Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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PAPERS: Co-designing with Care: Methods and Materiality 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: Zixuan Wang, University of Edinburgh Session Chair: John Vines, University of Edinburgh | |
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Material Agencies in Co-Design: A New Materialist Perspective on Workshop Practices 1: Adelaide University, Australia; 2: Monash University, Australia This paper explores the intersection of new materialism and co-design workshop practices, suggesting that design materials are not passive resources but active agents in collaborative meaning-making and future-making processes. Drawing on new materialist philosophy and care ethics, particularly the work of Barad, Haraway, and Puig de la Bellacasa, we examine how workshop artefacts such as canvases, sticky notes, tactile tools, and other ephemeral materials participate in and shape co-design processes and engender more care-focussed design futures. Through observations of co-design workshops in health futures contexts, we demonstrate how attending to material agency extends the value of workshops and forms sites of collaborative meaning and future making. In this paper we explore how materials actively constitute the social fabric of co-design work. This perspective builds on the material affordances of workshop assets and challenges human-centred design paradigms by recognising materials, environments, and other non-human actors as active participants in imagining and enacting futures. View Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.919
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