Conference Agenda

Higher education in prisons remains both insufficiently available and structurally marginalised within the UK prison education system. Prisoners’ Education Trust reports that provision in prisons in England continues to focus predominantly on literacy, numeracy and vocational education, with higher education opportunities largely restricted to distance learning and a small number of fragile prisons university partnerships. These arrangements are widely recognised as insufficient to meet learner needs or support meaningful progression into higher levels of study. Participation in education has also declined in recent years, alongside deteriorating prison regimes and reduced time out of cell (Prisoners’ Education Trust, 2024). While design research has a strong tradition of engaging with complex public services, prison education remains under-examined as a site for systemic design inquiry (University of the Arts London, 2021).This Conversation addresses that gap by bringing together design researchers, many of whom will have little direct familiarity with the prison education policy landscape, to collectively explore how universities might contribute to more inclusive and sustainable higher education provision in low-security prison contexts. The aim is not to propose solutions, but to identify tensions and generate new research questions for the design research community.

In a period of rapid change, this conversation will provide an opportunity for participants to better understand how design instructors are making decisions regarding AI in the classroom. Some might fear repercussions for their actions or feel pressure to implement AI against their judgment. Are individuals actively rejecting recommendations? Teaching against their values? How much do they agree or disagree with policy that trickles down from leaders in the school? How are these difficult questions and the confusion caused by the unleashing of AI into the university affecting teaching in general, not only for students but for instructors as workers? Our objective is to enable design faculty to compare notes on this topic and share resources in order to dispel confusion and offer more clarity for those facing difficult decisions and potential consequences. Through this session, design educators will not only learn about the range of others’ experiences negotiating the gaps between their course policies and institutional stances, but also leave with potential strategies to alleviate the confusion of this volatile period in order to confidently teach. We especially hope to unearth tactics that educators are adopting when their attitude toward AI differs from that of their institutions. Design education is uniquely positioned: it values creativity, critique, and ethics, yet faces industry pressing demands to incorporate emerging technologies. Our conversation will support reflection on this situation in relation to the particularities of design in higher educational institutions, and to offer design educators a supportive place in navigating this complex new terrain.

In recent years, Transition Design and Systemic Design have both emerged as prominent design-led responses to complex, interconnected societal challenges such as climate change, social inequality, and long-term sustainability transitions (Irwin, 2015; Jones & Van Ael, 2022). Both foreground systems thinking, multi-scalar intervention, and the need for design for systems change (Ceschin & Gaziulusoy, 2016). As a result, the two are increasingly referenced together in research, education, and practice.

This conversation proposes an open, collective inquiry into the boundaries, tensions, and field-level implications of Transition Design and Systemic Design. By assembling conveyors and participants from diverse institutions and geographies who bring a multitude of perspectives together from research, education, and practice, the session aims to surface shared foundations, productive frictions, and unresolved questions within and between Systemic Design and Transition Design. In doing so, this conversation seeks to contribute to a more explicit articulation of how these approaches can strengthen design’s future capacity for systemic change, and to identify directions for further research, theory-building, pedagogy, and practice.

This conversation places the focus on the question of how the interest and adoption of transdisciplinarity within Design research and education has gained ground and been shaped in different degrees of breadth, depth and pace. This becomes particularly important in efforts to consolidate and articulate design’s impact in transdisciplinary areas that tackle complex problems in social and ecological research. In this sense, the session would appeal to design practitioners, researchers, educators, and students interested in and currently engaging with transdisciplinarity as an approach, knowledge production paradigm, and transformative and creative practice.

Building off from the work advanced in previous DRS conferences, specifically the 2022 Track on “Design Methods and Transdisciplinary Practices” (Ozkaramanli et al., 2022), as well as the 2024 conversation “Transdisciplinarity: Taking stock beyond buzzwords and outlining an agenda for design research” (Zaga et al., 2024), we propose a new dialogue arena that keeps this debate evolving in a context of increasing popularity but also expansion and depth. This session proposes to contextualize and expand beyond what has been learnt regarding the roles, metaphors and modes that Design takes in transdisciplinarity. The conversation will focus on observing and understanding the diverse topographies (outlines of features, boundaries and qualities of a territory) in current transdisciplinary design practice and the implications on design education.

There has been a ‘participation turn’ in policymaking and a growth in participatory governance and democratic innovations due to many existing democratic processes facing a  crisis of legitimacy (Warren, 2014). Participatory governance is seen to improve representative democratic processes by bringing in more citizen participation to make policymaking more responsive and collaborative (Escobar, 2021; Heinelt, 2018). With more policymakers and institutions interested in participatory governance, it has meant that these approaches have become more institutionalised (Bua and Bussu, 2021).

Scotland has a rich landscape of innovative design work in and around policy, and there is a clear civic participation and open government agenda through recent legislation and initiatives such as the Community Empowerment Act and Open Government Partnership that seek to enable people and communities to have more say over the decisions that affect their lives (Escobar, 2022). Scottish Parliament has a dedicated focus on involving people and community organisations in inquiries to share experiences and insights on the impacts of legislation and has embedded deliberative approaches through their People's Panels (Broadley et al., 2025). Within the Scottish Government, the Office of the Chief Designer is leading on embedding design and participation approaches within health and social care policy, alongside developing and promoting the Scottish Approach to Service Design (Hamilton, 2024; Lyne, 2019; Scottish Government, 2019). Scotland has a visible design leader, design teams within government, a national approach to service design and key participatory governance legislation. How do these different aspects of design benefit and enhance Scotland’s participatory governance agenda? Does this differ to other countries approaches and what can we learn from each other?

Using Scotland as a provocation, this conversation will invite participants to discuss the role of design within participatory governance across the world, bringing their own perspectives to the conversation and identifying synergies and differences between different contexts. We will bring together stories and perspectives from practitioners and researchers working in design and policy spaces in Scotland, England and Northen Ireland, and invite participants to discuss and bring their own experiences to the conversation. By sharing practitioner’s stories, we want to ground the discussions in lived experience of people working within these complex contexts. We hope this conversation will build a community of interested researchers and practitioners and provide critical reflection on the ways that design can/might be applied to participatory governance.

This conversation investigates Unlearning Design through lenses of relational practice, critical sustainability, and material ecology. Drawing from multiple disciplines including communication design, fashion design, architecture, more-than-human-centred design, industrial design, regenerative design, interaction design, technology design, and education, the panel addresses sustainability delay not as a lack of knowledge, but as a structural and pedagogical problem. While design discourse increasingly acknowledges planetary crises, design education largely perpetuates structures, assumptions, and methods that enable unsustainable practices. We propose that transformation requires not merely adding sustainability content, but questioning what design education is for and how it operates.

Fry reminds us that “we are not just designing things; we are designing futures” (Fry, 2018). If so, unlearning ways of unsustainability becomes a critical task: a process of questioning what design education teaches us to take for granted. Despite decades of sustainability discourse, design education has changed remarkably little. Sustainability often remains peripheral: an elective, a lecture, a keyword in program descriptions. Meanwhile, the underlying assumptions of design — linear progress, human-centered problem-solving, growth-oriented success, material extraction, and authorship — continue to be reproduced. As a result, design education risks sustaining the very conditions it claims to address. What assumptions constrain transformation? What structures must shift? What competencies matter? This conversation surfaces tensions, contradictions, and unresolved dilemmas that resist resolution in traditional paper formats, generating new research questions through structured dialogue.

Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, is embedded through incremental features within everyday digital tools used in design research, framed as productivity or usability enhancements. While design scholarship has addressed AI’s implications for creativity, ethics, and authorship, less attention has been paid to how researchers experience these systems in practice. As LLMs recede into the background infrastructure of research, their subtle and often invisible nudges shape inquiry, attention, and what becomes visible as knowledge.

Design research, with its emphasis on context-aware inquiry, reflective and iterative methods, and the active role of artifacts and interfaces in shaping knowledge, is uniquely positioned to examine how AI-augmented research tools redistribute agency and influence epistemic practice. Embedded AI is not neutral and introduces new risks for design research (Van Der Maden et al. 2024). We suggest that while platforms claim to empower users, their designs enact subtle governance through defaults, nudges, and automated redirection, shaping research trajectories and agency without explicit consent.

Design education is increasingly tasked with responding to complex global challenges, yet innovative pedagogies are often stifled by institutionalisms: rigid assessment frameworks, "bums on seats" metrics, industry-facing reactions while also meeting the expectations of parents and funded research agendas. While educators are experimenting with new forms of learning, critical lenses like ‘ungrading’ and integrating cross-discipline, participation-based activities within coursework these efforts often remain isolated.

This DRS Conversation explores the potential of ‘riskiness’ as a core pedagogical value. We define riskiness not as recklessness, but as a purposeful opening to uncertainty, failure, improvisation with the result being resilience and confidence. This takes education beyond the responsibility of the institution to create employable graduates towards a position that accepts accountability for learning (for all those involved); new knowledge created through risky experiences. This session invites participant design educators to move beyond the ‘safe’ status quo and collectively imagine how design education can become a site of systemic friction and transformative learning for the student but also the educator.

As eight co-convenors of DRS's Pluriversal SIG and pluriversal design researchers ourselves, we come together at DRS 2026 to offer a "liberatory and radical space" for an embodied and generative conversation about how design research is, can, and must be pluriversal, which we define broadly as valuing diverse ontologies (ways of being) and epistemologies (ways of knowing). Our central question is: How can design research authentically embody pluriversal values? The following sub-questions will support this discussion:

● How might we foster and cultivate equitable collaborations and mutual learning in and through design research?

● What design approaches and engagement methods might be exclusionary or harmful? How might we remake these so they value diverse ecologies of knowledges and making?

● What boundaries or limitations do we currently experience when attempting equity in pluriversal collaborations?

● What are some ways to move beyond the idea of transactional "projects” when seeking to build pluriversal relationalities?

● How might we foster transversality in pluriversal dialogues and interactions within–and beyond–the design field?

● How might we navigate the limitations of language, meanings, and translation to reduce the "illusion of understanding" inherent in translation?

Everyone interested in these topics is welcome to join. We recognize that perspectives and lived experiences traditionally excluded can offer invaluable insights into contexts, questions, and knowledges that have so far been neglected in design research.

How can design research foster stronger, more meaningful engagement between public institutions, legal bodies, and ‘real people’, better shaping and protecting rights collectively?

Growing global conflicts leave people feeling powerless and uncertain when it comes to their rights. While BigTech think-tanks and large oil companies are generally well able to navigate complex international policies, the rights of climate-crime and abuse-of-power victims remain endangered (Wetzels and Keepe).

Though public institutions are crucial for providing legitimacy and organising collective action (Klijn and Koppenjan 143), their reliance on outdated methods to address growing societal challenges (Romme et al. 2) and lack of inclusive design often leaves people alienated from their rights (Bosman). This pushes social resilience further out of reach in times where trust in just governance is critical (OECD).

While growing consensus amongst scholars calls for a fundamental shift of institutional research towards real-world and design-based methods (Romme et al. 2), criteria for effective institutional design remain “too general and abstract” (Neef et al. 418). 

We aim to contribute to this discussion by challenging conventional definitions of design / design research and exposing practical approaches – across design, journalism, law, health care, and more – that operationalise human rights and reimagine lasting change.

We would like to start with giving spoken and visual input and to discuss the following three questions:

1. How do we begin the design process when we can research the past, evaluate the present, but can scarcely predict the future in such uncertain times? What is an alternative to speculative design and how might design research embrace flexibility toward the future.

2. What planetary-level adaptations might offer starting points? We are thinking through air and water as the main planetary lenses - we position them as ‘ocean of water’ and ‘ocean of air’

3. What is planetary resilience? We offer that resilience is embedded with the capacities of anticipation, preparation, recovery, healing, adaptation, and evolution.

With the exigencies of contemporary environmental, social, political, and economic, and nature crises, normal is being perceived as extreme by the generations currently active on this planet and the ‘new extremes’ reflect the pace and intensity of the planetary crises and their manifestations.

This conversation will focus on design through the lens of extreme environments, with the environment as a teacher in designing with limited resources, infrastructure, society and space. We acknowledge that living in the environmental extremes of temperature, pressure and air quality, requires a holistic view on the challenges for supporting life. We approach this conversation by adopting a systems perspective and using design strategies such as adaptability and resilience for the built environment. We invite guests and audience to discuss, interact and sketch; a generative process leading to first activities of critical input into a new framework.