Conference Agenda

Homelessness is a public health problem worldwide. System-wide failures often hinder solutions to this complex issue. In design and architecture education, the issue of homelessness is rarely brought into the curriculum. This paper describes how practice and theory related to homelessness can be applied to design education. First, a practice-based workshop was developed to enhance student reflexivity through exploring biases toward homelessness and applying trauma-informed theory to redesign products, services, and systems for homeless populations. Secondly, two case studies applied the theory deductively and critically reflected upon trauma-informed principles to housing and homeless design projects in hindsight and foresight. Our reflections show how a focus on homelessness as a traumatising social structure can support thoughtful, theory-informed decision-making. Further developing trauma-informed design methods holds promise to govern design research interactions with vulnerable populations. Such a foundation can influence student identity, leading to more ethical and caring design processes in the future.

Digital community platforms have transformed civic participation, enhancing social belonging and shared responsibility. Yet, they intensify the digital divide between people. This can be a risk to their fundamental human value of dignity. This paper explores designing for dignity within digital community platforms through a qualitative study conducted in South Holland, The Netherlands. Twenty citizens participated in semi-structured interviews to investigate their understanding, experiences, frustrations and expectations of dignity in digital interactions. The study confirmed dignity’s multifaceted nature (14 distinct definitions), varied expectations of respectful treatment, and common challenges in using government digital services. Only 30% of participants felt these platforms respected their dignity, the rest expressed negative experiences such as feeling helpless, stupid, frustrated, anxious, etc. Participants emphasized needs such as language support, clarity, and navigation assistance, as well as design requirements. The findings will be validated in participatory design sessions of co-creating a dignified digital community platform.

This paper examines how visualising values in women’s digital labour shapes recognition and justice in platform-driven environments. Visualisation is advanced as a design-ethics strategy for surfacing and negotiating undervalued work that remains obscured in digital economies. Grounded in Nancy Fraser’s justice framework and feminist epistemologies centred on situated and embodied experience, the study positions visualisation as a means to reveal and contest structural devaluation.

A three-phase ethical practice is developed: ethical narration to make hidden value perceptible, ethical prototyping to question recognition mechanisms, and ethical interaction to build collective participation in decisions about representation. Insights draw on sociological and anthropological research on Chinese women whose emotional and coordination work is routinely discounted by platform logic and gender norms.

The study clarifies how design can transform visibility into shared ethical judgement and action, offering criteria for evaluating whether visualisation can rearticulate value and support more equitable participation in digital labour systems.

While there has been a recent interest in trauma-informed design approaches, there is still a need for further research on its use in participatory design (PD). This paper discusses the methodology of a values-driven, trauma-informed PD project which explored how social care records could be redesigned to meet the needs and aspirations of young people (YP). Care-experienced people have often lived through traumatic experiences closely associated with their experiences of care, resulting in a lack of trust in social care professionals. While foregrounding the views of care-experienced people, this project also engaged with professionals, revealing systemic tensions which needed to be navigated through the approach. We discuss application of the trauma-informed methodology and tensions that arose. Our work demonstrates how trauma-informed values and methods can be used during participatory research where groups may have conflicting goals, and how this can enrich the design process.

Psychiatric care environments are intended to heal, yet their design is often experienced as stigmatizing. This paper presents the Uncovering and Designing for Dignity through Emotions (UDDE) method, a participatory approach designed to uncover the meaning of dignity for perinatal women in psychiatric care, explore lived experiences of stigma and dignity, and identify how care features can be re-designed to uphold dignity. While dignity is often defined as an inherent worth every person possesses, in everyday life dignity is experienced as a lived value shaped by interactions with others and the environment. Emotions act as biological signals that can reveal when dignity is maintained or violated and serve as a bridge between the abstract concept of dignity and lived experience. The UDDE method consists of six interconnected activities to visualize experiences and transform stigmatizing interactions into ones that better address what perinatal women in psychiatric care truly value and need.

Sub-Saharan Africa is at the frontline of climate change, with impacts particuarly acute in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). This study examines how value-led design can mediate between traditional cosmologies and scientific climate knowledge to strengthen adaptation. Focusing on pastoralist communities in Kenya’s Maasai Mara region, it applies the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) as a participatory reflection tool. Findings show how value-led design can advance equity by embedding community voices and centring values in decision-making, contributing to broader debates on design’s role in fostering systemic transitions amid climate uncertainty, safeguarding against maladaptation. It presents the MLP as a tool for value-led design, connecting abstract climate data and local knowledge, enabling communities to reinterpret climate projections through cultural worldviews and identifying locally grounded adaptation strategies. By following this method researchers and practitioners can support communities to imagine, negotiate, and sustain equitable, regenerative futures that are scientifically informed and grounded in cultural values.