Conference Agenda
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PAPERS: Knowing with Care: Means and Politics Location: Appleton Tower, LT2 Zoom Link Accessibility: https://www.accessable.co.uk/the-university-of-edinburgh/central-area/access-guides/appleton-lecture-theatre-2-edinburgh Session Chair: John Vines, University of Edinburgh Session Chair: Zixuan Wang, University of Edinburgh | |
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Unwording Design: Demilitarizing the Imaginaries of Design 1: Umeå Institute of Design; 2: UAM Azcapotzalco / Estonian Academy of Arts Design’s vocabulary is saturated with metaphors of control (targets, strategies, impacts), revealing a militarized ontology that frames design as domination over problems, contexts, and futures. This paper examines the politics of wording and introduces Unwording Design as a practice of ontological care: dismantling violent grammars that sustain extractive imaginaries and cultivating vocabularies grounded in affection, reciprocity, and relational ethics. Drawing on Haraway’s insight that the thoughts we use to think matter (2016), Butler’s performativity (2006), and Escobar’s ontological design (2018), we argue that transforming language transforms the worlds design brings into being. Unwording shifts from languages of war to languages of tenderness, from users to companions, from targets to relations, from innovation to care. In dialogue with feminist, decolonial, and earth-being perspectives (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993), this paper envisions design evolution through a living vocabulary of care, inviting plural, situated practices that affirm coexistence and collective flourishing. View Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.596
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