Conference Agenda

In an age of pervasive disinformation, values function as conceptual anchors for comprehending complex information. Design-for-values approaches frame values as alignment opportunities. But the same values that enable ethical, resonant communication can be exploited for manipulative and unethical purposes. This paper argues that values in graphic communication design function as 'darker affordances' — relational properties affording both ethical communication and manipulation with equal reliability. Drawing on Master's students' reflections from a project in which they designed paired climate communication — one ethically aligned, one disinformation — it examines how contrastive pedagogy develops ethical literacy around values' dual nature. Analysis reveals three findings: creating disinformation is structurally easier than ethical communication; this asymmetry triggers an epistemological crisis about design's agency; and recognising values' dual potential collapses ethical/unethical binaries, requiring reasoning within moral ambiguity. This extends design-for-values scholarship by demonstrating that values' stability as meaning-making anchors is precisely what makes them reliable targets for manipulation.

This paper addresses gaps in ethical guidance for socially oriented designers engaged in co-design with marginalised groups. It introduces an ethical canvas for planning and evaluating co-design, developed through a collaborative inquiry led by a practitioner-researcher with long experience in community-based design. The canvas was informed by the authoring team’s expertise in service design, ethical decision-making, and socially engaged design research. It makes ethical deliberation visible and actionable, especially where multiple or conflicting values are present. The canvas invites designers to reflect on their stance, engage with participants’ lived realities, and navigate tensions between institutional expectations and situated needs. It supports the recognition of values such as autonomy, empowerment, social responsibility and social change, often implicit in practice. Ethics is approached as relational and evolving, shaped through dialogue and shared experience, across all levels of society. This contribution strengthens ethical decision-making and offers a practical tool for value-sensitive reflection.

Design culture has proliferated aspirational value frameworks, from manifestos championing social justice to ethics toolkits, yet lacks meaningful accountability infrastructure when values are violated or conflict. This paper examines a transgressive design research intervention: a mobile confessional booth at a city Design Week in 2025 that invited designers to anonymously confess professional compromises and ethical failures. The 125 confessions revealed patterns of deflection (blaming systems over individual agency), superficiality (focusing on technical mistakes rather than methodological rigour leading to ethical violations), and conspicuous absence of admissions regarding exploitation, greenwashing, or designing harm. Unlike medicine, law, or journalism, design has implemented no meaningful ethical infrastructure, defaulting instead to personal intra-structuring of consequences for harmful or negligent practice. This structural gap means values remain aspirational rhetoric or private guilt, unable to be metabolised collectively. The paper argues value accountability requires bottom-up infrastructure to surface, negotiate, and reckon with complicity in design practice.

Emerging from a three-year arts-based participatory design and research collaboration, the Who Cares? Approach is a framework for social change developed to understand how a community in rural British Columbia could cultivate a system of support for aging. Through iterative cycles of team retreats, including creative engagement and group interviews, project members developed a framework grounded in values of trust, presence, creativity, storytelling, relationality, and acknowledgement of the unknown. By transforming value statements into diagrams, installations, and participatory events, the project demonstrated how design artifacts can act as mediators of shared meaning and catalysts for ethical reflection. The resulting visual framework captures the project's values as nonlinear, non-hierarchical, and overlapping. The paper presents a model of participatory design that treats values as living, negotiable, and materially enacted, and illustrates how creative research methods can generate new insights into care within complex social systems.

This paper examines how design education can reveal and negotiate values through the practice of design activism. Based on a multi-year teaching experience with undergraduate design students, the study reflects on how pedagogical strategies oriented by emancipation and collective responsibility enable the articulation of ethical awareness in design processes. The teaching approach evolved from remote reflection-based activities to embodied, field-based interventions that addressed social and environmental issues in local communities. Through qualitative analysis of classroom documentation and student projects, the study identifies values such as reciprocity, dignity, and solidarity as emerging drivers of learning and design action. The discussion highlights design education as a context for developing situated ethics, where activism and pedagogy intersect to foster civic imagination and value-conscious practice.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project using speculative design to explore the intersections of sustainability and technology in the UK Wool industry. Through a process of value mapping, worldbuilding, design fiction, and card development, the project involved stakeholders across the wool supply chain who contributed their perspectives and priorities. This process revealed how value is created in the wool industry, and how relationships and systems are mediated by hidden, often contrasting values. Findings highlight the importance of these values in shaping sustainable and equitable futures for the sector. We present a conceptual framework of valuation, revaluation and evaluation as a lens to understand this iterative process. The research challenges traditional top-down understandings of value and suggests Digital Good can be supported by a contextual values-driven chain. Finally, we present a key output: a card-based tool designed to support values-driven ethical evaluation and consideration of Digital Good in a futures-led approach.