Conference Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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