Conference Agenda

This proposal opens with the term maraña, a Spanish word that resists translation and serves as a conceptual provocateur. Instead of seeking clarity—often presumed as the goal of design—maraña encourages participants to inhabit discomfort, density, and entanglement. Marked by the “ñ,” it signifies complexity as a condition of life, not a problem to solve. Etymologically, maraña relates to material conditions of entanglement: thickets, tangled threads, or intricate situations that cannot be separated without loss (Malkiel, 1948). It names material situations of coexistence where separation is never neutral and never without loss. 

Drawing on the contrast between Prometheus and Epimetheus—anticipation versus understanding after the fact— this proposal rejects fully anticipated futures. Instead, it positions design as a practice of learning to live enmarañados, cohabiting complexity through praxis, staying with unresolved conditions rather than resolving them. It aligns with Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” (2016), using imagination not to escape, but to refuse fixed realities. 

In this Epimethean view, prototyping becomes a research method of learning-after: iterative redesigning with what already exists (in line with panel 1.5 Restaging Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design). Prototypes are seen as incomplete, open to revision, allowing uncertainty and unforeseen relations to persist (Hermansen & Tironi, 2024). This method facilitates staying-with marañas, slowing certainty and fostering situated engagement with resistance to closure. 

This entails an ethical shift away from binary logic toward inhabiting interstices, co-operations, and tensions. The Aymara concept of ch’ixi—heterogeneous elements coexisting without fusion—becomes central: a condition where “something is and is not at the same time” (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015). Designing thus becomes a process of learning to read, touch, and hold knots—accepting tension as an epistemic and coexistence mode (Sánchez-Aldana, 2025). 

Textile-thinking matters here as a material mode of perceiving and composing entanglement (Barad, 2003; Sánchez-Aldana, 2025). Maraña shifts from a word to a practice, emphasizing entanglement as inherent in everyday practices, infrastructures, bodies, and technologies —especially within the Capitalocene, where separation without loss is unfeasible. 

Participants are invited to collect real marañas—not metaphors or drawings. The session will produce photographic maraña specimens that record entanglements as they exist. These images are not mere documentation but prototypes that can be handled, compared, re-tagged, and reclassified. This photo-prototyping aims to let relations and frictions emerge through cycles of arrangement, testing, and revision. By sharing and handling images and textile marañas, the focus shifts to proximity, contact, and material engagement over abstraction and disembodied reflection. 

Disability research has long grappled with questions of power, voice, participation, and representation. The disability rights movement’s foundational demand—‘nothing about us without us’ (Charlton, 1998)—challenged centuries of research conducted on rather than with disabled people. The social model of disability shifted focus from individual impairment to disabling environments and attitudes (Oliver, 1996), while emancipatory disability research (EDR) insisted that disabled people must control research agendas, methods, and outcomes (Oliver, 1992; Barnes, 2003). Hamraie and Fritsch's Crip Technoscience Manifesto (2019) argues that disabled people are already designers and expert knowledge-makers of their own access—hacking, adapting, and innovating in ways that formal design rarely recognizes. 

Participatory research methods—Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR), and community mapping—have transformed how researchers engage with marginalized communities, shifting from extractive models toward collaborative knowledge production. These methods offer rich foundations for disability research, yet their application in disability contexts remains underdeveloped. This 

Exploration asks how design can contribute to adapting these participatory methods. Design brings distinct capacities: material and spatial thinking that reshapes how participation physically happens; prototyping approaches that allow iterative testing of engagement formats; multi-modal communication strategies that expand beyond text-dominant research; and attention to embodied experience that foregrounds how bodies interact with research processes. These design opportunities can extend participatory methods’ emancipatory potential, centering disabled expertise and deepening meaningful participation across diverse access needs and capacities. This Exploration is co-led by disabled and non-disabled researchers, reflecting a commitment to accountability structures that keep research answerable to disability communities (Stone & Priestley, 1996). 

Reflecting the posthuman shift in Design, More-than-Human (MtH) temporality has emerged as a critical dimension of how we could design with other-than-human beings. Building on theoretical discourses calling to reevaluate concepts of Western time (Bastian, 2009), and to incorporate plural perspectives of time (Eschrich et al., 2025; Rifkin, 2017), this session will explore practical approaches to engage with MtH temporalities through time as an experience of kinship (Vaughan-Lee, 2024; Whyte, 2021). Kinship time, building on the concept of “kincentric ecologies” in which humans perceive all natural elements of an ecosystem as kin (Salmon, 2000), is an understanding of time not as uniform, linear units but as shifts in kinship relationships, calling for an ethics of shared responsibility and interdependence (Whyte, 2021).  

Our session will examine the potential of embodied and in situ approaches to foster reflection on kinship time and temporal interactions with MtH, and identify tensions and opportunities in Design for future engagements, fostering more diverse notions of MtH time. It is part of a broader research that asks how, through collaborative, embodied, exploratory activities, we can develop new forms of attunement to temporalities beyond Western-centric frameworks, and how place-based, kin-centric approaches can support the emergence of new temporal MtH relationships. 

Specifically, the session will build on existing approaches engaging with MtH temporalities, such as visual mapping and participatory design (Zohar et al., 2024), the MtH Temporal Ontologies' booklet (Nisi et al., 2026), and meditation practices on kinship time (Vaughan-Lee, 2024), allowing us to interact with MtH temporalities at multiple scales and accounting for changes over various timeframes, such as historical growth cycles or future migratory patterns. We will introduce participants to an exploratory design-based probe packet for reflecting on MtH temporalities and kinship to ground conversation, exploration and discussion. Together, participants will cooperatively materialize artefacts that represent their understanding of and encounters with MtH temporalities in the form of a mobile sculpture. This kinetic artefact, materialising kinship time relationships in the landscape, will prompt further exploration of time’s materiality and of humans' responsibilities in fostering those relationships, as well as unpack the tensions and opportunities for engaging with MtH temporalities through design.