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.

Metaphors offer a powerful, inclusive way to articulate tacit wisdom within design research practice, serving as transformative pedagogical and cultural tools. Metaphors can also be exclusive; finding better metaphors helps improve understanding when working with different groups of people. What metaphors complement discourse on the design process and offer fertile pathways for evolving design pedagogy, culture, and communications?

Metaphors have long been used in design to conceive novel interventions and convey meaning to design concepts (Lockton et al, 2019; Blackwell, 2006). There's a parallel story about metaphors conveying the design research process itself—how they transmute expertise, inform practice, and shape broader design culture (Casakin, 2006). In studios and classrooms, skillful practice is conveyed through process diagrams, method collections, and case studies. But the metaphors practitioner-educators use to convey the embodied reality of their expertise and roles (Bisset & Kuštrak Korper, 2023) can be just as instructive and transformative in showcasing how design research unfolds in real practice.

Metaphors are not easily captured in scholarly papers; the patois of praxis is often erased for the reportage of method. DRS Conversations offer a powerful setting to stretch, collect, and co-investigate metaphors across global contexts. This is crucial given that metaphors are culturally situated and can disembody, exclude, or constrain as readily as they illuminate. If we wish to move towards a design culture where "world where many worlds fit," wrestling critically, carefully, and creatively with metaphor is foundational (Escobar, 2018).

When does care become control? Who remains invisible to technological systems?

These questions sit at the core of this workshop, which uses experiential and embodied methods to ask how design research can engage emerging public service technologies. Digital Twins (real-time digital counterparts of people, objects, and places) are spreading through public services on the promise of better coordination, prediction, and efficiency (Lyu, 2024). However, they also determine how people are sensed, represented, and acted upon, raising questions about surveillance, autonomy, and care that technical or policy analysis alone cannot address (Vesnic-Alujevic et al., 2019).

Our approach draws on Speculative Design, in particular Experiential Futures, which lets people encounter possible technological futures through action and perception rather than explanation (Candy, 2010; Candy & Dunagan, 2017). This 90-minute workshop treats lived experience as a source of knowledge for design research.

It unfolds in the initial warming-up activity and embodied experimentation. 

Design research increasingly engages multispecies and more-than-human relations, yet the hierarchies and violences that structure these relations often remain unnamed. This Conversation starts from the assumption that what is left unnamed also remains difficult to question.  Antispeciesism is mobilized here precisely as a practice of naming: not as an ethical stance, nor as a claim about moral priority among forms of life, but as an analytical lens that makes visible how anthropocentrism functions as a hierarchical principle of knowledge, value, and legitimacy. This Conversation proposes to bring multispecies justice into design research precisely as a space of dissonance and divergence. Within design research, the critique of anthropocentrism has often focused on decentring the human through relationality, interdependence, and ecological entanglement. Building on this, what antispeciesism adds to this conversation is not a comparative or hierarchical concern between animals, plants, or other forms of life, nor an appeal to empathy or benevolence, which risk reintroducing paternalistic logics. Rather, it foregrounds a specific and often underestimated angle of the more-than-human: the role of species-based hierarchies as political and epistemic technologies that organize domination, disposability, and differential worth, in ways structurally entangled with colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist regimes of knowledge.

From a decolonial perspective, the anthropos at the centre of modern knowledge is never neutral or universal, but historically produced as white, Western, male (Wynter, 2015), and positioned as fully human in contrast to those rendered less-than-human bodies (Manning, 2016; Ahmed, 2000). From this perspective, anthropocentrism is inseparable from other hierarchical regimes – of race, gender, class, and species (Vázquez, 2024; Lorde, 2018 ed.; Foucalt, 1975; hooks, 1996, 2000; Davis, 1981) – that organize knowledge through exclusion, animalization, and biopolitical differentiation. By bringing antispeciesism into design research, this Conversation seeks to reconnect more-than-human concerns with these broader hierarchies – making visible how design already operates within multispecies relations shaped by institutionalized violence, and opening space for questions that more- than-human design has so far tended to overlook or underarticulate.

Design, policy and governance have been increasingly discussed across the 60-year history of the Design Research Society conferences. Examples of this can be found as early as the 1982 conference on design policy (Langdon & Purcell, 1984) and continue to this day. Over the last ten years we have witnessed these themes consolidate, accounting for almost 50 publications spread across, but not exclusively, among four different tracks (Feast, 2016; Leoni et al., 2024; Mortati et al., 2022; Schmidt & Mortati, 2024). A simple keyword search for design, policy, and governance in the DRS Digital Library returns over 1,100 results, pointing to the abundance and depth of work produced by the community over time.

To reflect on how design for policy and governance has evolved over these 60 years in the DRS community, we propose this conversation as a venue to collectively discuss what knowledge has been produced and how we could move forward. Recent initiatives, such as the 2024 track “Past, present, and future: Understanding the expanse of design for policy and governance” (Schmidt & Mortati, 2024), indicate a growing interest in revisiting and critically examining this trajectory. Building on these efforts, the conversation is guided by the following research questions:

● What themes, changes and tensions emerge from examining DRS publications and proceedings at the intersection of policy, governance, and design?

● How might collective critical examination inform future directions for policy, governance, and design in the DRS community?

● How does DRS, through its conference contributions, participate in shaping the relationship between design and governance as a research domain?

Abid Abbas (Edinburgh); Xiaozhuang Gao (Edinburgh)

How do you explain a design decision that felt right but is hard to put into words? In design practice, the process is often where the real knowledge lives. However, it can be messy, tacit and difficult to communicate. This workshop invites you to make your design process visible. Together, we explore why audit trails matter in practice-based research and experiment with visual tools to help externalise the reasoning behind our design moves. You will then exchange your visualisations with peers and ask: Can I follow your process? Which steps feel convincing? Leave with a new visual representation of your own process, fresh conversations about how others document their practice, and a welcome break from the intensity of DRS. Before you arrive: please reflect on a recent project: how have you been documenting your process, and are there decisions you have found difficult to articulate? Optionally, bring any artifacts that help share your story.

Nearly all design is interaction design (Wiltse, 2025). You may, however, have noticed that the world and its digital twin aren’t looking too healthy right now. We take the position that Big Tech and its unrelenting advances towards winner-take-all-AI is harming society and the planet. Through our panel’s collective experience in design, research, teaching and practice in creative technology, we have seen the techno-optimistic landscape of digital technologies and the internet that was held at the start of this century turn into a dystopian battleground for just a handful of gatekeeper corporations. Creative tech approaches have been used to turn the design lens from making-the-machine to revealing the machine. Work such as Chatting’s (2024) Designerly Hacking, creative approaches to materialising data (Shorter et al, 2022), Culén et al’s (2023) investigation of technologies and democracy, Pilling et al (2023)’s combination of technology repair with design fiction, and Fass et al’s (2022) combination of technology with placemaking, and many more, all sit broadly within a Critical Design paradigm (Dunne and Raby, 2001).

This Conversation proposes a space for the DRS community to collectively examine the question “What now for creative technology?” in light of the intersecting crises of democracy, climate, and social inequality. Drawing on perspectives from design research, critical making, speculative design, civic technologies, and socio-technical studies, the conversation aims to surface shared concerns, tensions, and emerging questions. The DRS community includes many researchers who are also educators, and questions around how designers learn and understand through making, prototyping, and studio environments (e.g. Jones et al, 2022) resonate with issues of openness in technologies.

This is a closed meeting for members of the Retail SIG.

Open Design has been a set of practices and an ethos having an impact on professional practice, design activism, including maker culture, education, and design research, as particularly documented through several key European publications in the previous decade. In this Conversation, we aim to revisit open design and problematize how openness is framed, enacted, and claimed by designers and design researchers today, inviting critical examination of its assumptions and implications for equitable participation and inclusion.

To explore this topic, we approach the conversation format from the following themes:

1. Perspectives: How different lived experiences, disciplinary backgrounds, and cultural worldviews shape what becomes visible, valued, or relevant in open design.

2. Positions: The explicit stances, commitments, and value-laden choices designers adopt in open design projects, signalling different forms of agency.

3. Practices: The contemporary abilities, methods, and orientations designers use to engage with open design today, including the shifts, interventions, and systemic levers through which they influence trajectories, redistribute power, and reshape design ecosystems.