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. 

In what ways can landscape transitions be felt, interpreted, and narrated through sound? This workshop explores sound-based practices as a design research method for engaging with landscapes and human–environment relations. The research asks how working with sound as a material - rather than representation - can open alternative ways of understanding place, ecological processes, and human-landscape relations. The objective of the lab is to develop an embodied method collaboratively and to examine how this approach can contribute to design research concerned with landscapes, transitions, care, and situated knowledge.  

This workshop invites participants to queer their disciplinary and pedagogical practices by making Index Wheels. The Index Wheels will be a Riso printed resource that will map: methods, references, gestures, and milestones in the participants own practice or teaching. The workshop will be a participatory, hands-on session involving critical making and collaborative reflection facilitated by Nina and Saffie jointly, using a series of specific prompts. 

Through these guided prompts participants will collectively make and discuss how queer theory, critical pedagogy and design research can intersect to create more relational and experimental design practices that move away from fixed outcomes and instead form adaptable systems of learning and making. The prompts are inspired by discussions with designers and researchers who we were in conversation with for a publication we created titled, Queering Interdisciplinarity.

The aim is to build a holistic overview of how knowledge and practice emerge across multiple modes. Connecting making with thinking, the mind with the hand, this project frames queerness as a navigational tool; one that resists singular definitions and embraces fluid, embodied knowledge. We are thinking of an Index as a gauge that points toward something and in this way, the Index Wheel can be understood as a: circular, tactile system that organises and points to key elements of a practice (such as methods, references, gestures, or milestones) in a way you can rotate or navigate and use as a guide. 

Mending offers a rich site for design inquiry because it shows how judgments about visibility, restraint, dignity, and reversibility are negotiated in real time through material engagement (Acharya et al., 2024). As a practice between care and intervention, mending foregrounds reciprocal relations among people, materials, and the systems shaping continued use (Caselli et al., 2022; Escobar et al., 2024). Working with damage brings to the surface the values and assumptions guiding decisions about maintenance, worth, and interdependence, enabling repair to challenge dominant narratives of efficiency or newness (Callén & Duque, 2023; Jackson, 2014).  

Listening in Repair is grounded in previous mending research workshops (Image 1) framed through care aesthetics, understood as a relational, embodied, and socially embedded practice (Thompson, 2022). In this exploration, the mending circle incorporates listening – to materials, to one another, and to the environment, and guides how participants mend. Participants work with worn textiles (Image 2, 3, 4) while noticing how touch, visibility, pace, and intensity shape material outcomes and ethical relations (Denis & Pontille, 2023, 2025). Rather than focusing on technique, participants align mending gestures with their own research orientations. Through shared practice and listening encounters, the mending circle becomes a site where researchers build on method‑first approaches in design research (Forst, 2022; Mahler, 2024; Mäkelä, 2007) to surface how repair practices negotiate value, care, and continuation, and how these negotiations may challenge prevailing assumptions about aging, maintenance, and interdependence (Mattern, 2018). This format emphasizes experimentation, shared inquiry, and non‑textual knowledge, using embodied and aural‑material processes as primary modes of research development. 

While the democratic and identity-related goals of everyday heritage are well recognized, the role of aesthetics, encompassing embodied, emplaced and sensory experiences, as well as engagements remains underexplored (Ireland et al., 2024). However, recent urban practices such as soundwalks (Gallagher, 2015; McCartney, 2010) and scent mapping (Henshaw, 2013), which invites participants to move through space while engaging multiple senses, emphasize the role of bodily presence, mobility, and perception in the physical environment. 

This workshop explores the intersection of urban heritage, storytelling, and sensory perspectives to move beyond grand heritage narratives and foster deeper, situated connection with place. Through a combination of narrative and sensory-based practices, participants will engage with local urban setting, reflecting on personal experiences, everyday heritage significance, and alternative ways of telling and experiencing place-based stories. By foregrounding the notion of everyday heritage, the session examines how heritage is constructed through everyday stories, emplaced memories and embodied encounters rather than only through officially designated narratives.  

This exploration centers reciprocity, dialogue and community within design education. It begins from a shared recognition that teaching is relational work. It is rooted in care, yet at times made invisible within institutional cultures that can reward competition and individual output. Our goal is to create conditions for openness, reflection and mutual learning amount design educators, design practitioners and those engaged in teaching and learning.  

This workshop will extend an existing longitudinal project that began with our 2025 paper Unfolding Dialogue: Pedagogies of Reciprocity and Community in Design, which explored correspondence between educators as a reflective research method. As emerging educators, we are interested in how sustained exchange through shared documents, informal correspondence, and continued reflection can foster more collective, transparent, and supportive approaches to teaching and learning together.  

Ultimately, this session aims to build and sustain a network of educators committed to learning from and with one another over time. It will provide a platform for generative exchange that encourages continued reflection and experimentation in collective teaching practice. By cultivating dialogue that unfolds in the spaces between formal academic endeavours, we seek to model a relational pedagogy grounded in care, openness, and community. 

This exploration aims to enhance the understanding of the pluriverse through a storytelling and experiential workshop. Over the last 10 years, the design field —and DRS in particular — has opened up to address the historic dominance of white European and North American men in design discourse and research. We have seen the emergence of multiple voices, perspectives, initiatives, concepts, and theories under the labels of decolonial, diverse, inclusive, pluriversal, multicultural, participatory, situated, and equitable, among others. However, sometimes such “plural” terms have been used interchangeably. 

We argue that each one of those terms is important, valid, and valuable in itself, representing different theories of change, specific objectives, strategies, and conceptual frameworks. Each emerging from different groups of people with particular histories. Placing them in the same box only limits their power to promote genuine and substantial transformation to design research and practice. Metaphorically, we can think of placing several dots of colored ink on a palette. These colorful ink dots can be used to paint any form we imagine.  However, if we mix the dots before we paint, all we have is grey or greyish brown. The goal of this exploration is to pay attention to the particular hue of pluriversality —so we can understand how it can be used in tandem with other transformative hues across multiple color schemes.