Conference Agenda

This paper explores how care ethics, particularly Joan Tronto’s five dimensions of care, can enrich systemic design practices by embedding ethical and political reflections into co-design processes. The paper uses Tronto's framework as an ethical guide through the systemic design methodology of Jones and Van Ael and a retrospective case study involving children with incarcerated parents. It highlights how care ethics can guide designers in navigating complex relational dynamics, redistributing power, and fostering trust and responsiveness in co-creative processes. The study emphasizes the importance of designer positionality, expectation management, and co-ownership, especially when working with vulnerable groups. Ultimately, it proposes systemic design as a practice of care, offering conceptual foundations for more equitable and context-sensitive design interventions.

COVID-19 has left enduring emotional distress for many citizens even as public attention to the crisis has faded. In this context, participatory design (PD) is increasingly recognised as a dialogic and restorative practice that enables collective reflection and emotional recovery through shared meaning-making.

This study examines how participatory design supports citizens in reflecting on pandemic-related psychological distress, with particular attention to war metaphors widely used in governmental and media communications during COVID-19. While these metaphors mobilised collective action, they also intensified perceptions of risk and vulnerability.

The research is based on a year-long participatory design project, W&M, involving nine participants, including the author, who experience mysophobia. Through visual ethnography, reflective dialogue, and collaborative workshops, participants explored how personal anxieties intersected with crisis narratives.

The study proposes a four-stage framework—understanding, intervention, transformation, and impact—demonstrating participatory design’s potential to foster post-crisis reflection and collective emotional resilience.

In a world of increasing complexity, designers working in transitional spaces face blockages imposed by the dominant, locked-in capitalist mindset. Frustrated by the impediments in the systems we try to change, we were prompted to go deeper into the conditions for our change agency, as researchers focused on sustainability and long-term straddlers of industry and academia. As we asked how we can navigate being change agents within complex systems, we turned to becoming systems change pen pals, following the steps of a metadesign tool, which takes us from the remit of personal feelings to future perspectives and new vantage points for our respective and collective change work. This paper shares insights from this collaborative autoethnographic method. It proposes Pen-palling Systems Change as an accessible and agentic tool for change agents, as co-reflections are needed to extend our relatedness and care for the resilience required for long-term, complex change.

Self-management technologies help patients manage their health and improve autonomy by tracking biomedical data. For people with hormonal chronic conditions, these tools clarify complex, fluctuating symptoms. These technologies often rely on clinical data, overlooking the complexity and context of lived experiences, risking continued healthcare bias. This paper explores the lived experiences of people with chronic hormonal illness through a feminist ethics of care perspective. In collaborative sensemaking workshops, we unveiled how social and political contexts shape these experiences, the implicit politics of what data is valued (and what is not), and the socio-technical framing of self-management tools. Examining the intersections of care, justice, and ethics, we present a map of bias across social, healthcare, and technological contexts and consider how they influence power dynamics and healthcare interventions. Finally, we discuss how designers' engagement with chronic illness patients is an inherently political and relational act and offer suggestions for deeper participation.

Designers are increasingly called upon to address complex systemic crises, yet these expanding ambitions for impact risk overburdening both practitioners and students. This paper draws attention to the mounting pedagogical pressures within design education as students navigate problem-based, project-based, inquiry-based and transformative learning frameworks. I argue that as systemic aspirations for impact are integrated into curricula, the emotional and cognitive demands on learners intensify, threatening discovery, joy, and sustained engagement. Drawing upon care-based pedagogy and educational scaffolding, I propose approaches to support emerging designers learning to work amidst uncertainty, vulnerability and urgency. Positioned in contrast to design-for-transition literature that emphasises what and how we design, this paper focuses on who is designing and with what psychological resources. Without care-based scaffolding that endures, we risk reproducing the very crises we seek to address through design education itself.