Conference Agenda

Smart technologies promise efficiency and sustainability, yet their intelligence remains narrow – confined to optimising isolated human needs rather than nurturing the wider ecologies in which lives unfold. This paper explores how design may shift from smart technologies to more careful configurations: systems that participate in human–material–environmental relations rather than merely processing data. Drawing on Barad’s framework of intra-action, we reimagine technological innovation as distributed and relational. Through a series of eco-social prototypes – from modular heating and communal hydration to wooden fridges and moss bathrooms – the paper demonstrates how care, reciprocity and participation may re-enter the logic of innovation. Instead of designing for scalability, we imagine a design for careful reconfigurations, rethinking the familiar innovation triad of feasibility, viability and desirability as relational capacities. The argument contributes to emerging discourses of more-than-human design and proposes a model of design innovation grounded in care and resourcefulness.