Conference Agenda

The use of ‘live’ briefs and project-based learning models have been widely adopted in design education and are often presented “as best practices in design education” (Noel, 2021:256). DiSalvo (2021) warns us that the uncritical application of design methods to address societal issues risks “reproducing and re-asserting structures of power over [the] communities we work with” (Potter et al., 2025: 2). This conversation seeks to bring together design educators and researchers to discuss the risk of extractive pedagogies in such learning models and explore how these risks might be managed. In particular, it will ask: Can ‘live’ student projects deliver true reciprocity with the communities with whom they partner?

‘Ethical regime’, a concept introduced by Radin and Kowal (2015) within that scholarship, articulates that underpinning supposedly ‘universal’ ethical principles there are specifically and historically situated moral, political and economic stakes. Examples of ethical regimes include US and Australian scientific research ethics with roots in post-war responses to the atrocities of Nazi science and other infamous medical experiments. Importantly, they highlight ethical regimes critical of Western research, for example alternatives emerging since the 1980s from pan-indigenous rights movements in Australia.

Alternative ethical regimes are also evolving elsewhere, with notable examples including frameworks for research involving indigenous peoples and/or their land. For example, in New Zealand, ‘Te Ara Tika’ is well-recognized (despite uneven progress, Smith 2021). Canadian examples are seen as possible models across Sápmi (Drugge 2016) - while the Nordic countries have various stringent and advanced ethical research guidelines, the Sami perspectives is missing. While the UN-backed principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is widespread, it has never been ratified in countries such as Brazil and Colombia (but can be part of challenges brought by the indigenous peoples’ organization APIB to the International Criminal Court in the Hague).

Design researchers have engaged critically and creatively with ethical regimes. Critical studies trace design within medical science ethics abuses of colonial subjects and women (e.g. Prado 2015). This conversation will engage critically and creatively with diverse ‘ethical regimes’, specifically our universities’ ethical regulation of research in relation to principles developed with/within indigenous contexts.

As design researchers increasingly adopt generative AI tools across the research lifecycle, questions about when and how to trust these tools have become increasingly urgent to explore and address. From planning studies and generating tasks to analysing qualitative data and communicating findings, AI systems are now integrated into many aspects of design research work. However, these tools are frequently used based more on institutional demands, tool availability, and efficiency perceptions rather than on clear methodological or ethical considerations. This Conversation explores trust as a context-dependent judgment influenced by specific situations, tasks, and associated risks.

Although concerns about AI's reliability and ethics are valid, the increasing interest in these tools is understandable. Many researchers are drawn to AI for its ability to streamline labour-intensive tasks, accelerate workflows, generate new insights, or support accessibility. For instance, transcription tools, automated tagging, and language generation systems are already embedded in research workflows and often seen as low-risk or beneficial. These perceived strengths raise important questions: What value do these tools offer? Under what conditions are they helpful? And when might apparent benefits obscure potential risks?

This Conversation invites participants to examine how trust in AI is experienced, questioned, or withheld across the design research process. Rather than assuming AI tools either clearly belong in research practice or should be rejected outright, we ask where, when, and under what conditions they can play a role, and where they should not.

Empathy is often invoked as a concept of foundational significance to the design process (Cross, 1982): as we design for others, we must seek to gain empathic understanding of them and their experiences. Recent advances in the capabilities of AI tools have seen a developing interest in their ability to simulate / emulate empathy. Studies show that humans interacting with AI chat agents consistently rate these systems as more empathetic than human interlocutors (Calero & Herrera, 2025; Sorin et al., 2024). Just as these AI tools have become widely accessible and easily applied across many areas of human activity, so too they are being adopted and integrated into design activity. Design processes typically recognised as enhancing empathy with users have been conducted with LLMs substituting for human participation, including persona development (Kocaballi, 2024; Schuller et al, 2024), scenario development (Spaniol and Rowland, 2022), stakeholder interviews (Kocaballi, 2024; Rime 2025) and empathy mapping (Higuera and Macías, 2023).

Useful applications of AI within design research and practice are potentially extensive, and should be explored and exploited where appropriate. However, in experimenting with the use of these tools, it is vital that we critically and carefully reflect on the nature of the systems we are dealing with, what their capabilities and limitations are, and how these differ from established understandings of human empathic experience in design contexts.

As we face mounting environmental and societal challenges, design has a critical role to play in shaping sustainable and meaningful futures. In response, the design research community is working to understand and tackle these issues head on in multiple ways – for example through facilitating radical transitions (Coops et al., 2024), developing regenerative practices (Nowaki & Foissac, 2022) and exploring beyond human perspectives (Bessai et al,. 2024). These aim to meet the systemic challenges of the future and address the complexity of  plural evolving cultures. To support this growing body of work, there is a need for exploring new applied methods that challenge short-termism and build new modes of designing that foreground temporality and future significance.

Heritage practices offer a radically different temporal orientation through which to consider how we design. Heritage practices are explicitly concerned with value over time: how artefacts, practices, and environments are selected, protected, reinterpreted, and transmitted across generations (Harrison, 2021). Heritage thinking foregrounds questions of significance, care, stewardship, and loss, while acknowledging uncertainty about future values and contexts – offering the context necessary for developing lived futures (Sandford, 2019). What if we applied the same reverence to the things we design and to the methods of design practice today - treating all products, services, and systems as potential future heritage? This reframing, bringing together design and heritage, opens new possibilities for sustainable, culturally embedded, and ethically responsible design.

This Conversation proposes designing for future heritage as a provocation that brings these domains into dialogue. It asks what might change if designers approached products, services, systems, and infrastructures as potential future heritage - objects and practices that will shape cultural memory, environmental conditions, and social meanings over extended timescales. Rather than focusing solely on the near future and on reducing harm, this perspective invites design to engage with questions of long-term significance: what should endure, what might be allowed to disappear, and what responsibilities designers hold toward future generations.

Openly available tools, such as free online-templates, 3D printed models, or generative AI, can be applied at any point in the design process by designers and clients alike. While not perfect, these tools can still produce prototypes that are often indistinguishable from ‘finished’ or ‘polished’ artifacts. Whether one hails these tools as time-savers or condemns them as job-killers, their polished nature fundamentally changes the way clients and users experience the design process, and can have profound effects on the type of feedback designers receive. This conversation aims to understand the role of ‘incompleteness’ in the design process better (Hvidsten, 2019; Garud et al., 2008) and how designers might use it strategically for different types of participation, feedback, and critique. We ask the following sub-questions:

RQ1) How is incompleteness manifested in prototypes/design proposals, and how does it affect the activities of stakeholders and other testers and evaluators?

RQ2) How do we leverage incompleteness to highlight or hide aspects of a design to invite the kinds of feedback we need?

RQ3) Does designing for incompleteness change the roles, goals, or techniques of the designer?

What does it mean to actively rebalance the design canon and how can historical, critical, and pedagogical design research work together to make that rebalancing durable, accountable and transformative?

Despite women now forming largest cohort in graphic design education globally, their professional contributions remain systematically underrepresented within design histories, disciplinary canons and institutional archives. This imbalance reflects deeply embedded historical discourses that have shaped what counts as legitimate design knowledge, whose work is preserved and which narratives are reproduced through research, education and professional culture.

Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon (Resnick, 2025) responds to this absence by foregrounding the work of undervalued and marginalised women designers from diverse global contexts across the twentieth century. The publication operates not only as a recovery project, but as a critical intervention into the discourse of design history itself - challenging the epistemological assumptions, archival practices and methodological conventions that have shaped the field.

Led by contributors and the editor of the volume, whose broader research examines the historical invisibility of women in graphic design across the world, this conversation invites participants to critically examine how design canons are formed and contested. The session will explore how gendered structures of power influence recognition and how alternative historiographic approaches such as recovery work, situated narratives and intersectional analysis, can meaningfully rebalance design history.

At a very basic level, regeneration is often understood as an enhanced version of sustainability, as it advocates for positive impact rather than solely minimizing the negative impacts of human activity. However, when we look more closely at the diversity of knowledge being built around the topic, we can see that regeneration extends beyond this framing. It carries principles of inclusion of more-than-human realms into the design processes; it questions dominant narratives, paradigms, and epistemologies by exposing mechanisms of subjugation and erasure that remain in place today; it places connection and re-connection at its core as a way of imagining alternatives to prevailing mindsets, among other dimensions.

As designers, we are presented with an opportunity to contribute to the creation of a shared understanding that can bring forth the potential of this concept while guiding practices toward a more solid and coherent body of knowledge. For this to happen, we first need to recognise ourselves: to reflect on the terminologies and principles under which we have been working, and to identify what we hold in common.

This conversation will draw on the convenors’ complementary backgrounds in regenerative design practice, material-based research, and experimental pedagogies to spark dialogue among all of us in the room, creating a space for collective sense-making. Through an interactive format, we aim to collaboratively develop an initial, living map of what we, together, understand as “regenerative design.”

Our idea is to invite all those in the room to contribute bringing key-points for the co-creation of the proposed map, using interactive tools to ensure a plural yet productive session.