Conference Agenda

Urban curators, citizen-professionals with creative backgrounds, who mobilise their skills to orchestrate positive local change, require tools that help building community, engaging institutions and establishing legitimacy within complex transition dynamics. This paper examines Huis van de Toekomst (HvdT), a community space in a Rotterdam district undergoing a shift from natural gas to district heating, where using a participatory design approach, we co-developed a digital community visualization prototype. Using dramaturgical analysis, the study shows how the setting and composition of participatory events, and how different actors are addressed, influence how community and institutional dynamics unfold. The prototype functioned as a boundary object that enabled HvdT to reflect on its organizational model and legitimacy and exposed tensions between community-driven and institutional approaches. The paper argues that using a dramaturgical approach in design practice to create open-ended, iterative processes can foster institutional learning and adaptation, strengthen collective agency, and provide credibility.

This paper analyses how transition intermediaries and participatory infrastructures shape an unjust energy licensing process and outlines implications for design for just transitions. Centring on the Fosen Wind Farm in Norway, where wind power development violated Indigenous Sámi cultural rights, it traces how licensing enabled renewable expansion while generating democratic and rights-based conflicts. Using historical case analysis and a synthesis of various literatures, the paper explores the intermediary ecology of licensing and shows how interactions among transition intermediaries structure power asymmetries. In dialogue with design research on infrastructuring, it proposes three practices for design in just transition contexts: unveiling institutional–cultural divides, platforming under-represented voices, and engaging in ongoing collaborative infrastructuring and reflexivity. It argues that designers must act in power-aware, rights-oriented ways if transitions are to be both sustainable and just.

Transition arenas are organised to facilitate and guide sociotechnical system change. The organisers invite identified stakeholders in the set problem area to design desirable futures and develop transition pathways. Typically, a transition arena is organised by a transition team who wield power and authority in the transition context. Our broader research project develops transition arenas to facilitate a transition towards gender-equal futures in the Finnish music industry. This research-through-design study investigates how transition arenas can be organised in alignment with intersectional feminist values, specifically focusing on the establishment phase of the process. Through workshops with industry stakeholders, we explore avenues for transition arenas to become industry driven, centre the impacted people and decentre the transition team. In our analysis, we bring forward both how stakeholders are given power and agency over the transition process before the transition team is formed and the impact that this approach has.

In response to escalating socio-environmental challenges, transformative approaches in architectural design are crucial for facilitating urban transitions. Conventional adaptation strategies, prioritising density and digital integration, often fail to address the multifaceted crises facing modern urban contexts. Participatory architecture offers a shift towards socially engaged practices, fostering innovation and sustainable adaptation by creating spaces of disruption. This study evaluates projects in Colombia, Spain, Senegal, and the UK using our tailored/expanded deep adaptation framework through four components— resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation. Our findings reveal that participatory architecture can enable communities to transform vulnerabilities into actionable interventions for sustainable development and transitions. By fostering dialogue and collaboration, the framework acts as a mediator of socio-environmental transformations, promoting equitable urban planning, climate resilience, and empowerment. This paper underscores participatory architecture's pivotal role in reconfiguring human-ecological relationships and highlights its potential to address complex challenges in diverse global contexts.

Amidst the upheaval of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the threat of the Sixth Extinction, designers focus on approaches that help communities connect and imagine alternative, desirable futures. Transdisciplinary approaches promise more sustainable and just transitions by valuing and integrating diverse forms of knowledge to co-shape more

equitable design interventions. However, these ambitions often fall short. Transdisciplinary practices may be reduced to justice-washing or corporate co-optation, frequently failing to achieve epistemic and social justice. This paper introduces Responsible Futuring, a transdisciplinary design-led approach that enables communities to actively shape their future trajectories, embracing collaboration and diverse perspectives as catalysts for transformative action. We, as designers, self-reflect on cases using this approach to surface worldviews, explore alternative futures, and challenge the status quo. We discuss the epistemic and political shortcomings we experienced in practice. We highlight growing pains and offer recommendations for achieving transformative transdisciplinary ambitions

in addressing societal transitions.

This article examines the epistemological, political, and practical challenges of transdisciplinarity in a participatory design project with agroforestry family farmers in São Paulo, Brazil, within the Design for Biodiversity initiative. By bringing together designers, scientists, and farmers, the project demonstrates how participatory design operates as a negotiation between institutional knowledge and vernacular expertise. Farmers’ experiential knowledge informed design decisions and interpretations of socioecological dynamics. Findings reveal tensions not only in interactions with farmers, requiring communication adapted to accessible language and local realities, but also within the academic team, due to differing worldviews and validation standards. Through a design-led action research approach, the study argues that such frictions are productive mechanisms that foster regenerative futures. Embracing conflict and co-construction reposition design as an agent of territorial autonomy, community resilience, and socio-ecological regeneration, expanding its role beyond sustainability toward ecological restoration and recognizing non-academic knowledge as central to situated design outcomes.