Conference Agenda

Queer(ing) is a practice of questioning, unsettling, and liberating that resists normative ways of knowing. This paper advances a Queer(ing) epistemology for intersectional data science and offers TMI (Too Much Information)-WEB as a working case. This open source, theory-driven qualitative data analysis ecosystem treats identity, lived experience, and power as relational, contextual, and co-constructed. Built on a human-centered graph data model, it reimagines databases as dynamic knowledge systems rather than neutral containers. Authentic, identity-driven personas emerge from participants’ own narratives, while affective queries invite researchers to explore (and experience) patterns of harm, coping, joy, and self-acceptance across intersectional lives and social scenarios. We argue that Queer(ing) epistemology shifts data science from describing populations to knowing with people—centering embodiment, vulnerability, and relational dynamics. In doing so, TMI-WEB demonstrates how Queer(ing) epistemology through intersectional data science can generate open, complex, hopeful ways of knowing—otherwise.

Creativity in collaborative design unfolds under conditions of unspecific and ambiguous information. While such epistemic uncertainty is inherent to many design projects, its impact on creativity is underexplored. This study investigated how epistemic uncertainty induced through problem briefings affects creativity during idea generation, and how tolerance for epistemic uncertainty moderates this relationship. A between-subjects experiment with 67 student participants collaborating in 18 groups tested idea generation under high versus low epistemic uncertainty conditions. The results showed a dual pathway effect: high epistemic uncertainty, compared to low epistemic uncertainty, increased idea originality, but decreased idea usefulness. Average group tolerance for uncertainty did not significantly moderate this relationship. Instead, a tolerant-anchor effect emerged: having at least one highly tolerant individual in a group supports idea usefulness under uncertain conditions. The findings contribute new insight into the complex ways in which epistemic uncertainty shapes creativity in collaborative design.

Can Western design theory be a universal panacea? Celebrating Design Issues' 40-year legacy (1984-2025), "The Unfolding Culture" exhibition asks how culture will shape design's future, yet overlooks whose culture dominates design discourse. Through critical analysis of Design Issues, the author reveals three structural absences that question theoretical universalism: (1) Medium constraints—text-based format systematically excludes sound, video, and material-based knowledge production, eliminating epistemologies that resist textualization; (2) Temporal lag—non-Western topics arrive decades late, revealing one-way delayed recognition rather than dialogue; (3) Divergent concerns—East and West simultaneously focus on fundamentally different design questions yet lack mechanisms for synchronous exchange, resulting in parallel monologues rather than cross-cultural conversation. These absences expose design theory's provinciality: decades of isolated development, occasional belated recognition, but no sustained dialogue. The author argues for infrastructures enabling real-time, reciprocal, pluriversal conversation across divergent concerns.

Empathy is widely used as the initial stage of the design process to understand users and meet their needs and desires. Recently these methods have been critiqued for commodifying empathy in commercial practice, centering the designer instead of the user, and failing to account for power dynamics. Empathy is also under attack in political spheres, increasing the dehumanization of others. To address these criticisms, we explore the value of empathy in design processes and examine how queer theory and queering methodologies can help designers move past “walking in someone else’s shoes” towards intersectional design processes rooted in political responsibility. Synthesizing these insights, we offer six orientations that help designers to: challenge the normative, claim our terms, attend to the body, cultivate an ethics of care, focus on materialities, and redirect power. Queering empathy can provide new strategies for a more ethical, contextual, and reflexive approach to understanding others.

As design becomes increasingly automated and abstracted, the act of designation, once tied to human intentionality, appears to be lifting away from the human. In the era of exocapitalism, defined by Poliks and Trillo as a system unbound from the human condition and driven by self-replicating logics of value extraction, design too is being reconfigured through machinic and algorithmic processes. This paper introduces the concept of exodesign to describe this shift: the deterritorialisation of design’s human-centred agency amidst the rise of software stacks, machine learning, and cybernetic optimisation systems. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s notions of epiphylogenesis and general organology, alongside ontological and meta-design theories, it argues that design’s locus of operation is now distributed across recursive, inorganic strata that sense, adapt, and redesign themselves. Rather than opposing this exogenic drift, the paper proposes a hybrid account of design’s organological condition, an exo/endo interplay necessary for rethinking practice under planetary-scale automation.

This paper addresses a design dilemma: how can designers engage with materials that exhibit recognizable yet unpredictable behaviors? Traditional design relies on predictability and control. However, in an era of crises and complexity, we must acknowledge non-human agency and recognize that materials inherently respond and adapt. Complex material systems, characterized by self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, and emergent patterns, resist deterministic control, requiring an alternative approach. Drawing on material agency and play perspectives of rules and chances, we develop an operative framework of negotiating control, exemplified through clay fractals using the Lifting Hele-Shaw cell (LHSC). We identify three progressive modes of engagement: 1) Parametric Conditioning, adjusting variables without prescribing forms; 2) Structural Guidance, reinforcing pattern tendencies; 3) Orchestrated Formation, for goal-oriented control. These agentic patterns shift the designer’s role from form-function giver to facilitator of complexity, emphasizing coordination and responsiveness over control, where unpredictability becomes a valuable resource for collaboration.