Citizen dialogues strive for inclusivity but often exclude marginalized groups. New participatory and creativity-based approaches are needed to be evaluated and become a part of the skillset repertoire for public officials to foster an inclusive dialogue. This paper reflects on photo-based conversations as a dialogic method for societal development and inclusion. The results show that the method provides possibilities to creatively involve participants, strengthen relationships and open a space for diverse narratives between different actors in society. However, the challenges of internal exclusion, lack of strategies for impact, and the need to build competence in handling conflicting stories, without depoliticizing discussions, must be addressed. This research contributes to design methods as drivers of public sector innovation by discussing how creative, participatory approaches can support inclusive dialogue in society. The results presented is part of a four-year research project aiming to enhance coordination between diverse actors and organizations in everyday landscapes.

Participatory Processes (PPs) are increasingly fostering broader civic engagement, strengthening dialogue and collaboration between citizens, the third sector and public institutions. However, a gap persists between participatory aspirations and their implementation, limiting the capacity of processes to generate durable transformations in local governance structures and public service innovation. Employing a qualitative-comparative methodology, based on stakeholder mapping and service-ecosystem lens, the study analyses four novel cases involving green and peri-urban transformations across diverse Italian regions. By operating under diverse administrative frameworks, they present fertile ground for illustrating complementary and mutually reinforcing PPs. Through a Service Design lens, recurring patterns and mechanisms of public-private co-management are analysed, highlighting the conditions that can enhance or constrain participatory efficacy. Given that participatory practices unfold across multiple interdependent dimensions and evolve over time, authors indicate that SD interventions have the potential to infrastructure-level systemic changes at both local and cross-regional scales.

This research explores how fashion brands can replicate touch and garment materiality through digital design strategies to engage Gen Z shoppers in India, addressing the sensory absence in e-commerce. Using an interpretivist, qualitative, multi-method approach involving eight semi-structured interviews and five participant observations, the study investigates how Virtual Reality (VR) can enhance emotional engagement and responsible consumption in fashion retail. Guided by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), findings show that gamification, interactivity, and personalisation—combined with transparency and brand trust—drive consumer acceptance. The study highlights the importance of inclusive and culturally sensitive VR design that considers accessibility, affordability, and infrastructural realities of the Global South. By framing VR-enabled fashion e-commerce as an experiential and responsible design approach, the research reimagines materiality, emotion, and engagement within India’s evolving digital retail landscape.

This paper presents a longitudinal study of instore shopping technologies (ISTs) and their contribution to the phygital fashion store. It builds on studies of store design in an omnichannel environment and the use of ISTs for distinctive customer experiences (CX). The aim is to understand changes in fashion retailing brought about by ISTs and the extent to which they influence CX in the customer journey. The research was undertaken in three stages, in 2014, 2019 and 2024 in three of London’s West End shopping streets. The Methodology was replicated in each stage, using observations of store interiors and in-depth, qualitative interviews with 25 consumers. The findings provide retail designers with new knowledge about consumer-technology interactivity, retail sectoral differences and the rate of change in the use of ISTs. In conclusion, the paper highlights the evolving relationship between retailers and consumers, consumer agency and the shopping experience.

This study explores customers’ motivations to become regulars at contemporary specialty coffee shops and identifies the features that make these places meaningful enough for repeated visits. Drawing on observations and in situ interviews with staff and regular customers in Hong Kong, Copenhagen, and Columbus, the study examines how regular destinations emerge in contemporary café culture. The analysis identifies recurring characteristics of places that individuals consider their regular spots: (1) high-quality offerings, including quality products and professional service; (2) convenient and attractive locations; (3) the resources to accommodate different types of visits; (4) connectedness, or a sense of community and shared values between regulars and the shop; and (5) deeper relationships involving subtle forms of cocreation among long-term regulars. The study identifies both similarities and contextual differences between the cities and suggests directions for future research.

This paper examines experiential retail strategies in high-end fashion through two global flagships stores in East Asia: Lemaire Ebisu in Tokyo and Loewe Gaozhai Chengdu (Taikoo Li). Prior scholarship traced spatial storytelling in high-end flagships to connect brand identity with local environments, frameworks that render the narratology of ‘in-between’ as a design tool bridging localisation with customer experience remain underdeveloped. This study positions flagships as ‘in-between’ interfaces linking space, local culture, and brand to generate place-specific experiences. Through an exploratory qualitative approach comprising document analysis, store observation, and spatial-typological analysis, this research develops the ‘in-between’ as a conceptual framework that operationalises threshold conditions as narrative and design dimensions. The findings contribute by linking place-based spatial grammar to customer experience, enabling localised and shareable brand encounters.

Temporary luxury branded events run on short cycles and bespoke builds that accelerate material churn. We present a circular phygital product–service system that operationalises the circular economy (CE) through a 4R frame (Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycling) across warehouse‑to‑event journeys. Developed via a multi‑method design inquiry with a tier‑1 contractor, the system couples physical touchpoints (reusable fold‑flat transit boxes, adjustable racking, standard labels) with digital orchestration (a live digital warehouse, list‑based outbound/inbound workflow, and a sustainable materials library). The architecture aligns roles and decisions, protects and identifies assets, and makes reuse the default under luxury brand constraints. By embedding traceable actions and CE‑aligned rules into everyday handoffs, the PSS shifts procurement, storage, dispatch, return, and redeployment toward value retention. The contribution is a replicable, practice‑ready route from circular intent to operational change in branded environments, advancing responsible retail without compromising speed or aesthetic standards.

Brand experience is frequently theorized as a set of fixed domain attributes, yet how consumption context reorganizes the structural priority of these domains remains largely unmeasured. This paper argues that brand experience is a contextually generated design phenomenon that cannot be adequately addressed through static frameworks or single-context evaluation. Focusing on chain coffee brands in Taiwan, we conceptualize dine-in and take-out as distinct behavioral ecologies and apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to construct comparable experiential hierarchies across both contexts. Our findings reveal divergent experiential logics—dine-in privileging environmental immersion, take-out foregrounding product reliability and service rhythm—and non-obvious sub-criteria priorities only quantitative weighting can expose, such as the disproportionate role of service efficiency over interpersonal warmth in take-out settings. We propose a scenario-driven brand experience model as a diagnostic tool, positioning design research as a mediator between experiential data and strategic action in responsible retail practice.

The sustainable development of an ageing society necessitates active participation of older people, requiring effective integration of their individual and collective resources into design. However, designers’ understanding of older people’s resources is rather limited. This study aims to develop a conceptual model of older people’s resources to support design for healthy ageing. Through literature review and interviews with 19 recently retired Dutch seniors, twelve resource types were identified, categorised into six dimensions: practical, emotional, intellectual, social, cultural, and time. These categories were synthesised into a Diamond Model of Resources. The framework, encompassing both resource categories and the Diamond Model, was applied in a design workshop. Results demonstrated that the resource-based mindset and knowledge significantly influenced design outcomes, enabling designers to develop solutions that promote active participation among older people. The study has led to a toolkit for empowering healthy ageing, showcased in the “Design for all” exhibition in Zurich.

The growing presence of digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities for older adults, yet raises concerns around the digital divide, trust, and social inclusion. This exploratory study examines how older adults perceive and engage with technology through a community-based approach. Data were collected from 106 participants using a mixed-method design that combined the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to assess adoption factors with narrative storytelling to capture contextual experiences. Centring participants’ voices, the study identifies emotional, social, and contextual factors shaping technology engagement. Findings highlight the importance of relational trust, social learning networks, perceived ease of use, and confidence in technology use. Thy also demonstrate the potential of co-design practices to empower older adults as active contributors rather than passive users. The study underscores the role of inclusive design and co-design approaches in promoting autonomy, wellbeing, and equitable digital inclusion among ageing population.

Older adults face complex challenges in managing multimorbidity. As the ageing population increases, digital health technology (DHT) offers significant potential to address these challenges while supporting independent living. However, current research remains largely condition-specific and technology-driven, providing limited insight into how digital health can support older adults with multimorbidity (OAwM) in self-management for independent living. This study investigates how digital health technologies can be inclusively designed to support older adults living with multiple and complex health conditions. Drawing on qualitative inquiries into older adults’ self-management practices, it develops an understanding of the challenges existing in multimorbidity management within independent living contexts. The findings contribute to inclusive design by proposing design principles to inform the creation of digital health that are context-responsive and grounded in the lived realities of ageing with complex health needs.

As populations age, companion robots are increasingly explored to support emotional well-being in later life. However, older adults often find it difficult to express abstract emotions or imagine interactions with unfamiliar technologies, limiting their participation in early-stage design. This study develops and validates a structured toolkit designed to support emotional articulation and co-design participation. The toolkit, consisting of companionship cards, robot role cards, and recording canvases, was refined through expert evaluation and user testing, and validated through comparative interviews with older adults (n=10). Results show that the toolkit supported richer emotional expression, smoother dialogue, and more sustained engagement, helping participants transform lived emotional experience into design-relevant insights. The study contributes a replicable methodological approach for emotion-centred participatory design, showing how structured visual scaffolding can foster emotional and conceptual inclusion, empower older adults to articulate their perspectives, and help their voices more actively shape more resonant Human–Robot Interaction.

As global population ageing accelerates, virtual reality (VR) offers new opportunities to enhance older adults’ wellbeing, cultural participation, and social connection. Existing VR research concerning older adults has predominantly concentrated on medical or clinical applications. In contrast, this study investigates the potential affordances of VR for this population within cultural and entertainment domains. Through Participatory Design workshops with ten adults aged 60+ in UK, this study explores older adults’ user experience with VR and proposes recommendations for age-inclusive VR design. Results show that complex multi-step operations, dual-hand coordination, and complex menu structures create high cognitive load and reduce user confidence. Participants also faced sensory–perceptual challenges and reported limited access to VR in daily life, though they expressed strong interest in using VR for cultural and social engagement. The study also reflects on methodological challenges such as sampling bias and the early developmental stage of age-inclusive VR research.

In Scotland’s social care system, decisions about support and care transitions are often shaped by professional and policy discourses, leaving older people and their families with limited involvement in key decisions. Although policy frameworks emphasise “choice and control,” communication remains dominated by professional language, and lived experiences are rarely used to inform care processes. This paper proposes an early-stage conceptual framework that considers how narrative theory and scenario-based co-design may contribute to a more user-centred understanding of decision-making for older people. Within this framework, a by-proxy approach is proposed, in which family carers are positioned to represent aspects of older people’s experiences. The framework outlines a way to gather, structure, and communicate experiences, with the aim of supporting reflection among carers and exploring how narrative experiences might be translated into scenario-based materials that could inform decision-making, while making the perspectives of older people and carers more visible.

Museums increasingly aim to create multisensory, immersive experiences, yet exhibition design still tends to privilege visual-first ideation and communication, risking outcomes that are photogenic rather than atmospherically coherent for visitors. This paper introduces the Atmosphere Jukebox, an interactive soundscape playback device that enables heterogeneous teams of curators, designers, architects, historians, and educators, to listen to, discuss, and negotiate sonic atmospheres in the design process. In doing so, it supports multimodal attention and a shared imagination of the affective affordances that unfold across the visitor journey. The Atmosphere Jukebox is therefore proposed as a boundary object for atmospheric staging. The contribution challenges the field’s overreliance on visual literacy in experience design and shows how a practice-based intervention can also generate new knowledge about the role of sound in shaping exhibition atmospheres. Test situations further indicate its potential in exploratory inquiry and co-design with different user groups.

Digital technologies and human-centred design approaches have transformed the cultural heritage sector, shifting the focus towards the visitor experience and advocating for collaboration between designers and non-designers. This article draws on design research and museography to discuss the role of sound in the digital cultural heritage, focusing on sound-driven exhibition design practices. The ephemeral nature of sonic experiences challenges the concept of “boundary objects”, reframing them from blueprint-like physical or abstract schemes into an Ingoldian concept of “bindings", promoting mutual understanding and collaboration across different communities. We focus here on two narrative exhibitions we were directly involved in: a participatory project based on sounds and oral stories from a local community, and a collaborative sound-driven project on musical automata involving multidisciplinary teams of professionals. The findings suggest a shift in exhibition design towards a broader understanding of sounds as “bindings”.

Recent research has established the necessity to understand sound as a service design material since its unique qualities can enhance representational design methods and contribute to the understanding, communication, and collaboration in designing complex service situations. However, much is still unknown about the role sound plays in the service design process and how the nuances related to its representational capacity influence collaborative sensemaking. This paper explores these nuances by developing a framework that allows inclusion of sound in service design practices regardless of sound-related skill level. The framework was developed based on empirical input from a master level course in service design with a specialised focus on sound. It categorises representational capacity of sound as divergent (auditory representations) and convergent (auditory prototypes) and shows how different conceptual levels (abstract vs. concrete) can have meaning-related implications (denotative vs. connotative) in collaborative design work.

Sleep is fundamental to health and well-being, yet sleep problems have risen sharply in recent years. These problems often arise from individual and contextual factors, some of which are modifiable through behaviour or design. Research examining sleep’s contextual factors and how they can inform design interventions remains limited. This article presents two connected workshops exploring these aspects of sleep using participatory and speculative design methods. The first workshop invited participants to map contextual aspects of sleep through empathy maps and speculative exercises revealing three themes affecting sleep: safety, sleep routines, and stress or anxiety. The second focused on ideation asking design students to prototype sonic interventions addressing these themes. These prototypes were analysed by a professional sound designer to identify novel design elements. Findings highlight key considerations related to agency, ethics and technology, and offer insights and a flexible participatory methodology and framework for bridging user needs and design expertise.

Sonification and visualization practices usually take "data" as a given, without considering the complex ways in which data is collected or the complexity of the phenomena that data represents. Autographic design is an emerging field approaching this issue by starting the design process before data collection with the phenomenon itself, treating data as a material trace rather than an abstract reference. An autographic display uses a phenomenon's self-inscription, rather than its mediation and representation in symbolic encodings. While the existing framework of autographic design has a strong relation to the visual domain, a phenomenon may also reveal itself through its sonic trace. The contributions of this paper are threefold. We extend autographic design into the sonic domain, introduce autographic sonification instruments, and propose a design continuum.

As immersive media grows, brands increasingly adopt multisensory design, with ASMR emerging as a key auditory tool. How ASMR interacts with visual content to influence consumer product evaluation remains underexplored. Grounded in multisensory integration and processing fluency theory, this study employed three experiments (N=630) to examine their joint effects on immersive experience and purchase intention. Results indicate that ASMR generally enhances consumer evaluation, but its effect depends on visual richness. With low visual richness (color), ASMR adds sensory cues and enhances immersive experience. With moderate visual richness (3D), ASMR’s effect diminished. With high visual richness (close-up), ASMR may induce overload and reduce effectiveness. Overall, ASMR and visual richness exhibit an inverted U-shaped effect. These findings deepen understanding of multisensory integration and provide guidance for achieving sensory balance and designing human-centred, responsible brand experiences.

This study reinterprets the EKB model from an experiential perspective to examine electric vehicle (EV) consumer decision-making in Taiwan and extends the influence factors in the modified EKB model. Based on semi-structured interviews, the findings reveal how experience operates differently across five stages. Regarding internal factors, personal beliefs are identified as a long-term factors of problem recognition stage, while “Consumer experience with product/brand” is extended to include vicarious experience and experiential control. Post-purchase experience generates affect that, together with “Switching cost”, re-initiates evaluation cycles. Regarding external factors, real experiences from “Role of third parties” can shorten or bypass search and alternative evaluation stages. The study contributes by introducing experience forms as an analytical lens to explain how experience advances decision-making. It also suggests that EV brands should strategically design key touchpoints to enhance decision-making and foster long-term loyalty.

Technological advances have made VR interactions more natural, yet fatigue and social awkwardness persist. Microgestures offer a promising solution. However, prior research has focused mainly on the index finger, leaving the thumb’s potential as a stable, low-fatigue ray-casting modality underexplored. This study conducted two experiments to examine whether the thumb can function as an effective technique for 3D pointing in VR. Experiment 1 compared four input methods: VR controller, hand tracking, index-finger pointing, and thumb pointing. The controller was most efficient, while hand tracking provided greater stability but higher fatigue. Both microgestures outperformed hand tracking in efficiency and fatigue reduction. Experiment 2 examined thumb and index-finger pointing on horizontal and vertical target planes. Vertical layouts facilitated faster and more efficient pointing. The index finger was more efficient overall, but the thumb caused slightly less fatigue during vertical interactions. These findings provide valuable guidance for the design of microgesture-based VR interaction.

Icons are essential visual elements in vehicle cabins, serving as key conduits for presenting information. As in-vehicle infotainment systems grow increasingly complex, it becomes critical to understand how different types of icons influence the interaction effectiveness across different user groups. This study investigates the effects of icon type and individual cognitive differences on in-vehicle interaction effectiveness, employing a 2×2 mixed experimental design with two independent variables: icon type (i.e., abstract versus concrete) and drivers’ construal level (i.e., high versus low). Results show that icon type significantly affects reaction time, perceived matchiness, and cognitive fluency, while construal level independently modulates cognitive fluency. These findings underscore the value of aligning icon concreteness with users’ cognitive styles to enhance cognitive fluency, reduce visual demand, which may improve decision accuracy in driving-related interactions. This research provides actionable insights for the design of personalized, context-aware visual interfaces that promote safer and more efficient driving.

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 brand style through the aesthetic experiences it elicits.

Technical solutions dominate current approaches to smartphone overheating, yet user-centred strategies that exploit zonal thermal perception remain underexplored. This study examined how contact region (thumb, index finger, thenar eminence), surface temperature (36.0-43.5°C), and exposure duration (0s vs. 120s) jointly shape thermal experience. Thirty adults completed trials with a prototype featuring hotspots at high-frequency grip locations, rating perceived heat and thermal dissatisfaction using two Borg CR-10 items. A PERMANOVA revealed a significant Area × Temperature interaction (F = 10.35, p < .001): the thenar eminence showed disproportionately higher ratings at ≥ 42 °C than the other areas. Main effects of temperature and duration were also significant (p < .001), indicating discomfort intensifies with hotter surfaces and prolonged contact. These findings provide an empirical basis for strategic thermal zoning, placing or redirecting heat away from high-sensitivity regions, and complement hardware-level cooling with ergonomically informed design.

This paper proposes an Epimethean mode of design that works with reproductive labour as a counterpoint to Anthropocenic narratives of progress. Rather than innovating new futures, design is approached as a practice of aftercare, sustaining endangered forms of life-making within existing institutions. Drawing on a long-term participatory design project at a large hospital maternity ward, the paper theorizes Epimethean design as a mode of infrastructuring that resists the translation of care into productivity and reclaims reproduction as a site of ontological and political contestation. At the same time, it argues that confronting reductionist ideas of productivity requires a double movement: undoing, by protecting fragile reproductive practices from capture within technosocial regimes, and doing, by cautiously reworking these regimes from within. This dual stance positions design as both an act of maintenance and a generative force, enabling reproductive labour to contest and redefine what counts as productive work.

This paper reconsiders what it means to be critical in design studies under Post-Anthropocene conditions. It proposes slow relational critique as an orientation. In doing so, it stays with the fragile entanglements through which oppression is enacted by both human and more-than-human entities. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory, the paper revisits a case of a cradle in a caste-oppressed community in Sri Lanka to show how power and inequality are relationally produced through mundane associations of “things.” The analysis demonstrates how critique can remain empirical and attentive to objects while resisting the purification of problems into grand Anthropocene social explanations. Rather than presenting ANT as a new method, the paper reflects on how its attentiveness can open a more cautious and situated descriptions of objects—one that lingers with things, holds contradictions in view, and contributes to a slower, more careful design scholarship in the age of posthuman design.

Planet B emerges as a practice-based-fiction responding ironically to the slogan “There is no Planet B.” The project speculates on the discovery of an alternate planet and the task of replicating Planet A under the principle “if it looks the same, it is the same.” Through absurd protocols for selecting the perfect rock, flower, and stick, the experience enacted a satire of technoscientific control. Developed within the School of Materialist Research’s exploration of Nature and Artifice, it asks: what sensory, political, and aesthetic implications would the discovery of a Planet B bring to the design practice? Children spontaneously took over the installation, turning the stage into a space for free play, revealing an ecology of gestures beyond our initial intention. Planet B reflects how design can host open-ended processes, proposing irony, attentiveness, and affective responsiveness as modes of engaging with planetary fragility and the paradox of fabricating the natural.

What if the future of fashion lies not in novelty, but in endurance? This paper proposes patina, the visible traces of wear, repair, and time, as a philosophical lens for rethinking design’s relationship to sustainability, identity, and value. Drawing on collaboration with Red Thai (Thái Đỏ) artisans in Vietnam, the research reimagines denim not as commodity, but as memory cloth: garments as temporal archives of land, ritual, and community. The work asks whether fashion can exist outside imperatives of novelty and speed, locating beauty instead in incompleteness, opacity, and repair. By framing patina as “unfashionable knowledge,” it positions endurance and imperfection not as failures but as alternative epistemic values. This paper contributes to debates on design ontology, epistemology, and axiology, inviting the DRS community to consider how time, wear, and repair might inspire alternative design futures.

This paper presents a situated, plural, and horizontal curatorial methodology centered on questioning rather than providing solutions in response to posthuman thought and practice. It inquires whether we might be witnessing the emergence of a New Romanticism in contemporary design and architecture concerned with interspecies relations. This romantic turn arises by acknowledging subjectivity and imagination while engaging critically with the complexities of the climate crisis. To this end, this paper examines the making of an exhibition that assembled material evidence from science, art, technology, and design. The exhibition was developed through a three-step curatorial framework aligned with the decentering narratives of posthuman philosophy, through which a group of researchers collectively constructed a narrative. The paper outlines the principles, methodology, and structure of this curatorial framework. Following audience feedback, we reflect on how the exhibition evoked interspecies emotional responses, embodied memories and critical reasoning, opening directions for future inquiry.

Homelessness is a public health problem worldwide. System-wide failures often hinder solutions to this complex issue. In design and architecture education, the issue of homelessness is rarely brought into the curriculum. This paper describes how practice and theory related to homelessness can be applied to design education. First, a practice-based workshop was developed to enhance student reflexivity through exploring biases toward homelessness and applying trauma-informed theory to redesign products, services, and systems for homeless populations. Secondly, two case studies applied the theory deductively and critically reflected upon trauma-informed principles to housing and homeless design projects in hindsight and foresight. Our reflections show how a focus on homelessness as a traumatising social structure can support thoughtful, theory-informed decision-making. Further developing trauma-informed design methods holds promise to govern design research interactions with vulnerable populations. Such a foundation can influence student identity, leading to more ethical and caring design processes in the future.

Digital community platforms have transformed civic participation, enhancing social belonging and shared responsibility. Yet, they intensify the digital divide between people. This can be a risk to their fundamental human value of dignity. This paper explores designing for dignity within digital community platforms through a qualitative study conducted in South Holland, The Netherlands. Twenty citizens participated in semi-structured interviews to investigate their understanding, experiences, frustrations and expectations of dignity in digital interactions. The study confirmed dignity’s multifaceted nature (14 distinct definitions), varied expectations of respectful treatment, and common challenges in using government digital services. Only 30% of participants felt these platforms respected their dignity, the rest expressed negative experiences such as feeling helpless, stupid, frustrated, anxious, etc. Participants emphasized needs such as language support, clarity, and navigation assistance, as well as design requirements. The findings will be validated in participatory design sessions of co-creating a dignified digital community platform.

This paper examines how visualising values in women’s digital labour shapes recognition and justice in platform-driven environments. Visualisation is advanced as a design-ethics strategy for surfacing and negotiating undervalued work that remains obscured in digital economies. Grounded in Nancy Fraser’s justice framework and feminist epistemologies centred on situated and embodied experience, the study positions visualisation as a means to reveal and contest structural devaluation.

A three-phase ethical practice is developed: ethical narration to make hidden value perceptible, ethical prototyping to question recognition mechanisms, and ethical interaction to build collective participation in decisions about representation. Insights draw on sociological and anthropological research on Chinese women whose emotional and coordination work is routinely discounted by platform logic and gender norms.

The study clarifies how design can transform visibility into shared ethical judgement and action, offering criteria for evaluating whether visualisation can rearticulate value and support more equitable participation in digital labour systems.

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 be navigated through the approach. We discuss application of the trauma-informed methodology and tensions that arose. Our work demonstrates how trauma-informed values and methods can be used during participatory research where groups may have conflicting goals, and how this can enrich the design process.

Psychiatric care environments are intended to heal, yet their design is often experienced as stigmatizing. This paper presents the Uncovering and Designing for Dignity through Emotions (UDDE) method, a participatory approach designed to uncover the meaning of dignity for perinatal women in psychiatric care, explore lived experiences of stigma and dignity, and identify how care features can be re-designed to uphold dignity. While dignity is often defined as an inherent worth every person possesses, in everyday life dignity is experienced as a lived value shaped by interactions with others and the environment. Emotions act as biological signals that can reveal when dignity is maintained or violated and serve as a bridge between the abstract concept of dignity and lived experience. The UDDE method consists of six interconnected activities to visualize experiences and transform stigmatizing interactions into ones that better address what perinatal women in psychiatric care truly value and need.

Sub-Saharan Africa is at the frontline of climate change, with impacts particuarly acute in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). This study examines how value-led design can mediate between traditional cosmologies and scientific climate knowledge to strengthen adaptation. Focusing on pastoralist communities in Kenya’s Maasai Mara region, it applies the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) as a participatory reflection tool. Findings show how value-led design can advance equity by embedding community voices and centring values in decision-making, contributing to broader debates on design’s role in fostering systemic transitions amid climate uncertainty, safeguarding against maladaptation. It presents the MLP as a tool for value-led design, connecting abstract climate data and local knowledge, enabling communities to reinterpret climate projections through cultural worldviews and identifying locally grounded adaptation strategies. By following this method researchers and practitioners can support communities to imagine, negotiate, and sustain equitable, regenerative futures that are scientifically informed and grounded in cultural values.

This article examines an Indigenous-led exhibition renewal at the Sámi Museum Siida, in which multisensory design and digital media were collaboratively developed with Sámi artists and museum experts. The exhibition was created primarily for the Sámi community, in a museum that also receives many international visitors. The study is based on a survey (n=35) and three focus groups (n=9) with participants representing diverse visitor perspectives to understand how people experienced and interpreted the exhibition’s sensory and technological elements. The results demonstrate that the exhibition created a sense of immersion through spatial and multisensory design grounded in local artistic and cultural practices. The analysis explores how collaboration among designers, artists, and museum professionals can support inclusive and culturally grounded approaches to digital transformation in heritage contexts. The findings offer insights for future museum practices that incorporate digital and sensory design through collaboration with Indigenous communities.

Abstract: As digital technology becomes an integral part of museum services and strategies, visitor experiences have evolved from physical to phygital experiences. Phygital emphasizes the fusion of digital and physical environments, constructing complex emotional scenarios that bridge those realms across different exhibition phases—from entry and immersion to extended experiences—thus distinguishing itself from traditional, object-led historical museums. This scoping review employs a hybrid deductive-inductive coding method to analyse 54 publications from databases including WOS, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, PubMed, and PsycInfo. It proposes a DES emotional experience framework for historical museums and identifies corresponding technological interventions and design directions. The study advocates for the creation of more inclusive, equitable, and enjoyable cultural experiences in future historical museums.

In biennales and world expos, where creative ideas, cultural values, and technological developments in art and architecture are exhibited, kinetic systems are increasingly used in installations and pavilions. This paper frames kinetic structures in relation to embodied aesthetics and investigates how such kinetic structures go beyond mere display to offer visitors a holistic aesthetic experience. It introduces a selection of kinetic structures presented in diverse biennales and expos by utilizing publications, commentaries, and curatorial statements; deconstructs and analyzes their designs regarding types of movement, body-space-time relations, participation modes, embodied metaphors, and conceptual narratives. Thus, the paper shows how kinetic structures designed with a somaesthetic sensitivity expand architectural aesthetics from visual appreciation to bodily experience. Overall, it proposes a framework for investigating kinetic exhibition designs in line with the approaches defined in the literature.

The cross-cutting introduction of digital technologies into museum infrastructure activates a process of reinterpretation of digital languages within the museum narrative framework. From this perspective, the spread of phygital phenomena, such as contextual interaction between physical and digital worlds, is recontextualised within the field of cultural heritage and museums, revealing narrative and experiential potential in the capacity to express the evocative component of the spaces and artworks on display, through digital and interactive abilities. The contamination between physical space and digital layer is constructed starting from the stories to be told, orchestrated by the body gestures of visitors. The paper presents a taxonomy of phygital experiences, conceived as analytical tool to guide the relationships between digital level, spatial context, and visitors. This taxonomy offers a perspective for the theoretical and applied investigation of phygital narratives within the museum, describing the design characteristics and extrapolating orientation for future research.

As digital interactive technologies evolve, visitors have higher expectations for narrative experiences in revolutionary history museums. This study uses the three stages of flow theory—conditions, experience, and effects—as a starting point, integrating user experience design with narrative communication theory. A mixed research approach is employed to explore how digital interaction design can trigger user flow states and enhance immersion. By transforming passive observation into actively engaging flow experiences, we focus on three dimensions: the operability of hardware interaction, the guidance of software interfaces, and the immersion of content narratives. An integrated immersive interaction design model, termed “Three-Dimensional - Four-Stage,” is constructed for museums. Design practices are conducted, and the model's feasibility is validated through System Usability Scale (SUS) and User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) testing. This provides a design methodology reference and practical paradigm based on flow theory for enhancing digital experiences in revolutionary history museums.

Moving beyond instrumental rationality that treats materials as passive objects, this study operationalizes the Art of Making (AoM) by proposing a three-dimensional degeneration approach. Degeneration disrupts object fixity, reframing objects as materials in a state of in-betweenness that invites co-creative dialogue. Adopting drawing as a universal making practice, we empirically grounded this proposition through five workshops with ten participants from diverse countries and design backgrounds. By degenerating sensory, bodily, explorative, and social dimensions of drawing products and practices, the resulting state of material-in-between invited participants into dialogical engagements. Findings reveal that this state sparks curiosity, transcends preconceptions, activates subconscious exploration of self-identity, and reshapes human-material relationships from hierarchical to co-evolutive. As an initial exploration, this study is confined to drawing practices and participants came predominantly from art-based design backgrounds; further research should examine its application across other materials, practices, and user groups, as well as its long-term effects.

Classic “Making as Knowing” relies on tangible resistance from physical materials, but this framework is insufficient for intangible virtual materials in Large-Scale VR, often leading to the “problem of spectacle.” This research explores how “Making as Knowing” is reframed in this context, using a Research through Design (RtD) approach with a novel “Mandated Design Rationale Protocol.” The paper argues that “making” transforms into a rigorous epistemic practice of “systemic and experiential tuning” to generate “Knowledge of Experience” (K-OF). A reception study (N=31) confirmed a strong alignment between the designer’s K-OF targets and visitors’ takeaways. This work offers a traceable RtD methodology and an empirical framework to address the “problem of spectacle.”

This study examines mani stone piles in Eastern Tibet as material forms emerging through dwelling, movement, and situated acts of making. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective and long-term visual ethnography conducted between 2016 and 2025, it shows how mani piles are produced through the embodied selection, carrying, and stacking of stones at passes, riverbanks, and crossroads. Rather than treating these piles primarily as fixed religious symbols or products of prior design intention, we argue that their forms arise from the practical coordination of bodily skill, available materials, topography, ritual habit, and movement through the landscape. It further shows that these practices are being reshaped by tourism and digital image circulation, which increasingly privilege standardised and image-oriented forms over locally responsive processes of making. The study offers an ethnographic account of this transformation and its implications for debates on dwelling, making, and mediated visibility.

In the face of widespread global conflict, this paper explores emergent work on empathic design for peace. We draw on award-winning theory and practice within peace studies and previous work on empathic design to develop a theoretical framework for the practical application of design methods, and illustrate this framework by showing how an analysis of a novel—in this paper, Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)—can lead to a multi-scalar approach to civil society-led peacebuilding which can inform future public sector and policy design work. We view this as a form of ‘literary design fiction’—that can harness the positional difference of conflict adversaries found in literary fiction—which can be applied to processes of designing and which can shape peacebuilding efforts in conflict and post-conflict zones.

This exploratory research discusses participatory speculative design (PSD) in the context of understanding its potential opportunities for civic service design (CSD) and for practicing designers in this growing field. This study employs a critical lens, with consideration to existing criticisms regarding the design practice, and how to navigate through potential barriers in civic service design. The research paper explores the approach of participatory speculative design, and how it might inform civic service design and its designers today.

This paper examines relational dynamics within a programmatic service design collaboration shaping public service development in Espoo, Finland. Over two years, a service design researcher collaborated with civil servants to co-create more inclusive employment practices. Drawing on iterative design interventions, observations, interviews, and informal everyday communications, reflexive analysis identifies three conditions that enabled collaborative design agency: relational alignment, infrastructuring coherence, and reflexive reconfiguration. These relational conditions highlight how civil servants actively advance design work and institutional learning. By bringing forward the concept of collaborative design agency, the study highlights how design in public services is an emergent capacity calling for greater attention to the agency, motivation, and situated expertise of civil servants. Recognising and intentionally nurturing such relational dynamics not only embeds design in everyday public administration but also contributes to the broader institutionalisation of design as a mode of governance.

Public-sector innovation units across Latin America increasingly use design methodologies to reimagine policymaking and service delivery. However, fragmented and inconsistent documentation continues to limit institutional learning and sustained impact. This study maps how public design is practiced through a multilingual literature review of 84 sources (from an initial corpus of 700 sources) analyzed across English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Coding findings at institutional, project, and individual levels reveals four critical patterns: inconsistent terminology hindering synthesis, uneven geographic coverage leaving vast regions underrepresented, superficial methodology documentation describing tools without unpacking adaptation or context, and striking temporal gaps with minimal longitudinal evidence linking pilots to sustained policy change. These findings expose how scattered documentation prevents innovations from compounding into embedded governance capacity. Our analysis is the first step in building an open repository that builds collective memory in a field too often starting from scratch.

Human-centred design is an essential element of the application of design in public and social sectors. What has remained largely unexpressed in the field is the way in which design is influenced by how we see humans, and how that is informed by our worldviews and dominant paradigms. In this conceptual paper, we investigate five common views on humans – user, worker, fallible individual, consumer, and whole and social being - based on four dimensions. The dimensions include 1) depth, 2) personal focus, 3) social focus, and 4) level of agency. Based on a case study of youth unemployment, we show how such views can lead to fundamentally different types of designs. We discuss the need to include the image of humans as a topic in stakeholder conversations. We conclude with arguing for a holistic and social perspective on humans when design is aimed at fundamentally addressing complex societal challenges.

This paper explores the evolving practice of design in the public sector. To do so, we initiated a reading group that brought together academics and practitioners from around the globe to discuss how public design is understood and practiced in different contexts. The common thread across the six reading groups held so far was that public design is inherently paradoxical. Three core paradoxes appear to characterize its practice: the identity paradox (blending in to stand out), the enablement paradox (constraining design by enabling it), and the political paradox (designing apolitically while designing politically). These paradoxes highlight the need for strategic agility in public design—the ability to hold contradictions in creative tension. Methodologically, the paper positions the reading group as a generative approach for transnational, dialogic research that bridges scholarship and practice. Taken together, the study contributes to ongoing debates on the pitfalls and possibilities of advancing public design.

While business and strategic design scholarship widely acknowledges the benefits of Human-Centered Design (HCD), limited research noted that implementing HCD may produce intricate challenges in real-world business contexts—especially in startups constrained by resource scarcity and limited time for trial and error. Drawing on institutional theory, we examine how HCD permeate into organizational culture, strategy making, and daily operations. Our case study develops a framework of “HCD Institutionalization Dilemma”. The framework encompasses four themes. First, overcommitment to HCD, where organizational members deeply adhere to HCD tenets. Second, operational predicament perception, where high investments fail to deliver tangible, actionable design outputs. Third, skillful predicament concealment, a counterintuitive practice where predicaments are deliberately veiled to preserve HCD’s positive reputation. Collectively, these practices reinforced organizational underperformance, characterized by perceived inefficient return on investment, biased decision-making, and resource misallocation. Our framework advances understanding of the intricate complexities of HCD integration in real-world business contexts.

This paper explores current challenges of and competencies in design education through an industry lens, highlighting both the opportunities and obstacles arising from the growing integration of AI. Drawing on the interviews with design leaders, scholars and students, the findings reveal diverse perspectives and challenges related to AI, including four main aspects: (1) AI can serve as an assistive tool in design practice; (2) AI creates new requirements and needs for designer roles and affects job displacement; (3) AI can improve work efficiency and reshape organisational structures; and (4) AI raises ethical issues such as plagiarism. Moreover, two AI-related cultural challenges unique to the Chinese context are also identified: (1) AI-driven unemployment can increase the ‘curse of 35’ career bottleneck; and (2) the rise of AI may impact unspoken social norms, or ‘guanxi’, as a source of competitive advantage.

Typical organizations are characterized by complexity, comprising individuals working in isolated groups with competing priorities. Structural and cultural factors often hinder effective collaboration, despite organizational efforts. This paper examines collaboration dynamics in organizations through the lens of behaviour-change. It introduces the CraftChange framework for behaviour-change for promoting collaborative participation, demonstrating the approach through an analysis of two real-world organizational projects. The paper argues that genuine participatory engagement cannot be achieved solely through top-down directives or establishment of support units like innovation labs, design thinking or prototyping teams. Instead, there is a need to focus on bringing behaviour-change through a stagewise approach to encourage meaningful collaboration, beginning by raising awareness among stakeholders and gradually supporting their transition into active participation. The methodology outlined in this paper provides a pragmatic guide for practitioners seeking to implement participatory design within dynamic and evolving workplace environments.

This article presents a case-based investigation of design-led foresight in practice through a series of international workshops conducted in Denmark and China within a doctoral action-research programme with Revigrés, a Portuguese ceramic manufacturer. Grounded in a structured trend cartography clustered into fifteen domains, multidisciplinary teams employed lightweight foresight methods, including personas, rapid scenario visioning, and low-fidelity prototyping, to explore possible housing futures for 2070. Twelve speculative design visions emerged, ranging from bio-integrated habitats and privacy-legible smart homes to circular neighbourhood systems and programmable interiors. Rather than treating these visions as predictive outcomes, the study examines how workshop artefacts functioned as boundary objects that enabled organisational reflection, surfaced assumptions, and supported cross-disciplinary dialogue. The case illustrates how compact design-led foresight workshops can facilitate strategic sense-making and enact elements of design leadership within industrial contexts. Implications are discussed for strategic design practice, innovation governance, and design education.

This bibliometric study analyzes 236 articles from Web of Science (2008-2024) to map the intellectual structure of real-time user participation in service encounters (RUP-SE). The field has transitioned from exploration (2008-2013) to maturity, with post-2020 publications averaging 29.5 annually. Three core research clusters emerge: real-time co-creation and participation, digitally-driven service innovation, and value creation-destruction dynamics. Theoretically grounded in service-dominant logic and value co-creation frameworks, the field addresses how technological advancement and COVID-19 have accelerated the shift from co-design to co-execution. However, platform architectures introduce governance logics that render co-execution inherently asymmetrical, and value co-destruction in algorithmic contexts may be structurally unequal among service actors. Key gaps include the ethical governance of algorithmic mediation, limited cross-cultural analyses, and scarce longitudinal studies. Future research should integrate critical platform perspectives with service theory to address equity and accountability in real-time service systems.

Enterprises operating under resource constraints often struggle to maintain efficient and innovative design practices. Data intelligence (DI) offers new opportunities to overcome design challenges and process optimization. However, research on how DI is practically integrated into real-world design workflows under such constraints remains limited. To address this gap, qualitative interviews were conducted with 21 industry designers from 14 companies. Using grounded theory, the interview data were coded to examine how DI supports the optimization of existing design processes and to identify its key intervention points and values. The study further investigates how DI interacts with design practices from multiple perspectives, including project type, organizational mode, and design strategy. By outlining a fifteen-dimensional blueprint of DI system functionalities, it provides guidance for future system development and proposes a framework for DI-driven design collaboration.

Nowadays, parents and educators are paying more attention to the intervention of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Children with ADHD typically exhibit deficits in executive functions (EF), and metacognition is crucial for enhancing these functions. However, existing interventions mostly focus on specific training of EF and lack effective strategies to promote overall improvement through higher-level metacognitive processes. Therefore, this study integrates the metacognitive theoretical framework into EF training and designs a gamified intervention program for children with ADHD. Subsequently, we conducted an experiment with 16 children with ADHD and analyzed the changes in their EF levels before and after the intervention to assess the effectiveness of the program. The results indicate that the training significantly improved the EF levels of the children. This study provides theoretical guidance and a practical framework for the future design of intervention games, tools, and other interventions for children with ADHD.

This study investigates how indoor environments, for example of schools or workplaces, can actively support the diversity of communities, by considering the case of autistic adults’ preferences for them. Employing a participatory design approach, we engaged autistic individuals to understand their lived experiences, preferences for meaningful in-person social interactions, and their strategies to engage in social settings. Key findings highlight the importance of sensory regulation, vibrant and engaging spaces that mitigate awkwardness and promote authentic interactions, and the role of predictability and autonomy in reducing unnecessary stresses. We show how autistic adults can be supported in managing their regulation to participate how they wish. The findings are discussed in the light of inclusivity of school or work communities and their physical environments. Supporting and illustrating the principle of equity, the study shows how an example outlier group’s needs can be considered in designing environments that aim to serve everyone equally.

The increased recognition that minoritised people should play a more significant role in the research and design of technologies aimed at them is welcomed. Though Interaction design research has begun to address the needs of neurodivergent people, the epistemic framing of the research aims, and practical co-construction of technologies are still infrequently from a lived-experience perspective. This work sought to address some of these concerns through a series of interaction co-design workshops with ADHD adults framed as technological design for wellbeing. This paper reflects on our adaptive use of Soma and Co-design workshop methodologies to account for and speak to the lived experience of ADHD in our participants and researchers. By foregrounding co-design of the co-design process, we demonstrate how methodological adaptation is not a matter of accommodation alone but a route to deeper agency, creativity, and equity. We contribute facilitation guidelines for co-design workshops with and for ADHD participants.

Amid the integration of AI into special education, establishing trust between AI educational robots and children with autism through emotional design is a critical challenge in HCI. While emotional design benefits general educational robots, systematic frameworks and empirical evidence for autistic children remain scarce. This study applies the three-level emotional design model (Instinctive, behavioral, reflective) to examine how multimodal elements—voice (volume, speed), appearance (color, form), and emotional expressions—affect attention, interaction willingness, and trust. A controlled experiment (N=12) revealed that higher volume, slower speech, warm colors, and positive expressions significantly improve engagement and trust. Based on the results, a design evaluation index hierarchy model was developed, incorporating perceptual adaptation, behavioral guidance, and emotional resonance. This model offers theoretical and practical guidance for developing trust-building AI robots, supporting inclusive, human-AI collaborative educational environments.

While design methods are a crucial aspect of design research, education, and practice, our understanding of how they work and what shapes their performance remains limited. To address this, this paper reports on a theory-building effort, outlining core aspects of the phenomenon of method usage in design. Following recent calls for grounding design research in cognitive science, it frames method usage as a cognitive process and integrates cognitive load theory and dual-process theory to describe central relationships between the design method, the method user, and the context of usage. The paper concludes by highlighting that method performance emerges from these interactions and by reminding us that design methods themselves do not perform—the method user do. Consequently, method performance should not only be assessed based on output, but its ability to foster effective design practices in the method user.

Collaging is a form of design that references, remixes, and transforms the past, while holding potential for queer decolonial imaginaries. Through bringing together decolonial and queer theories, we propose an exploration of collage as a design technique that seeks to tear through dominant imaginaries to create more emancipatory visualizations. To explore this, we first turn to feminist theoretical understandings of collage, and then ask: how does collaging show up as a distinctly queer and decolonial design practice? Then, we utilize examples from our field work to demonstrate how collage can function as a queer and decolonial design practice that shows up in everyday life. Finally, we take these observations to our pedagogical practices and illustrate how making collages in the classroom generates an embodied practice that not only deepens understandings of queer and decolonial theory, but also visualizes alternate futures.

The National Education Policy of India (2020) states that Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is essential towards student’s holistic development. While existing curricula provide structured guidance and learning, they often lack playful and participatory elements to engage children in the learning process. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a non-digital, co-operative and playful activity called Bhavna Chakra (Wheel of Emotions) which aims to teach children about emotional awareness using Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. The study proposes a design framework based on cognitive appraisal theory, narrative structure and social play. A within-subjects study with 40 students (ages 11–12) from low socio-economic backgrounds compared Bhavna Chakra with an existing SEL task. Children demonstrated higher gains across five of six emotional awareness dimensions (EAQ-30), with notable improvements in differentiating and analyzing emotions. The findings highlight the value of culturally grounded, playful artefacts for SEL in low socio-economic settings.

This paper challenges how contemporary design activism has been defined and practised. While Western frameworks have framed activism through countering narrative, raising awareness and social change, this paper proposes a move from a position of countering toward a position of affirming. By looking at the history and current practices of design activism and examining the deficit of the “unheard” paradigm, this paper highlights the limitations of oppositional logics that centre critique over creation. This paper then explores alternative understandings grounded in decolonial, Indigenous epistemologies, and the voices of the global majority. Through examples and case studies, the paper illustrates how creative activist practices can be expressions of lived experiences, tools for radical imaginations and spaces for collective healing and truth-telling. Through this, the paper reframes design activism through positions of affirmation, relationality, and the genuine articulation of pluriversal ways of being, imagining, and creating a better world for all.

This paper examines the PhD onboarding process as a site of co-creation and relational design between supervisor and student. Drawing on first-person experience, we present a series of collaboratively annotated and devised documents - The Table of Supervisory Style, Competency Profile Form, Competency Development Trajectory, A Gentlewoman’s Agreement, and Marching Orders - as performative artefacts that structure dialogue, reflection, and trust-building in supervision. These practices have emerged within an industrial design context at a university of technology, where institutional expectations intersect with creative and emergent modes of inquiry. We argue that onboarding can function as a design-led intervention: a process that materialises values, negotiates positionality, and reconfigures traditional hierarchies of academic supervision. Through the deliberate use of ambiguity, reflexivity, and value articulation, the process cultivates spaces of mutual learning and identity formation. The resulting framework positions supervision as an ongoing design practice that evolves through shared authorship, understanding, and critical awareness.

Design education has embraced empathy, developing a diverse repository of tools and methods for cultivating empathic engagement. Yet guidance on how or why these tools should be selected remains limited. Current practices often conflate availability with appropriateness, with tools chosen based on familiarity or convenience rather than empathic fit or contextual suitability. This leads to shallow engagement, limiting the empathic understanding needed for effective design outcomes. This paper proposes a criteria-based framework for evaluating empathy tools, grounded in psychological theory and established empathic design frameworks. The proposed criteria offers a structured lens to assess how tools operate, for whom, and to what effect. Supporting this is an Empathy Tool Repository of 65 design methods, analysis of which reveals important patterns in current practice which demonstrate that true empathy is rarely achieved through a single tool alone. The framework provides selection wisdom to enable a shift from tool-first to intention-first pedagogy.

This article takes the Shenyang China Industrial Museum as an example to expose the interpretation and design of China's representative industrial heritage museums dominated by authoritative narratives and technocratic biases. Through the case study of the “Steel Home Still” exhibition, explore how narrative design can reconstruct industrial archives and challenge their power structure. This article conducts a comparative analysis of two cases based on three parameters: narrative themes and strategies, representation of individuals and workers, technology narratives and human engagement, discussing how human-centered exhibition narratives reposition human memory at the core of industrial heritage, transforming it from static representations of industrial and technological achievements into a dynamic platform for emotional connections and inclusive storytelling of workers and industries. The research results show the exhibition achieves this goal by reconstructing multi-dimensional scenes of workers' work and life, juxtaposing technological and living environments of different eras, and employing universal emotional narratives.

In an emerging longevity society, reimagining social infrastructure has become increasingly essential. The World Health Organization (2025) projects that the global population aged 60 and over will nearly double from 12% in 2015 to 22% by 2050, raising urgent questions about how people live and interact with services over time. This study introduces the service exposome, extending Wild’s (2005, 2012) exposome concept to consider the cumulative service-related exposures that shape well-being across the lifespan. Using the Design for Longevity (D4L) Unclock Framework—a tool that helps designers explore intersections across longevity, service, system, design, technology, and society—the research examines how early-stage design processes can uncover longevity-related needs. Drawing on two participatory workshops and survey data from 16 undergraduate design students at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Northeastern University, the findings suggest that the D4L Unclock Framework and service exposome concept can guide longevity-inclusive, systemic, and experiential design interventions.

This thesis reimagines the aging U.S. suburb as a site of transition, where single-family housing can evolve into distributed care infrastructure supporting longevity and community well-being. Through onsite research in Sacramento and collaboration with local care providers, the project develops a scalable framework for retrofitting suburban homes into neighborhood-based care hubs connected by shared food, mobility, and caregiver networks. Integrating architectural transformation, service design, and participatory co-design methods, it proposes a systemic approach that bridges individual housing adaptation with urban-scale resilience. Rather than pursuing technological “smartness,” the model advances a human-centered LongevityTech vision,where design mediates between housing, health, and social connection. By turning suburban fragmentation into an intergenerational ecosystem of care, this work illustrates how the built environment itself can transition alongside its aging residents, shaping more inclusive, adaptable, and age-ready futures.

The City of Longevity (CoL) framework integrates emerging technologies, participatory methodologies, and systemic service design to mainstream longevity in urban planning. Anchored in equity and intergenerational engagement, CoL introduces an AI-driven decision-support platform that translates longevity evidence into actionable urban policy through participatory co-design, KPI setting, and systemic service design principles. Following the Longevity as a Service (LaaS) concept, CoL advances a phased, coordinated implementation architecture whose deliverables are tailored to each municipality's cultural heritage and civic identity. This architecture is embedded within a collaborative inter-city network. Methodologically, this work synthesises convergent evidence from exposome science, longevity-ready urbanism, participatory design, and systemic service design into a layered architecture where each performs a distinct function, validated through pilot application in a real governance context. By establishing longevity as measurable and replicable rather than aspirational, CoL offers cities a scalable model supporting healthy, meaningful lives across generations.

This qualitative study examines social isolation among Boston's elders aged 65 and older. We explored ways to employ service design and interactive encounters to connect different generations around history. Our focus was on Boston’s Seaport—a district shaped by redevelopment and technology. This study involved four interviews with museum professionals, elders, and locals to understand how memories influence community connections. The Time Travelers app features an Interactive Memory Map of stories along with guided walks and collaborative memory threads that encourage intergenerational exchange. Complementing the app, a Seaport boardwalk installation features televisions from different decades displaying memories from each era. Visitors can browse stories and record their own through connected telephones. Together, these experiences transform public spaces and technology into portals of living history, promoting social engagement and purpose across generations. Future studies may examine Time Travelers’ long-term impact on social connections and expand participation to include more elders across Boston.

China's rapidly ageing urban population faces complex mental health challenges, particularly with comorbid conditions. Current elderly care is nonpersonalised and unresponsive to support holistic wellbeing. To address the challenges of inclusive, responsive, and adaptable senior care, this study suggests a human-centred digital twin framework that incorporates service ecosystem design.

This study employs a human-centred digital twin design methodology based on service ecosystem theory, focusing on how digital twins can mediate between users’ lived experiences and service innovation.

The findings from the literature review and design practice indicate that digital twin technology has potential foster older adults’ life experience, social inclusion, and psychological support beyond technical efficiency. This provides theoretical and practical guidance for designing age-friendly communities and emerging longevity technology cities based on smart service ecosystem.

In an age of pervasive disinformation, values function as conceptual anchors for comprehending complex information. Design-for-values approaches frame values as alignment opportunities. But the same values that enable ethical, resonant communication can be exploited for manipulative and unethical purposes. This paper argues that values in graphic communication design function as 'darker affordances' — relational properties affording both ethical communication and manipulation with equal reliability. Drawing on Master's students' reflections from a project in which they designed paired climate communication — one ethically aligned, one disinformation — it examines how contrastive pedagogy develops ethical literacy around values' dual nature. Analysis reveals three findings: creating disinformation is structurally easier than ethical communication; this asymmetry triggers an epistemological crisis about design's agency; and recognising values' dual potential collapses ethical/unethical binaries, requiring reasoning within moral ambiguity. This extends design-for-values scholarship by demonstrating that values' stability as meaning-making anchors is precisely what makes them reliable targets for manipulation.

This paper addresses gaps in ethical guidance for socially oriented designers engaged in co-design with marginalised groups. It introduces an ethical canvas for planning and evaluating co-design, developed through a collaborative inquiry led by a practitioner-researcher with long experience in community-based design. The canvas was informed by the authoring team’s expertise in service design, ethical decision-making, and socially engaged design research. It makes ethical deliberation visible and actionable, especially where multiple or conflicting values are present. The canvas invites designers to reflect on their stance, engage with participants’ lived realities, and navigate tensions between institutional expectations and situated needs. It supports the recognition of values such as autonomy, empowerment, social responsibility and social change, often implicit in practice. Ethics is approached as relational and evolving, shaped through dialogue and shared experience, across all levels of society. This contribution strengthens ethical decision-making and offers a practical tool for value-sensitive reflection.

Design culture has proliferated aspirational value frameworks, from manifestos championing social justice to ethics toolkits, yet lacks meaningful accountability infrastructure when values are violated or conflict. This paper examines a transgressive design research intervention: a mobile confessional booth at a city Design Week in 2025 that invited designers to anonymously confess professional compromises and ethical failures. The 125 confessions revealed patterns of deflection (blaming systems over individual agency), superficiality (focusing on technical mistakes rather than methodological rigour leading to ethical violations), and conspicuous absence of admissions regarding exploitation, greenwashing, or designing harm. Unlike medicine, law, or journalism, design has implemented no meaningful ethical infrastructure, defaulting instead to personal intra-structuring of consequences for harmful or negligent practice. This structural gap means values remain aspirational rhetoric or private guilt, unable to be metabolised collectively. The paper argues value accountability requires bottom-up infrastructure to surface, negotiate, and reckon with complicity in design practice.

Emerging from a three-year arts-based participatory design and research collaboration, the Who Cares? Approach is a framework for social change developed to understand how a community in rural British Columbia could cultivate a system of support for aging. Through iterative cycles of team retreats, including creative engagement and group interviews, project members developed a framework grounded in values of trust, presence, creativity, storytelling, relationality, and acknowledgement of the unknown. By transforming value statements into diagrams, installations, and participatory events, the project demonstrated how design artifacts can act as mediators of shared meaning and catalysts for ethical reflection. The resulting visual framework captures the project's values as nonlinear, non-hierarchical, and overlapping. The paper presents a model of participatory design that treats values as living, negotiable, and materially enacted, and illustrates how creative research methods can generate new insights into care within complex social systems.

This paper examines how design education can reveal and negotiate values through the practice of design activism. Based on a multi-year teaching experience with undergraduate design students, the study reflects on how pedagogical strategies oriented by emancipation and collective responsibility enable the articulation of ethical awareness in design processes. The teaching approach evolved from remote reflection-based activities to embodied, field-based interventions that addressed social and environmental issues in local communities. Through qualitative analysis of classroom documentation and student projects, the study identifies values such as reciprocity, dignity, and solidarity as emerging drivers of learning and design action. The discussion highlights design education as a context for developing situated ethics, where activism and pedagogy intersect to foster civic imagination and value-conscious practice.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project using speculative design to explore the intersections of sustainability and technology in the UK Wool industry. Through a process of value mapping, worldbuilding, design fiction, and card development, the project involved stakeholders across the wool supply chain who contributed their perspectives and priorities. This process revealed how value is created in the wool industry, and how relationships and systems are mediated by hidden, often contrasting values. Findings highlight the importance of these values in shaping sustainable and equitable futures for the sector. We present a conceptual framework of valuation, revaluation and evaluation as a lens to understand this iterative process. The research challenges traditional top-down understandings of value and suggests Digital Good can be supported by a contextual values-driven chain. Finally, we present a key output: a card-based tool designed to support values-driven ethical evaluation and consideration of Digital Good in a futures-led approach.

This paper presents Digital Ghosts, a practice-based research project exploring how creative and tactile approaches to web archives can reimagine engagement with digital cultural heritage and GLAM collections. Using exploratory visualisation of metadata, the project transforms the digital into interactive multimedia installations. Operating within the “post-digital” condition of GLAM, the project investigates how design can mediate between the technical infrastructures of preservation, traditional archivist practice, and the experiential, interpretive needs of users. Rather than treating messy humanities data as a failure, the project frames absence and inconsistency as evidence of the web’s fluid temporality and of institutional decisions about what counts as memory. Through user-testing workshops, visitor surveys and interviews with archivists and users, the research explores the role of visualization and interaction in accessing GLAM data. The paper argues that creative access is effective in sustaining engagement and encouraging data literacy, which are necessary for the sustainability of collections.

Narrative has long been used in cultural heritage for interpretation and communication, primarily within institutions and historic sites. Everyday heritage, however, foregrounds seemingly modest places and is constituted through routine interactions and practices, emphasising a continuing narrative between place and everyday life. Ubiquitous digital technologies make multi-layered narratives possible and bring underrepresented stories to light in situ. This pilot study in Loughborough’s Market Place, UK, explores narratives rooted in lived experiences that convey cultural-heritage significance. We designed and deployed cultural probes (a set of creative and speculative tasks) to prompt and record place-based stories. The analysis identified four themes: spatiality, temporality, sensoriality and social context. These findings inform a narrative framework for the next stage of the research: AI-assisted co-design of locative media for everyday heritage and, ultimately, a distributed and inclusive heritage experience in urban environments, fostering a sense of place and community connection.

Australian museums invest heavily in hybrid and immersive gallery technologies yet treat their websites, where many neurodiverse visitors seek essential planning information, as static brochures. As 15 to 20 percent of the global population is neurodivergent, this oversight affects a significant audience. This study presents the first Australian audit of neurodivergent accessibility across 43 museums, revealing major disconnects: 86% offer minimal digital experiences despite their accessibility potential, and 35% provide no neurodivergent resources. While many claim consultation, neurodivergent voices remain absent from digital design. Shared digital infrastructure across museum networks creates sector-wide intervention points, since improving centralised systems could enhance accessibility across multiple institutions. Building on theory that calls for co-design and recognition of digital as a heritage experience, this practice-led research establishes baseline data to move from advocacy to implementation. In partnership with a federal museum, future phases will test neurodivergent-led co-design to drive organisational change and meaningful accessibility.

This research explores how design-driven approaches can boost engagement with cultural heritage and archives, centering on an experimental initiative in San Marino's historic center. The project envisions the city as a dynamic archive brought to life through interactive installations. A system featuring an interactive device called Iride and six site-specific installations was created to reveal the hidden historical and meaningful layers within the urban landscape. These installations use multisensory components to craft experiences that enhance visitors' cognitive and emotional connections with local cultural stories. This method illustrates how design and digital technology can connect tangible and intangible heritage, institutional archives and community memory, as well as static preservation and dynamic interpretation. The project provides a model that small historic towns can replicate to utilize their cultural resources and create engaging heritage experiences. This highlights the role of design in reimagining archives as evolving cultural engagement sites in the digital era.

Building an information legacy requires method: identifying, selecting, and cataloguing information that can anchor future research demands a thorough archiving process, with accurate information access and rigorous preservation practice. Yet academic archives today must also respond to a broader cultural condition shaped by digital transformation and interdisciplinary collaboration.

This paper discusses the development of an academic design archive as part of the wider GLAM ecosystem, where preservation, innovation and digital transformation coexist. It proposes a design-led framework that approaches archiving as a cultural and participatory process.

Through literature review and institutional reflection, the study highlights the archive’s dual role: collecting and curating pedagogical outputs while activating them for new purposes such as exhibitions, partnerships, and critical discourse.

The archive thus becomes a living system, sustaining academic memory, fostering creative renewal, and positioning design education within the post-digital landscape as a platform for continuity, participation, and ethical reflection.

This article presents a study examining digital collections in order to map resources available on digital platforms that influence user behavior and participation. By analyzing the collections’ interfaces, it identifies how artificial intelligence resources can relate different cultural objects within those spaces, working with different layers of information. These resources provide ways to overcome barriers between systems and the assumptions of their original cataloging, leading us to conceptualize digital objects as potential entangled objects. From this perspective, the article discusses the dual role of digital collections—as knowledge repositories and as mediation systems—while exploring viable alternatives for constituting collections within specific contexts of the Global South. To this end, the study presents an interface design, organized with computer vision techniques, arguing the importance of critical engagement with digital images and the intertwined dynamics in a decolonial approach on memory and technologies. It outlines implications for design practice, policy, and research globally.

Immersive technologies can assist older adults with visual impairments, but they require meaningful, context-specific design. In collaboration with an eye care provider, we present Macular Mailbox, an at-home Virtual Reality (VR) system that connects clinicians and family members in supporting older adults with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). The prototype combines Preferred Retinal Locus (PRL) vision training and monitoring (patient–clinician) with playful acts of making and sharing artefacts (patient–family) designed to foster emotional engagement and self-efficacy. Within an asymmetric VR environment, participants hold distinct yet interdependent roles that contribute to a shared outcome: connected care. We conclude by outlining directions for future research grounded in our design case study and reflections.

Digital behavior change tools increasingly use system-driven tailoring to guide users toward healthier choices. While well-intentioned, such approaches may undermine autonomous behavior change by removing users from decision-making processes and limiting opportunities to develop self-knowledge: a practical understanding of what works for oneself that can help regulate current and future behaviors. This is particularly consequential for adolescents, who are developing personal autonomy at a time when the health behaviors they establish can have long-term consequences. We propose that self-tailoring can enhance autonomy by actively involving users in constructing and adapting approaches to their own contexts. Through two studies, we investigated how adolescents can be supported in constructing their own behavior change strategies. Study 1 shows that adolescents are capable of self-tailoring and that doing so can build self-knowledge through experience. Study 2 shows how a strategy menu at moments of goal (re)setting can scaffold self-knowledge to inform behavioral choices.

Neurological prevention science is gaining traction, with implications for people at raised familial risk of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). We examine how design can intervene in this emerging prevention space through Digesting Science (DS), a co-designed public engagement project that brings families affected by MS together through events and playful, hands-on activities in community settings. We analyse post-event open-ended evaluation forms and a follow up study using auto-photo-elicitation with semi-structured interviews with children and parents. Findings show that DS makes MS discussable without increasing anxiety, embodied activities create shared reference points and language for talking about symptoms, science and uncertainty. We conceptualise these effects as situated preparedness, readiness built through context-specific adjustments and reorganisations of care in family life. We argue that such situated design work builds the relational groundwork required for future, responsible discussions around neurological prevention.

This paper investigates how bio-inspired design can contribute to preventive healthcare by learning from the adaptive intelligence of living systems. Through a Critical Interpretive Synthesis of 356 studies, it explores the translation of concepts like adaptation, cooperation, and self-repair from biology to design practice. The Design Knowledge Translation Model (DKTM) is introduced to illustrate the process by which biological insights are interpreted, abstracted, and applied to inform design knowledge. The findings indicate that leveraging nature-inspired reasoning can shift healthcare from a reactive to an anticipatory approach, fostering systems that enhance wellbeing and collective care. Furthermore, this work provides a guideline for interdisciplinary collaboration across biology, design, and clinical science, establishing bio-inspired thinking as a shared language for developing preventive and adaptive life-centred innovations.

Body sensors render human bodies as digital data, promising better self-knowledge. Yet, as people trust and learn to attune to these representations, system breakdowns expose tensions between embodied knowing and digital authority. Through Research through Design and Critical Design, this paper investigates how trust, control, and self-perception are negotiated in bodily interaction with data. Breathe Kritisk is a critical artefact that externalises breathing via an inflatable system linked to the user's solar plexus. Designed for estrangement, it resists attunement through a sensitive sensor and deceptive outputs — sometimes following the user’s breaths, other times acting on its own. We discuss insights from interviews and observations of interacting visitors at design festivals. Some visitors were convinced that they had complete control over the machine, while others questioned if they breathed properly. We interpret these reactions as a tendency to overtrust in the digital body representation, and discuss its implications.

This study positions Design as a distributed capability for New Product Development through ecosystems knowledge. While the strategic role of Design in local productive systems is well established, new technology affordances often necessitate the design and implementation of organizational strategies—beyond traditional business strategies—across SMEs from diverse industrial clusters. Consequently, technological evolution calls for a system-level positioning of Design interventions and a clear articulation of Design capabilities within the organizational dimension of an ecosystem, where multiple actors participate in strategic and operational decision-making for New Product Development. By conceptualizing Design as an organizational intelligence, this research highlights its potential to enable firms to integrate heterogeneous and specialized knowledge, thereby enhancing value co-creation and economic growth. The paper proposes a theoretical framework for classifying Design capabilities at the organizational level of New Product Development interventions and examines current opportunities and barriers to embedding Design as a meta-capability within manufacturing SMEs.

Systems are shaped by dominant mindsets that constrain which futures can be imagined or made possible. Supporting system transformation requires shifting temporal boundaries and revealing the hidden system logics. This study explores how design can contribute to understanding and reframing sociotechnical system change from within. In an empirical study conducted within a research consortium investigating the electrification of road freight transport, we, as design researchers, entered the system change as participants. Using a practice-oriented lens, we learned from riding in trucks, conducting contextual observations, and interviewing drivers and transport planners whose everyday work sustains the system. What is often portrayed as a tightly controlled, planned system instead revealed itself as held together by human skills. This study uncovered how systems are maintained by workarounds – established practices and improvised actions that expose hidden tensions and logics. We propose that workarounds can be used as potential leverage points for transformative change.

This paper traces the emergence of territorial design as a distinct discourse and practice that repositions urban-landscape design from site-based form-making toward socio-ecological governance across scales. Drawing on a systematic review of scholarly literature (1960-2025), a practice survey (42 questionnaires with designers working in France), and three comparative case studies - Room for the River, Medellín’s social urbanism, and riverfront renaturation projects in Paris and Lyon - we show how ecological planning, landscape urbanism, and territorialist thought converge into methods that couple territorial diagnosis, morphological and biophysical patterning, and participatory co-design. The analysis foregrounds two fertile frictions: replicability vs. situatedness, and short political cycles vs. long ecological rhythms. We argue that territorial design extends the remit of design toward metabolic flows and governance interfaces, articulate a role typology - mediator, systems integrator, custodia -, and propose a triad of metrics - biodiversity, climate resilience, and habitability - to evaluate territorial transformations.

Service design has evolved from a niche practice focused on improving customer experience into a transdisciplinary discipline driving systemic and societal transformation. Drawing on an online survey of 82 practitioners with formal training (MA Service Design) and a validation panel with eight experts, this study examines the current state of practice, identifying evolving roles, competencies, and emerging trends. Findings show a shift from tools to mindsets, grounded in curiosity, adaptability, and ethical, human-centred values. Practitioners increasingly engage in strategic and organisational transformation, adopting life-centred and planetary perspectives while integrating generative AI into research, ideation, and prototyping. The study also highlights growing hybrid roles across policy, strategy, and digital practice, creating both opportunity and professional ambiguity. As the field matures, education must foster strategic literacy, systems thinking, and ethical awareness, enabling designers to navigate complexity and shape sustainable, technologically responsible futures.

The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into design workflows is reshaping how designers make decisions. This study examines the influence of LLMs on design decision-making during the early stages of service design, through a diary study with service design practitioners. By analysing usage logs and conducting post-intervention focus group interviews, we examine collaborative decision-making across three interaction dimensions: designer–designer, designer–LLM, and LLM–LLM. The findings reveal that LLMs reshape the internal decision logic and collaboration mode within service design teams. Across different stages of collaborative decision-making with human, LLMs take on varying roles as apprentice, collaborator, advisor, expert, co-creator, and evaluator. This study contributes to the understanding of AI-assisted design collaboration by mapping the evolving dynamics of decision-making in human–AI co-creation contexts.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s economy has shifted from oil dependence toward diversification, spotlighting the “creative economy”. This transformation highlights the design economy, where designers are pursuing entrepreneurial and commercial opportunities. Understanding the challenges and enablers that shape design start-ups is key to supporting their growth within the design economy. This paper, part of larger PhD research, explores the Saudi Arabia design ecosystem and the experiences of running a design start-up. The paper addresses the question: “How does the Saudi Arabian ecosystem support or hinder design start-ups?” It provides a qualitative perspective based on semi-structured interviews with fifteen designer-entrepreneurs across five Saudi Arabian cities (i.e., Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Jazan, and Tabuk). This paper contributes insight into how design start-ups operate within an emerging, non-Western creative economy, a context underrepresented in existing literature. The findings show that formal support structures remain misaligned with design practice, shaping how designer-entrepreneurs run their start-ups.

The growing recognition of design’s value to business and society has driven rapid expansion in the design industries, intensifying competition among designers and design firms. Despite an increased scholarly attention to the strategic role of design, there is a lack of understanding how design businesses strategize and position themselves in the market. We aim to revitalise this debate by reviewing a diverse range of literatures on strategic positioning of design agencies and suggest a focus on the theory of optimal distinctiveness. This theory argues that to be successful, firms need to find an optimal balance between being different to be attractive yet at the same time being similar to gain legitimacy. We conceptualize the portfolio as a strategic interface for achieving this balance as it connects internal creative capabilities with external expectations.

As discussions about AI and its societal impacts grow, questions about how to practise design responsibly and ethically have become more prominent. This paper examines how designers do ethics in practice, focusing on the relationship between universal frameworks and situated, lived experiences. Conversations with design practitioners reveal that while universal ethical frameworks provide consistency, they often overlook the everyday negotiations designers face in the workplace. Practitioners report that current governance systems, influenced by external regulations, are overly ‘top-down’ and narrowly focused on specific technologies. This approach leaves designers to identify and fill ethical gaps themselves, often through subtle, even covert, methods. Drawing on conversations with designers and my own observations, this paper reframes ethics as a dynamic, negotiated process embedded within design work. It argues that designers’ talk—their reflection, hesitation, and sense-making—serves as the key to understanding how ethics operates in practice.

This study explores how a micro craft brand sustains its original sincerity toward craftsmanship while confronting the challenges posed by industrialized production processes and economic constraints. Based on a fifteen-year practice-led case of craft entrepreneurship, it analyzes reflective negotiations between persistence and compromise, ideal and capital, craft and industry. Employing the Double Diamond model and Aristotle’s Four Causes, the research interprets the process of craft commercialization and examines the underlying motivations that sustain the existence of micro craft brands. The findings reveal that practical limitations can be transformed into drivers of creativity. “Compromise” no longer signifies failure but, when approached with sincerity, becomes a form of resilience essential for survival. In the fast-paced environment of contemporary design and creation, embracing slowness is not resistance to progress but a reflective strategy that preserves the meaning of design innovation and the dignity of the craft practitioner.

For many years, design thinking has been recognised as an important process in creating and commercialising new digital products and services. Increasingly, design researchers are attending to design thinking applied in real-world, interdisciplinary settings for entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we surface and interpret examples of design thinking in the setup and delivery of a multi-cohort education programme connecting Edinburgh’s creative industries with local expertise in digital product innovation and entrepreneurship. Through a thematic analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with programme educators and participants, we explore the role of design thinking in bridging siloed industries and ecosystems. We interpret design thinking at two levels: featured implicitly within the programme curriculum, and implied in the structure of the programme itself. We share insight into the interactions with design thinking that enabled educators to adapt the programme to its local context, and participants to navigate opportunities for entrepreneurship in the real world.

The Culture Communications Model (CCM) provides a framework for structured sensemaking grounded in everyday visual culture. It assists designers and non-designers in navigating complex contexts through four interrelated domains – physical, social, commercial and media – each examined via interpretive filters such as norms, gender, class, power and capital. Through iterative processes of finding, understanding and synthesizing, the CCM structures visual inquiry as an embodied and dialogical practice. By translating observations through these filters and reconfiguring them with conceptual tools, users can reveal hidden relationships, challenge assumptions and generate new perspectives on context and identity. The model transforms diffuse contextual information into interpretable patterns and fosters awareness of the sociocultural conditions shaping perception and design. In positioning design as a form of visual anthropology, the CCM frames the ordinary as a site of insight – rendering the familiar visible, meaningful and creatively generative, while supporting an accessible and distributed approach to visual-cultural understanding.

This study addresses the inadequate wayfinding signage system in the Seoul subway, which causes significant delays for people with reduced mobility (PRM), particularly wheelchair users, during transfers. We examined the information structure and visual accessibility of transfer signage from the PRM perspective. Using a shadowing method, we observed the movement of 30 unfamiliar wheelchair users across 10 transfer stations. The evaluation focused on information continuity, visual accessibility, location identifiability, and information hierarchy. Results indicated frequent information gaps and unrecognised signage due to structural obstructions and visual clutter. Crucially, inconsistencies and confusion surrounding lift locations were repeatedly observed. Based on these findings, we propose design principles for reconfiguring signage by spatial type, emphasising a continuous information flow using the “Preview–Decision–Reassurance” concept. This research offers foundational insights for developing a truly inclusive and barrier-free wayfinding system within the Seoul Metro network.

This paper explores how online design studios can become more inclusive by embracing their inherently ‘fuzzy’ nature as characterized by negotiated visibility, ambient awareness, and flexible participation. Through a series of co-design workshops with students, educators, and practitioners, we examined learner experiences and co-designed recommendations for future online studios. Findings reveal ten core studio values, including respect, care, agency, and joy, operationalized through tangible design features such as dynamic visibility, serendipitous interactions, and multi-dimensional content views. Mapping these recommendations to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines demonstrates strong alignment, suggesting that inclusive practices can emerge organically when learners actively shape studio environments. Rather than focusing solely on accessibility or reasonable adjustments, this study advocates for studios that foster belonging, creativity, and learner agency. The paper advocates for online studios as transformative spaces where diverse identities and learning journeys are supported through experiential, flexible, and inclusive design.

Large Language Models are increasingly integrated into UX design. However, their effectiveness in meeting visual accessibility requirements is under-explored. This research evaluates ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to generate visually accessible interfaces using a Research through Design methodology. First, an accessibility scoring system was created from the Apple, WCAG 2.2, and Microsoft accessibility guidelines. Second, design experiments were conducted using ChatGPT and Copilot, and the outputs were evaluated using the new scoring system. Findings indicate ChatGPT and Copilot can respond effectively to well-structured prompts, but they demonstrate low competence in executing visually accessible interfaces. This research makes two valuable contributions to the field. It accesses the state-of-the-art capabilities of AI-generated design for visual accessibility, proposing a balanced positioning of AI as an assistive tool rather than an autonomous designer; and, it provides a new ‘cross-standard’ scoring system and method for evaluating the visual accessibility of AI-generated outputs.

The global population is aging rapidly. Hearing loss (HL) constitutes the leading cause of years lived with disability for individuals over 70. With 42% of the 430 million people experiencing disabling HL aged 60 or older, and the majority of them residing in less developed regions, accessible intervention strategies are essential. This paper details an initial study from an ongoing project to develop a digital health intervention (DHI) for hearing screening and monitoring, specifically considering the difficulties faced by older users living in Brazil. User needs revealed critical design requirements, including simplified language, the need for adding images for guidance, and avoiding unfamiliar digital features. Moreover, the issues faced by those who need support to use Apps and Smartphones highlighted a need for alternatives beyond digital. These findings confirmed that focusing on diverse older adults as critical groups during design can benefit the development of inclusive DHIs.

This study presents an AI-assisted Design Improvisation Pedagogy integrating artificial intelligence with bodystorming in space design education. Built on a three-dimensional framework—Embodiment, Enactment, and Improvisation—an AI system was developed using Coze to generate emergent scenarios and guide improvisational performance. Validated over three semesters with 16 undergraduate students tackling extreme environment challenges, the system employed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to deliver context-rich, adaptive prompts. Results showed strong correlation between AI support and enhanced improvisational creativity (r = 0.48), especially in spontaneous adaptability. Students often underrated their own performances, with significant gaps in Improvisation (p < 0.01). Material types influenced outcomes, with sound-based tasks producing the largest evaluation discrepancies. Findings highlight AI’s evolving role from tool to creative collaborator, offering a novel pedagogical model that merges embodied cognition, reflective practice, and AI to foster design thinking under constraints.

Cuteness is often dismissed as trivial or decorative. Yet research across neuroscience, psychology, and cultural theory reveals it as a powerful affective force that captures attention, evokes empathy, and encourages prosocial behaviour and well-being. Cute’s affective potency also renders it ethically ambivalent, capable of manipulation as much as comfort. Despite its ubiquity, cuteness remains under-theorised in design research, a notable gap for a discipline concerned with communication, emotion, and human connection. Addressing this gap, this study conducts an interpretive systematic literature review of publications from 1943 to 2025, identifying 65 key scholarly sources. Interdisciplinary insights are synthesized into the ‘Cuteness Matrix,’ a diagnostic framework mapping two central tensions in cuteness studies: power and purpose. The study reconceptualises cuteness as a relational affect that can be intentionally designed to nurture empathy, participation, and care. Ultimately, it asks: can cuteness be reimagined as a purposeful and ethical design strategy—Cute for Good?

Designing drug instructions that communicate effectively to both experts and lay users requires understanding of their different information needs. This study examines how healthcare professionals and the public differ in their priorities and cognitive focus when interpreting drug instructions, offering design guidance for future instructions and labeling system. Using a two-stage approach, we conducted a survey of 111 professionals and 123 public participants to assess their perceived importance of 22 information items, followed by focus groups exploring perceptual and structural expectations. Professionals prioritized procedural accuracy and detailed guidance, while public users emphasized clarity and safety. Despite these differences, both groups shared six core items that informed a three-tier information framework: Basic Treatment and Safety, Professional Medication Support, and Additional Attribute Reference. By aligning distinct user needs with information hierarchy, this study advances inclusive communication design that enhances the usability, transparency, and safety of drug instructions.

Hospital lobbies are gradually transforming from traditional zones of circulation and waiting into multifunctional public spaces that integrate rest, cultural display, retail services, and social interaction. This study analyzes four tertiary hospitals in Korea using space syntax methods, specifically convex space analysis and visibility graph analysis, to quantitatively examine the integration and visual integration characteristics of various functional zones within the lobby. The analysis provides a systematic assessment of spatial accessibility and visual guidance within the lobby environment. From the perspective of enhancing user experience in healthcare settings, the study identifies four key design strategies aimed at optimizing circulation and functional layout, thereby improving users’ spatial orientation and overall comfort. These findings suggest that future hospital lobby design should prioritise clear circulation, visible core services, and context-sensitive integration of composite functions.

Japan, as the birthplace of Kansei Engineering (KE), has played a pivotal role in shaping this field, building a solid research foundation and accumulating extensive scholarly experience. A substantial body of valuable Japanese-language studies has been published in academic conferences and journals in Japan. However, current English-language review articles in KE rarely include these Japanese works. To address this gap, this study provides a preliminary attempt to compile and analyse Japanese publications that propose new concepts, theories, models, and frameworks within KE. The review highlights distinctive perspectives developed by Japanese scholars, revealing contextual and situational sensitivity, collective and social understanding, relational and multi-scalar dynamics, and cultural and value-based orientation. Based on these insights, the study introduces the concept of Field Kansei Engineering (FKE), which focuses on modulating the nested affective fields co-created by humans, artifacts, and environments, and highlights the systemic interdependence, reflexivity, and social meaning of Kansei.

Prevailing design methodologies and models tend to contain language specific to pragmatic and contextual foundations of design history and culture. Consequently, these models provide limited support for the diverse and constructive nature of contemporary design practice, and particularly, lack the presence of embedded reflexivity. This paper seeks to determine the predominant and excluded language of 66 design process models, which function as projections of instruction and value in design dissemination. In the analysis, special attention is given to omissions within these process models, as well as their differences among more recently documented methodologies. As a result, the paper explores reflexive language in contrast to dominant pragmatism as a significant area of potential for the future of design models and process evolution. The discussion concludes with reconsiderations of how language guides design processes, the impact of models on design practice, and an assessment of consistencies and opportunities within design model representations.

This paper presents the methodological framework of an ongoing design research project focused on cultural creation in rural contexts. It structures the design work that precede co-creation workshops, including the design of tools, participant criteria, session formats and preliminary analyses to understand community needs. Based on design research in rural regions of Aragón (Spain), the study integrates human-centred and community-based design to adapt participatory processes to low-density territories. Initial results include a mapping of key actors, a first set of metrics for evaluating participation and collaboration, and the identification of gaps that justify a specific methodological guide for rural cultural projects. The paper contributes to debates on how design research can scaffold ethical, inclusive, and context-specific processes, and shows how it can support social change by connecting cultural rights, territorial justice, and innovation for sustainable rural development.

As technology becomes vital to aging independently, its first points of contact such as packaging influence accessibility and confidence. This study examines how older adults engage with technology through packaging. Nineteen Boston-based adults aged 65 to 85 interacted with three smart home kit packaging prototypes. Observations and interviews highlighted four main insights: Participants preferred (1) design that supported independent use, (2) visible organization of all components, (3) easy, tool-free opening, and (4) sustainable, recyclable materials. Ninety-five percent recalled past frustration with packaging that felt like it was meant “for someone else.” These results suggest that designing for longevity means rethinking the tactile and emotional entry points to technology. Packaging can serve as a bridge for inclusion and trust. Future research will focus on the other key barriers preventing older adults from integrating effectively with AgeTech.

Social relationships, extending beyond the familiar and domestic spheres, play a crucial role in sustaining the healthy ageing of cities’ inhabitants. The urban ecosystem can support social participation and interdependence among its inhabitants by combining the design of hard and soft infrastructures that shape social engagement and urban attractiveness. Within this framework, a new dimension of care is emerging, one that transcends traditional healthcare and institutionalised models. How can technologies help generate the cornerstones of caring, inclusive, long-life communities? By examining a series of international case studies on technology, proximity, care, and ageing, the paper aims to offer actionable design opportunities to create ageing-friendly communities that leverage technology to foster mutual care and social inclusion, thereby enhancing the quality of life for older adults in urban environments. Building on these insights, the selection of a specific urban context for experimentation and the first phase of concept generation will be presented.

This paper explores how older migrants in urban China can record stories that everyday language and design often miss. We ran two co-creation workshops with 10 elders. Activities combined oral storytelling, facilitator-mediated AI assistance, and hand making. Large language models proposed candidate glyphs through a facilitator. Participants crafted new Hanzi to hold their stories. The resulting characters served as memory anchors for later sharing and retelling. Our interpretive analysis shows heterogeneity and adaptive capacity among participants. Participants experienced AI as a creative initiator that lowered barriers to expression and making, especially for those with lower digital literacy. The work challenges homogenizing assumptions about older adults and the presumption of uniform capacities and needs. We contribute a workshop framework that positions AI as a backstage facilitator. We also offer insights on engaging older migrants as sources of community memory and situated cultural knowledge within inclusive urban systems.

Mindfulness meditation supports psychological wellbeing and stress regulation—factors closely associated with healthy aging and longevity. However, practitioners often struggle to sustain attentional depth over time. While virtual reality (VR) has been explored as a tool for immersive meditation, most systems rely primarily on audiovisual stimuli and overlook olfactory cues despite their strong influence on emotion and environmental perception. This study introduces ScentSync, an olfactory-enhanced VR meditation system integrating AI-generated environments with synchronized scent delivery. A controlled experiment with 54 experienced meditators compared traditional meditation (Non-VR), VR meditation (VR), and olfactory-enhanced VR meditation (VR+Olfactory). Results show that the VR+Olfactory group achieved significantly higher Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) scores (p < 0.01) and reported greater presence and enjoyment than both comparison groups. These findings highlight the importance of multisensory design in contemplative technologies and provide design insights for immersive wellbeing systems that support sustained mindfulness practice and dignified longevity.

Advances in neuroscience and neuroimaging have created new pathways to interpret how urban environments shape spatial cognition, psychological well-being, mobility, behaviour, and related outcomes across different age groups. This review examines the use of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in urban settings and assesses its contribution to an age-inclusive, longevity-focused environment. It synthesises interdisciplinary research into a concise framework that integrates fMRI-based pattern recognition with stimuli mapping to generate design insights. Within this context, fMRI is positioned as a complementary methodological approach to be used alongside ethnographic, participatory, and experiential methods in generating neuro-informed design knowledge. The review highlights design-relevant patterns and identifies key gaps in evidence, particularly concerning the inclusion of older adults. Furthermore, this paper provides insight into practical implications for human-centric design, while also acknowledging emerging challenges in fostering well-being and deeper spatial understanding across diverse populations, and drawing attention to interpretive constraints.

Critical making often assumes that practitioners possess or can acquire sufficient technical and fabrication skills to balance reflective inquiry with material engagement. Yet, as digital and networked technologies grow more abstract and complex, they risk constraining critical making by privileging technical proficiency over critical reflection. This tension raises questions about accessibility and the depth of engagement required for meaningful participation, as reliance on pre-integrated solutions may distance both practitioners and lay participants from interrogating technology’s societal roles. Still, uncovering the components of technological systems remains essential to critical engagement. This article proposes critical assembly as an extension of critical making, to address these challenges within technologically oriented design practice and experimentation. Drawing on observations from the Lumogram project workshop, it explores how critical assembly can unpack layered engagements with technology and mitigate the cognitive and practical barriers that accompany increasingly complex techno-creative practices.