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. 

By surfacing the personal and professional sustainability-related experiences and competences (Goldberg, 2009) of participants we hope to collectively envision alternative scenarios in which fashion is sustainable and fairer for all. LSP is a well-established facilitation technique that encourages contributions from all participants, fosters reflective thinking, allows for individual and collective concept development, and has been successfully applied in co-design scenarios (Garde and van der Voort, 2016, Roos, 2018). The success of any LSP session is in the formation of the questions. We believe that it is only by asking the right – and difficult - questions that the norms of the industry can be disrupted and can be envisioned at a personal, professional and collective level.  

Hence, the workshop aims to:

• Expand participants’ understanding of Lego® Serious Play® and metaphor as a systems design-based approach
• Explore participants’ personal relationship with fashion products and fashion retail experiences
• Foster co-design for sustainable fashion through interactive play facilitated through Lego® Serious Play®
• Encourage participants to reflect on a range of sustainable fashion prefigurations and scenarios  

Quantum Computing is a field at the cutting edge of computer science. Yet, an understanding of the basic mechanics of this domain remains confined to a relatively small group of experts across the world. With this Exploration, we pose the question: what might the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have to offer Quantum Computing in terms of learnability and engagement? Grounded in our teams’ nascent research and design work in this space, this Exploration will extend an invitation to academics, designers, and other practitioners to explore the opportunities for HCI practices to support better learning and engagement outcomes within the field of quantum computing. Specifically, participants will be invited to explore how the properties of physical materials (e.g. weight, texture, movement, magnetism)  might be utilised to represent the highly abstract and often unintuitive principles of quantum computing concepts and make them more understandable to the average person.  

The Exploration will start with an overview of the basic concepts of quantum computing. This will be followed by a hands-on investigation into the use of provided physical materials to represent these concepts. Rapid prototyping and open exploration will be encouraged. Rather than aiming to develop fully-realised learning tools or strategies, we instead will open a dialogue within the DRS community to investigate early design concepts and potential avenues for physically capturing and representing the qualities of quantum materials. 

This exploration investigates how common interaction framings with generative AI shape design research practice, specifically reflecting on the following hypotheses: 

• Personification as a variable: Does anthropomorphising and addressing AI as a “persona” (social actor) versus as an “impersonal tool” change designers’ willingness to challenge outputs, attribute authorship, and maintain accountability?  (Hsieh & Lee, 2024) 
• Modes of co-intelligence: How do different “co-intelligence modes” (e. g., AI as coach, co-worker, creative partner or tool) alter ideation trajectories, decision points, and the distribution of agency in design work? (Mollick, 2024; Doshi & Hauser, 2024). 
• After-AI practice: What remains of a design workflow when AI is restricted or removed, and what tactics help designers “unmake” AI’s influence while preserving designerly judgement? (Choi, 2024; Zhang, 2025). 

The session has three main objectives:  

• First, it aims to produce a comparative, practice-based account of how different framings of generative AI reshape design thinking, authorship, and accountability during co-creation.  
• Second, it seeks to generate reusable research artefacts – such as templates, prompt protocols, agency & accountability maps, and co-/unmaking pipeline maps – that other researchers and practitioners can adopt, critique, and extend.  
• Third, it is designed to bridge affirmation and critique by making visible what AI enables in design work, what it curtails or distorts, where it fails, and how its influence can be decentred through explicit “unmaking” practices. 

A sonic immersion at The Meadows, an iconic Edinburgh park reached by a seven-minute walk. Following an introduction at 50 George Square we leave for Boys’ Brigade Walk, home to an avenue of seventy-five Sakura cherry trees, renowned for their remarkable blossom to deliver our immersive sonic activity then return with participants to the conference site.

Listening Like a Tree is an outcome of AHRC funded “Reperceiving Communities: Prototyping the More-Than-Human Community Toolkit”, a collaboration between The School of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, The Angela Marmont Centre for UK Nature at The Natural History Museum, and Phoenix Community Housing. The project empowered community groups in Lewisham as agents for pro-environmental and pro-social behavioural change. Through a series of listening events in Lewisham parks with community housing and informal education groups, a set of 3D-printed tools and attachments were iteratively designed, to extend the utility of affordable field recording equipment to enable listeners to experience the audio resonances of urban treescapes

Through this Explorations session, we invite DRS2026 participants to directly experience the neighbourhood of resonances within which a tree is entangled, enabling discussion about the potential for nature-connectedness through the design of immersive sonic experiences. The aim of the Exploration is to provide a grounded experience with DRS26 participants to support reflection and discussion. We ask how the methods and approaches of community-designed sonic platforms support the ambition for nature-connectedness. How should we record and share sonic events for others? How might we share the tools and approaches of sonic experiences in nature with a broader community?

Data has become a dominant lens through which planetary crises are perceived and addressed. Yet the infrastructures through which data comes to matter, including platforms, states, and industries, are primarily shaped by logics of efficiency, optimisation, and extractive governance. Within these regimes, data is often treated as neutral and given, obscuring the choices and configurations through which phenomena and ecosystems are represented. As a result, dominant data practices tend to reproduce anthropocentric, extractive, and colonial dynamics, foreclosing the epistemic and political possibilities offered by plural ways of knowing and being that are urgently needed to respond to planetary crises (Briggs et al., 2025; Dunbar & Speed, 2024; Gabrys et al., 2025; Giaccardi et al., 2025; Tironi & Albornoz, 2025). 

This Exploration invites participants to reimagine, and potentially trouble, the very notion of data itself. Rather than assuming data as a stable or given entity, the Exploration asks how data comes into being through situated relations, practices, and agencies. It seeks to collectively articulate which questions need to be asked, and which directions explored, when what counts as data is co-produced across human, nonhuman, and computational agencies. In doing so, it foregrounds the frictions, trade-offs, and axes of negotiation that emerge when attempting to connect MTH frameworks with the practical realities of technological design and governance.

Designers, researchers, and innovators are increasingly asked to engage with complex, uncertain futures. While futures studies offer powerful analytical tools, and design provides rich visual and narrative methods, these practices are often separated: futures research can remain abstract, while design speculation risks becoming anecdotal or stylistic. This workshop proposes a structured yet highly visual approach to “sketching futures”, where participants systematically generate supporting and contradicting future scenarios through drawing, categorization, and narrative compression. 

The workshop builds on the premise that futures become legible not through singular visions, but through tensions between desirable and undesirable, dominant and marginal, accelerating and resisting trajectories. By sketching these tensions explicitly, participants learn to use drawing not only as representation, but as a thinking device for futures inquiry. 

Using a step-by-step process reflected in the accompanying diagram, participants will move from early signals and metaphors to structured future segments, and finally to single-image narratives and counter, sketches that articulate both positive and harmful futures, and the conditions that produce them.