Conference Agenda

This paper presents a first approach to a Latin American feminist design method based on three actions proposed by the Chilean feminist sociologist Julieta Kirkwood who said feminist praxis required to (1) know the structures of oppression, (2) recognize our place in them and (3) transform them through our practice. Although the intersection between design and feminism has successfully pointed out the false neutrality in design practice and its potential to imagine more equal futures, practical approaches are still needed as a guidance to put feminist design into practice. Therefore, this design method based on understanding, recognizing ourselves and transforming would have two main areas of impact: First, it would promote design interventions that improve the lives of women and other marginalized subjects, and second, it would become a reference for other designers who want to move away from apolitical ways of designing.

This study examines Interference Archive, a collectively run archive of social movement ephemera in Brooklyn, as a site where archival practice and design converge in continuous public formation. Through an analysis of exhibitions, interviews, and institutional materials, it demonstrates how archives employ the design tactics of tracing and projection not as discrete interventions but as recursive practices embedded in long-term infrastructuring. Tracing reveals genealogies of struggle, enabling participants to locate themselves within shared histories, while projection transforms this awareness into forward-looking artifacts and events that circulate beyond the archive. Unlike conventional participatory design or speculative futuring, IA cultivates a prefigurative present, where the deliberate curation of socio-technical assemblages and volunteer-led programming sustains counterpublics through material maintenance rather than depoliticized innovation. This analysis repositions counter-institutional archives as alternative knowledge infrastructures, demonstrating how design’s political potential lies in maintaining the conditions through which collectives continuously articulate issues and prefigure different social realities.

Metaphors play a crucial role in how designers understand, communicate, and shape technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) is no exception. This paper introduces Archipelagic AI (AAI), a speculative framework that employs metaphor-making as a design research strategy to challenge the colonial epistemologies that structure AI systems. Developed through collaborative autoethnography and fabulation in one of Europe’s richer ecosystems (Samouco in the Tagus Estuary), AAI draws on archipelagic studies and Caribbean decolonial thought to foreground a geosocial intelligence emerging through relational nodes of situated knowledge, where matter, forces, currents, and affects interweave in fluid assemblages. Structured around three metaphorical figures — AI as Contact Zone, AI as Composting, and AI as Companion — AAI proposes design practices oriented toward coexistence, care, and ecological justice. The paper contributes to speculative, place-based, and community-oriented design research by articulating methodologies that integrate more-than-human perspectives into AI design.

The over-sexualisation of female characters in video games peaked in the 1990s and 2000s and fighting games have been slow to move away from it. Their reliance on visual exaggeration to convey identity and fighting style makes this harder to change. With 48% of players today being women, this raises questions about how these portrayals persist. This paper examines how participatory approaches can be used to explore how women players respond to these designs through a survey, a within-subject evaluation task, and a co-design workshop. Participants recognised exaggeration as part of the genre’s identity but criticised its association with sexualisation. They did not reject femininity but favoured forms tied to personality, agency, role, and backstory rather than objectification. The workshop showed that “cool” and “relatable” characters draw on similar features, but that relatability depends on how these are grounded in function and context.

Light is gaining attention as a design element in public space. Its relational and ephemeral aesthetics enable urban transformations beyond the built environment, offering new possibilities for sustainable and inclusive cities. Yet, artificial light remains a relatively new concern in planning, traditionally excluded in drawings and regulations. This paper examines how light’s relational materiality is translated within urban planning and design, and travels as a matter of concern in city governance to become a public thing. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, we analyze municipal lighting policymaking in Gothenburg, Sweden, showing how light’s multiple dimensions—its aesthetics, sustainability, safety, environmental —are mediated through scripting instances such as visualisations, guidelines, comprehensive plans and digital twins, and become part of the bureaucratic organizing of the municipality. The study contributes to understanding how light, through such organizational translations, shifts from an object of design to an object of urban governance - in search for public concern.

The ontological aspect of designing is commonly defined as a feedforward loop between the world and the designer, as if the world designed us as much as we design it. In this definition, derived from the “everyone is a designer” motto, “everyone” means “we,” but also “no one”. Thus, design philosophy avoids scrutinizing worldly agents interested in designing the designer, understanding the world as a homogeneous force reacting to the designer. A world where many worlds fit isn’t a homogeneous one; therefore, answering “who designs the designer?” from an anticolonial stance requires considering the social production of design(ed) bodies and their historical inequalities in world-making. This paper builds upon Vieira Pinto's question "who produces the producer", and recent research on userism that asks “who gets to design/to be designed”. Thus, this research unveils the worldly dispute for sustaining and dismantling the coloniality of making, including the production of design philosophy.