Conference Agenda

How can rich user scenarios become engineering specifications without losing the user experience they are meant to preserve?

In interdisciplinary product development, user scenarios are often used to communicate context, goals, and lived experience. However, when these narratives are transferred to engineering teams, their experiential intent can become diluted, requirements may become ambiguous, and specifications may lose traceability to the original user need. This workshop addresses this challenge as the experience–specification gap.

In this 90-minute hands-on Explorations session, participants will work in teams to translate an elder-care robot scenario into engineering specifications using the Action Steps method. Rather than treating scenarios as informal design stories, the session uses them as structured evidence for specification development.

Participants will work with Novy, a smart elder-care robot designed to support nocturnal awakening, medication access, safe movement, and nighttime assistance. Through a guided six-step sprint, teams will identify scenario elements, form user–product interaction sequences, derive functional requirements, select components, define target specifications, and evaluate component placement.

The session will conclude with peer review and group reflection on traceability, interdisciplinary negotiation, and artifact quality. Participants will leave with a practical framework, a practitioner manual, a workbook, working examples, and reusable templates for teaching, research, or practice.

This workshop welcomes participants from any background who are interested in human-centered design, engineering design, product design and development, scenario-based design, robotics, healthcare design, interdisciplinary collaboration, or design research methods. No prior experience with the method is required.

To address the persistent gap between the acknowledged relevance of images and their practical implementation in research communication, this exploration asks: How can design scholars write with and through images? Through a workshop format combining critical analysis, discussion, and hands-on exploration, we will articulate possible frameworks for producing, evaluating, and publishing visual essays within design research contexts. In doing so, we aim to address the implementation gap by moving from theoretical justification to practical capacity-building. Specifically, the workshop seeks to identify and experiment with ways of communicating academic knowledge in design with and through images. Following the workshop, insights on how to provide evidence and argumentation in visual form and how peer-reviewers can balance evaluating scholarly rigor alongside visual experimentation will be summarized in a reference paper. Participants and the wider community will be then invited to contribute to a special issue on visual essays for Design and Culture. 

Reproductive experiences are deeply shaped by stigma, legislation, and intense emotional dimensions (Mohammadi 2016; Lusi et al. 2024; Stangl et al. 2013). These experiences are navigated within healthcare infrastructures that often prioritize standardized protocols over lived experience (Naghdali 2025; Ross 2020). As a result, dominant representations of reproductive health rely on sanitized and medicalized narratives that flatten complexity, reinforce normative reproductive timelines (Kessler 2008), and marginalize experiences that fall outside idealized notions of healthy or “normal” bodies. Structural barriers, delays in care, and persistent stigma erode trust in healthcare infrastructures and medical advice, as disclosure itself can feel emotionally risky (Fox 2025). Consequently, much of what is lived, felt, and negotiated remains difficult to articulate within existing representational frameworks (Dubriwny 2012). 

This 90-minute exploration adopts a speculative and performative approach, using dolls as material and symbolic media through which reproductive health experiences can be explored, deconstructed, and reimagined through play. Doll-based methods have been framed as design practices of perspective- and role-taking, facilitating empathetic engagement (Jakobsen, 2012). Indeed, Persona Dolls have been used in participatory and educational settings as culturally situated figures to support inclusion and challenge discrimination (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2022). Dolls help participants adopt users’ perspectives and explore scenarios during early ideation (Kagohashi et al., 2020). In therapeutic contexts, dolls support expression through play and making, offering material ways to articulate experiences that may be difficult to verbalize (Krystyniak, 2020).  

At DRS 2026, we invite participants to hack dolls to explore and represent reproductive health experiences, including menstruation, endometriosis, pregnancy, abortion, postpartum, menopause, and many more—across both first-person experiences and those encountered as loved ones or caregivers. We will provide second-hand dolls, props and craft materials, to support sketching, annotation, and reflective note-taking throughout the session. Participants will be invited to use the props to hack the dolls bodies and imagine, or stage interactions to explore bodily change, complications, care practices, unpredictability. We explore how hacking dolls can surface and document reproductive health experiences that resist articulation within dominant biomedical and service representations, extending prior workshops in reproductive health (Ahmed et al. 2025, Gamboa 2024, Hansson 2023, Kumar 2019, Lusi et al. 2024, Reime et al. 2022, Petterson 2025, Tuli 2025). We propose three interrelated thematic areas:  

• how reproductive health experiences such as pregnancy, abortion, surrogacy and more, unsettle the notion of a singular, bounded body, including the material, symbolic, and ethical implications of distributing risk across bodies.  
• how reproductive health stories are shaped collectively, for example in relationships with partners, families, and institutions.  
• how reproductive health experiences might intersect with other health conditions such as chronic illness and mental health, reflecting on bodily and psychological experiences that both shape and are shaped by reproductive health.