Conference Agenda

This paper examines how the Power+Place Collaborative — a participatory placeshaping design partnership — reflects, reinforces, and resists the dominant educational, political, and social systems it seeks to transform. Since 2018, the Collaborative has been working with historically and systematically marginalized communities to critically examine the power-laden place-design processes of a diverse, semi-urban county in the Southern United States. Through oral history interviews, digital and place-based storytelling, and community gatherings, the Collaborative aims to construct a more inclusive narrative of our county and cultivate opportunities for systemic transformation. Reflecting the call to consider the ethics of participation in systemic design, this paper is coauthored by community partners, students, and faculty. The paper begins by outlining the complex histories and interlocking crises the county is facing, documents our participatory approach, shares findings from a longitudinal research study highlighting systemic transformations from multiple perspectives, and concludes with a set of recommendations.

This paper offers a critical account of using a layered systemic design process to surface the complexity of a superdiverse neighbourhood - Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. The approach employs systemic design practices through walking and iterative prototyping to encounter a multiplicity of experiences and forms of participation that shape place. Four methodological contributions are presented: critical vignettes from ethnographic walks framing complexity, systemic visualization from walks with residents, three prototypes of archives and across the paper, accounts of systemic participation shaping place. The layered approach is presented as a form of systemic design participation in itself. It reveals how superdiverse places are sites of localized participation and governance that may resist, adapt to or deviate from normative policymaking. It advances research in systemic and place-based design practice by linking community experiences to systemic conditions while offering opportunities for design researchers to grow contextual awareness when working with marginalized communities.

Rarely does speculative socially engaged design reflectively compare different approaches. This paper reflects on two speculative socially engaged design projects that employ materials-based participatory methods to explore the supports and barriers to the continuity of healthcare and the remediation of environmental pollution. The first project, TheChange@Work, engaged hospital staff and outpatients in exploring menopause-related workplace stigma through colour, collage, and textiles, to reflect on diverse experiences of dynamic hormones. The second project, From Waste to Care, involved communities in 3D-printing ceramics from coal ash waste, addressing the remediation of toxic materials remaining from energy production. We analyse the blind spots in current framings of health and environmental challenges identified in the workshops. Our reflections on these projects provide a fruitful comparison of our approaches and deepen our understanding of what we learnt from participants about dynamic hormones and the reuse of fossil-fuel waste to counter eco-social challenges.

Research involving Deaf and hard-of-hearing participants remains limited in its ability to include and engage with diverse participants lived experiences, weakening research rigour, relationships with communities, and perpetuating existing inequalities. The use of co-design approaches to address these needs, by positioning lived experience as an additional form of expert knowledge, has increased in recent years. However, the ways in which practices genuinely empower DHH participants, enabling participation that advances justice within and beyond the research setting, have not been translated into co-design research. This paper proposes an initial participatory framework for exploring DHH engagement in research, examining how models of deafness, participant characteristics, and research practices interact to shape the nature of participation in co-design. We aim to provide guidance for the design community seeking to move beyond tokenistic involvement toward genuinely shared power, respect for the lived experience of DHH, and more socially impactful co-design practices.

This paper reflects upon the research process of co-designing equitable engagement within the healthcare sector. The research considers approaches to co-design as rooted within researchers sharing decision-making and shifting power not from themselves to participants, but amongst the research team itself. Co-design is mostly discussed as a process of academics and non-academics sharing the research design journey through participatory, inclusive and dialogical methods. This study considers how this process evolves within the research team itself, whereby known research project roles, responsibilities and remit are put to one side allowing difference, conflict and disagreement to be explored using design research methods. The findings suggest design exploration of this kind is likely to support a type of engagement in a context such as healthcare often difficult to research. The benefits of the research are both methodological and empirical - in advancing methods for co-design as well as enriching empirical studies in healthcare.