Conference Agenda

Ruderal Definition seeks to co-create a definition of regenerative design through collaborative documentation and critical reflection. Regenerative Design as a theory and a practice is increasingly invoked across a multiplicity of design domains, yet its meaning is fluid and unresolved, and our lexicon is fragmented—inviting both productive plurality and the risk of greenwashing and dilution. Our exploratory workshop treats this disturbed semantic ground as ruderal: a site where meaning can coalesce and stabilise through shared inquiry. The session positions regenerative design as an emergent practice and seeks to produce artefacts, specifically mapping, concepts, and relationships, that will help designers speak rigorously across fields without eclipsing industry- and place-based differences. We aim to surface productive tensions and generate a living, publicly accessible knowledge artefact that captures the multiplicity of regenerative approaches while identifying areas requiring further conceptual development. 

We will address three connected research questions: 

 

How do researchers-designers understand regenerative design principles across diverse contexts, and what tensions, gaps, or insights emerge when we map our practices against a collective, proposed theoretical framework? 

How can collaborative mapping serve as a rigorous method for recording, verifying, and interrogating design research knowledge beyond traditional textual formats? 

What new relational understandings emerge when place-based regenerative practices are situated in cross- and transdisciplinary dialogue, revealing patterns, absences, and possibilities across cultural, industry, and economic boundaries? 

To paraphrase Randolph Glanville (1981), design research is not just a practice of creative exploration for desired change in products and systems, but a model for better research, a designed process for scientific discovery, as well as the invention of artefacts.  

This workshop seeks to create and test a definition of regenerative design that emerges as a system of looking with, thinking with, and responding with the world we are entangled in. Can this definition hold across academic fields, geographies, and praxes, and can we discover shared phenomenologies of this robust design definition in a collaborative creative exercise?  

Through documentation, word play, critical reflection, and collaborative mapping, we seek to create research knowledge, in real time, among the communities in which it will be used. We will then document these findings through photography, ephemera, and field notes.   

Artificial Intelligence is now part of design education, which raises the question of whether these tools build students' critical thinking and creative voice, or quietly erode them. This workshop treats participants' own tool use as the object of study. In small groups, students, educators, and practitioners work with NotebookLM environments that are preloaded with research, institutional AI policies, and classroom resources. They will use the system as a thought partner while documenting their exchanges. They isolate sources, capture notes, and participate in a structured reflection during which they examine how that mediation shaped their reasoning and discussion. The aim is to test our understanding of how AI tools can cultivate authentic creative voices and critical thinking skills.

Note: This workshop is best experienced with a Google account. Facilitators recommend that participants bring a laptop that is logged into a personal Google account or a mobile device with the NotebookLM app already downloaded and logged into.

Crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality to challenge "single-axis analysis" of identity and recognize how multiple social categories intersect to create unique experiences of privilege and oppression. This concept, now nearly forty years old, is just beginning to transform the field of design. Costanza-Chock (2020) argues that without embracing intersectional thinking, design perpetually overlooks the realities of those facing multiple forms of discrimination, yet, attempts to apply the concept in design remain limited (Chopra, 2022; Arquilla & Caruso; 2025).  

This is due to design scholars’ recent engagement with feminist thinking and to the concept’s complexity, which resists simplification. The latter is a core feature that characterizes Dominant Design practice (Chopra & Del Gaudio, 2023) and risks treating intersectionality as a "checklist", losing its political value. To meaningfully apply intersectionality, designers must engage with two elements of intersectional thought: pluralism, and contextualization (Chopra, 2022). Pluralism involves recognizing and valuing diverse ways of being and knowing, and understanding that individuals’ multidimensional identities must be considered in design decision-making (Chopra, 2022; Leitão, 2022). Contextualization requires grounding analysis and action in the specific histories, geographies, social conditions, and knowledge systems that shape people’s lives and identities, ensuring responses to inequality are context-sensitive rather than universalized (Chopra, 2022).  

Given the challenges of translating this complex concept into practice and design’s limited theoretical engagement with intersectionality, this exploration aims to advance the practice of intersectionality. It seeks to do so by engaging participants in a collective investigation and experimentation with one aspect of pluralism: how designers can acknowledge and value multiple ways of being and knowing within a design process. 

The exploration will unfold through a hands-on workshop grounded in a real situation shared by participants, centring the embodied nature of intersectionality. It will also explore non-academic textual formats for knowledge dissemination of findings, further addressing the challenge of bridging theory and practice in intersectional design. Hence, this exploration addresses these research questions: How can designers acknowledge and value multiple ways of being and knowing within a design process? What non-academic textual formats can foster understanding of the practice of intersectional thought in design among practitioners? 

The shared real‑world situation to explore the practice of intersectionality is how the DRS conference can continue to enhance inclusivity for attendees at different career stages and from diverse backgrounds. This inquiry aligns with the intersectional commitment to social justice, challenging dominant and universalizing practices, and valuing diverse experiences and worldviews. The aim is to support the conference, as DRS approaches its 60‑year celebration, in strengthening its role as a space that welcomes and honours a wide range of perspectives and needs. 

Designing for transformation, transitions and systemic change is taking off, and there are dozens of methods and theories that support transdisciplinary teams in designing for transforming practices. However, in practice, it proves to be a major challenge to evaluate, interpret and discuss the quality, success and impact of such complex changes. Designing for transition and transformation seem to be becoming new buzzwords, with the risk of becoming empty phrases if there are no clear criteria for quality. Transformation occurs at many different levels, on different time scales, in different contexts and cultures, by different actors, and this plurality has contributed to the fact that there is not (yet) an adequate language or approach for assessing and discussing (the qualities of) transformation. 

In this Explorations session, we will share a selection of the developed approaches to explore with all participants, which creative forms and transformation indicators resonate with them, to discuss and evaluate transformation. Through exploring and combining the outcomes of various participatory ‘creative stations’ we aim at finding a common language and understanding of transformation, which can spark both transformation processes and a thriving regenerative society, leading to the following research questions:

• How can different forms of art and design (e.g. performances, visual poetry, mutants) qualitatively extend our ways of seeing, doing and knowing, to explore alternative quality criteria for designing for transforming practices from a minor key perspective? 
• How to describe, visualise, express “minor key” qualities of transformation such as fractal notions of resonance between the small scale and systemic change? 
• How can Key Transformation and Thriving Indicators (KTIs) be developed to meet the needs of evaluate transformative design practices over time? 

Design researchers normally ground computation as something that exists within an electronic device, relying on current industrialized processes and supply chains. This framing has been productive, yet it also narrows the designer’s set of possibilities when designing for computation. Within interaction design, this framing has shaped how data and intelligence are understood, often privileging stability, scalability, and abstraction over material variability and change (Akyildiz et al., 2007; Karl & Willig, 2004). Within sustainable human-computer interaction and circular economics, computation is increasingly understood as material, biodegradable and even permeable. This lab extends that trajectory by shifting attention from electronic devices toward biodegradable materials as active interfaces for computational infrastructure. 

Drawing on a material-centred design approach, this lab investigates how materials such as clay, plant fibres, and organic composites can signal, store, and respond to environmental stimuli. Prior research demonstrates that biomaterials can register environmental conditions through physical change, including growth, deformation, hardening, and decay, offering alternative ways of recording and expressing information (Bell et al., 2024; Bell et al., 2025). Work on clay, microbial materials, and growable composites further shows how computation can be enacted through making processes, where sensing and feedback emerge from the material itself rather than being imposed through electronic layers (Rosner et al., 2015; Nicolae et al., 2023; Postl et al., 2024). These practices position materials as active participants in computation, capable of mediating data. 

This lab builds on scholarship that treats material change as a design probe rather than design burden (Döring et al., 2013; Sylvester et al., 2010). Participants are invited to engage materials as infrastructure—systems that reliably change with use and environmental exposure. The lab surfaces questions about viable design practices when computation is embedded in biodegradable interfaces. By working hands-on with materials that evolve, the session explores how data is collected, adapted, and transformed in material interaction, providing space to re-explore tangible computation as a material-driven infrastructural design. 

Extreme heat is becoming a defining condition of everyday life in many urban and peri-urban environments. Heat waves are increasing in frequency and severity, and cities often amplify thermal stress through the urban heat island effect, material surfaces, limited vegetation, and unequal access to cooling infrastructure (Adapting the Built Environment 2023). Yet heat is still commonly communicated through aggregate metrics such as temperature, humidity, and heat index. A reliance on such metrics alone renders climate legible primarily through quantitative data rather than through embodied experience (McQuillan 2018).  

   

Heat is not lived uniformly. People encounter heat through bodies in motion, through effort, sweat, breath, fatigue, and the ongoing decisions that shape outdoor life: where to walk, when to rest, which surfaces to avoid, where shade or airflow can be found (NOAA 2025). These experiences are uneven, shaped by what bodies are doing (walking, carrying, working), what bodies can access (shade, water, shelter), and what places afford (vegetation, soil moisture, airflow, thermal mass) (Bramer et al. 2018; Adapting the Built Environment 2023). In practice, heat is often experienced at the scale of microclimates: meter-to-meter differences between a shaded edge, an exposed plaza, a humid pocket near dense plantings, or damp soil near irrigation or mulching (Bramer et al. 2018; Hemenway 2009).  

At the same time, many climate-facing technologies and communication practices still treat sensing and computation as the primary path to awareness: gather measurements, visualize them, and encourage decisions. These approaches are necessary, but they can make heat feel distant, something known through numbers rather than through attention. Data-driven systems often “disappear” into the background of everyday life; their phenomena become perceptible indirectly (e.g., “rising heat,” such as climate stripes) (Karkera and Griffiths 2026), while moments of breakdown, threshold, or disruption (e.g., “the heat wave”) become foregrounded. This produces an experiential gap between measured conditions and felt conditions. Two areas can show similar readings yet feel different because of shade patterns, radiant heat from materials, airflow, or the cumulative strain of movement. Conversely, small measurable differences can feel significant when layered with humidity, direct sun, dehydration, or social constraints (Parsons 2020; NOAA 2025). When engagement is centered on dashboards and thresholds, microclimatic variation can be flattened into averages, and thermal experience becomes abstracted from the relational conditions that produce it, bodies, soils, plants, water, built surfaces, and the sensing technologies used to describe them.

Objects are never simply objective; they actively mediate how humans experience the world, as post-phenomenological philosophers Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek have argued in their accounts of technological mediation and human–technology relations. Within design research, material artefacts and prototypes therefore operate as more than neutral prompts:

they function as applied thought experiments that configure what can be said, felt and decided in a given situation. In response to the DRS2026 theme “Designing for and with Taboo,” this exploration stages two artefacts— a research object and a design proposal. Both designed for the same function: acute cerebral anoxia—obstructing blood flow to the human brain—but with radically different intentions, one to save lives, the other to end lives. This exploration aims to use these two objects as applied thought experiments to help explore their inherent ethical dilemmas.

The contemporary condition of our planet is indelibly marked by the residues of the Anthropocene, or as Donna Haraway (2016) suggests, the Chthulucene. At the heart of this epoch lies the paradox of plastic—a material born from intense Extraction, shaped by mass Production, and destined for a problematic Disposal. Yet, plastic is not merely a "waste" product; it has become a pervasive, "active material agent" (Liboiron, 2016) that has woven itself into the very fabric of our ecosystems. As it breaks down into micro-fragments or persists as monstrous monoliths, it does not simply disappear but enters into new, often unexpected, Entanglements with non-human life.  

This explorative workshop proposal, titled "Making Kin in a Plastic Terrapolis: Worlding with Multispecies Companions," invites participants to rethink our relationship with these synthetic remnants. We move away from the traditional perspective that views plastic as a problem to be "solved" through technical efficiency. Instead, we embrace the concept of Terrapolis—a speculative, multispecies "worlding" where humans are not the sole protagonists, but one of many companions (human and non-human, organic and inorganic) struggling to coexist on a damaged planet. In a Plastic Terrapolis, plastic actively participates in shaping bodies, ecosystems, and social systems. Making kin here is not about harmony, but about staying with complexity and responsibility amid plastic’s long-lasting and uneven effects. 

The workshop draws on multispecies ethnography (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010) and cospeculative design (Lohmann, 2018) practices grounded in sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016)—practices of “making-with.” Through embodied, hands-on activities and futures-making strategies, participants explore alternative ways of knowing and practicing kin-making, collaboratively imagine multispecies futures, and develop shared, transformative actions. These practices will extend to citizen scientists and local communities, fostering participatory observation, raising awareness of multispecies entanglements, and cultivating collective responsibility.