Conference Agenda

This article explores how material properties and sustainability awareness shape aesthetic perception in leather handbag design. Drawing on practice-based research, the study combines memory collection, collaborative designer-led prototyping and user feedback to examine designer and consumer experiences. Findings show that designers focus on structural and tactile qualities—stiffness, thickness, and texture—while aesthetic attributes such as colour and surface finish support conceptual and stylistic intentions. Sustainable tanning methods and innovative leathers introduce new challenges, requiring adaptive strategies. For users, long-term interaction with leather fosters appreciation for durability, patina, and cultural meaning, shifting aesthetic evaluation from immediate visual appeal to qualities signalling longevity and emotional attachment. First impressions are primarily driven by colour and texture, but deeper engagement highlights leather’s role in sustaining meaningful experiences. The study demonstrates that material knowledge mediates between making, perception, and meaning, and that sustainability awareness shapes both aesthetic evaluation and emotional connection with leather.

Working with natural materials can open space for exploratory forms of inquiry. This paper examines how nature influences our approaches to artistic practice and research. Through the frameworks of introspective methodologies and posthumanism, this study examines a case of Icelandic geothermal clays to reflect on possible methodological approaches within artistic research. The author’s ceramic practice serves to trace the processes of developing artworks with natural materials. The acts of collecting, testing, and designing with geothermal clays become both a creative and an epistemic endeavour, a way of thinking with and through materials. Artistic practice emerges as a form of inquiry responsive to the environment. Situated and relational methods, in this context, arise through immersion in a material assemblage, where making is guided by responsiveness and openness to uncertainty. The study contributes to discussions on methods in craft research, suggesting that situated, materially grounded approaches foster relational forms of making.

Research-through-Design (RtD) continues to grapple with how prototypes can generate comparable design knowledge beyond stand-alone studies. This paper addresses that gap by studying how knowledge takes shape in constrained design settings, where limitations themselves become sources of insight. Using the case of affordable dental care in India, chosen for its material, spatial, and procedural limitations, the study shows how constraints can make tacit design understandings more visible. From this work, three categories of knowledge emerged: embodied negotiation of ergonomics, enacted hygiene, and modularity-for-resilience. These categories describe how designers learn through doing, maintaining, and adjusting within limitations. Rather than focusing on healthcare design, the study uses this case as a lens for understanding how situated constraints can strengthen RtD by generating knowledge categories that are both credible and relevant to comparable constrained contexts.

Prototyping offers ways to anticipate futures by supporting people to inhabit futures through hands-on experiences. Prototypes offer “invitations” to suspend disbelief and make believe. A canonical distinction is made between levels of fidelity in prototyping. Here, we critically re-examine “fidelity” by asking: How may fidelity inform prototyping practices and pedagogies? How may prototyping practices be more responsive, generative and ethical? How can fidelity in prototyping contribute to engagements with futures? Building on foundational ideas in prototyping and futuring, we put forward the FIRE (Fidelity/Resolution) map, a framework for distinguishing between fidelity and resolution and for navigating their spread and interplay for more effective and more ethical prototyping practices. Illustrated through sample cases, the map demonstrates how facilitators and educators can anticipate, respond to and reflect upon changes in prototype resolution and experiential fidelity. We conclude by connecting these insights to theory and proposing actionable prototyping strategies for response-able futuring engagements.

Concrete builds the assets and aesthetics of contemporary cities. This research suggests that concrete also shapes emotions and cognition, generating a tacit body of valuable experience. Construction workers, who engage with this material daily, embody expertise through their bodily practices. Yet their insights remain unheard and underrepresented in the design discourse. This study adopts a material engagement approach, using concrete samples as probes and conducting semi-structured on-site interviews with 14 workers in Shenzhen, China. Analysing 280 minutes of video and audio data thematically, the research reveals that workers and materials mutually shape each other. Workers develop their understanding of concrete through multisensory, temporal, and spatial perceptions. By taking this social group as a case study, the paper reveals the agentic - and unrecognized - role of materials and their craftsmen in shaping urban material culture. The goal is to incorporate workers’ tacit knowledge into future design practices.

This practice-based research explores stuckness in creative work not as a problem to eliminate, but as a threshold state where tacit knowledge becomes operative. Drawing on autoethnographic narrative, I examine how attending to stuckness reveals the autonomic nervous system's (ANS) role in embodied knowing. Through a close reading of wood carving practice, I document how physical engagement with materials offered a way to work with, rather than overcome, stuckness. When invited to exhibit this work, I experienced acute stress that led me to adapt a Risk Assessment form—typically used for physical hazards—to map emotional risks such as shame and humiliation. Rather than eliminating uncertainty, this adapted matrix became a tool for aligning conscious awareness with bodily knowledge. This account contributes to practice-based design methodology by offering one practitioner's methods for lingering within stuckness, opening questions about working with embodied intelligence at threshold moments.