Conference Agenda

Steering sustainability transitions in complex organizations, such as hospitals, may benefit from iterative, situated, and participatory experimentation. Co-creation holds particular promise in this regard, acting as a “pebble” in the system that generates ripple effects towards sustainable change. However, its implications and methodologies within hospital systems, especially those grounded in design practice, remain underexplored. This paper investigates designerly co-creation through seven medical device design projects conducted by master’s students in collaboration with healthcare professionals. Drawing on observations of co-creation processes and 14 interviews, the study identifies designerly co-creation as both an “incubation space” for sustainability innovations and a potential “catalyst for change” in staff behaviors, mindsets, competencies, and hospital procedures. The paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge on design for sustainability transitions by highlighting the evolving role of co-creation in steering change and generating impact within hospital contexts.

This study investigates how adaptive reuse servicescapes may contribute to sustainable transformation through learning, by leveraging circular practices as experiential learning tools. Research on circular economy rarely adopts a human-centred lens or explores its links to learning, especially in the Global South, where the value of alternative epistemologies and informal economies often remains unrecognised. To address this gap, a qualitative case study approach was employed, combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews at educational initiatives in an adaptive reuse precinct in inner-city Johannesburg, South Africa. The findings reveal a reciprocal relationship between education and circular practices in generating value for sustainable human development. The study positions adaptive reuse environments as facilitators of experiential learning, with the potential to foster inclusive, community-driven transformation and support sustainable livelihoods. Finally, the paper proposes an inclusive experiential learning model that integrates circular practices as both learning content and method.

Sustainability problems are complex and overwhelming, with terms like eco-anxiety now commonplace. Sustaining engagement therefore requires attention beyond systemic levers towards relational, social, and emotional dimensions. This paper explores play as a participatory tool to foster wellbeing, maintain engagement and reframe environmental action. Play is known to support healthy development, reduce stress, and connect socially as an antidote to fatiguing emotions. Research has additionally explored play’s transformative potential to disrupt existing structures and imaginaries. This study examines how play can be leveraged to support more inclusive and emotionally sustainable engagement with environmental action. Using a participatory research-through-design process (Situated Play Design), this research contributes: (1) Play potentials - relational spaces where playfulness naturally occurs in environmental action; (2) A co-created speculative interventions catalogue, illustrating how these play potentials might be designed for to reimagine environmental action. These contributions support regenerative, joyful environmentalism, recognising playfulness as a legitimate mode of participation.

Existing attitudes to waste in sustainable design treat it as a quantity to be minimized: reduced, reused, or recycled. However, according to the field of Discard Studies, waste, and the act of wasting, are shaped by wider social, political, and material systems of interest to design (Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022), therefore working with waste can have broader implications for design practice. We introduce the principles and methods of Discard Studies, through a report on the participatory project "L'Arxiu de Rastres Tecnològics de Vic", carried out in Vic, Catalonia, in autumn 2025. The project used Discard Studies methods to encourage participants to reflect on the lives and afterlives of their digital waste through speculative practice, and to imagine more regenerative futures for their discarded devices. We close with conclusions on how an attention to waste, informed by Discard Studies, might be useful to design practice more generally.

Relational design practices, grounded in the collaboration among local producers, public institutions, and designers, have strengthened cultural identity and promoted new forms of economy based on values of sustainability and belonging. This article presents the development of a gastronomic festival as a living laboratory of transformation, carried out in the municipality of São Gonçalo do Rio Abaixo, Brazil, by the Design, Territory, and Gastronomy extension project of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Based on the theories of relational design and design for transitions, the study highlights how design mediates local tensions, overcomes institutional challenges, and helps the reconstruction of symbolic bonds. It argues that relational design, when practiced in a situated and participatory way, constitutes an agent capable of supporting ethical, sustainable, and plural processes of collective transformation.

Cities are physical manifestations of how we live together in urgent need of redesign to adapt and respond to impacts of climate change. Place-based methods offer critical and imaginative ways to work with neighbourhoods as living labs for regenerative futures and planetary civics. Reworlding explores urban play as method in co-governance of the green transition of neighbourhoods. It works with posthuman methods to give nature a voice, supporting more-than-human approaches, and addressing climate, biodiversity, and pollution challenges. Play and democracy balance interests, power, and knowledge asymmetries among neighbourhood actors by engaging cultural actors and use local, indigenous, or marginalised knowledge in regenerative design. This paper maps urban LARP (Live Action Role-Play) as intersectional and interdisciplinary method for connecting neighbourhoods and communities to play futures together by experiencing, testing, imagining, and negotiating regenerative design in relation to place, working with Reworlding City North, a two-day urban LARP as a case study.