Conference Agenda

With the emergence of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, wearable design is gathering renewed interest. Although design has an obvious role to play in developing wearables for user acceptance, the understanding of the role of design in wearables is fragmented and poorly understood. Through a scoping review, we highlight the fragmentation of the wearable research field and the lack of design-led approaches to developing wearable devices. To augment this lack of design literature, we analyze six design cases. The result reveals a key tension: wearable practice is rapidly expanding into interdisciplinary, speculative domains, blurring evaluative boundaries. To bridge this gap, we propose a descriptive radar mapping model. This model functions as a shared map to address the field's fragmented cognition. By providing a framework to navigate diverse approaches, it enables unbiased critique from researchers and more comprehensive thinking from designers, thus better articulating design's significant role in the future of wearables.

Recent years have seen an acceleration in efforts to secure global supply chains of ‘critical minerals’ for defence, digital technologies, energy and transport. However, this rapidly evolving geopolitical context also impacts other sectors including healthcare which rely on some of the same resources. In orthopaedics, metals including titanium and medical grade stainless steel are used for implants. Supply chain disruption and rising costs therefore pose risks to product performance in the body, affordability and quality of patient care. Firstly, this paper shares findings from a content analysis of grey literature by leading orthopaedic manufactures. Secondly, it presents an illustrative re-use example of an ongoing collaboration between Canadian and East African paediatric orthopaedic health care professionals. The article makes an original contribution by identifying a list of ‘orthopaedic critical minerals’ and highlighting the potential for responding to material shortages in the sector and global health inequalities through product re-use.

This article analyses textiles as living materials endowed with their own agency. In addition to the emotions and memories they evoke, textiles are imbued with vitality. When they occupy an intimate and private space, such as a home, they act as a kind of soft architecture, absorbing the words, gestures, smells, memories and relationships that emerge within that environment. Steeped in everyday aesthetics and imbued with feminine care, these materials face a society with clear and visible power structures as they cross the threshold into the public sphere. This is accentuated when these textiles cover a body, revealing social hierarchies and gender distinctions. The research takes the apron worn by domestic workers in Santiago de Chile as its case study, serving as a starting point for critical reflection on how the vitality of the object transcends the space it inhabits and envelops the body with a distinct agency.

This paper explores alternative pedagogical approaches that centred the relationship between the human body and design in 1970s Denmark. Initiated by lecturers at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts – School of Architecture (today Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation), a series of interdisciplinary ergonomics seminars (1974–78) at Institute 3C2 brought together more than a hundred students and lecturers from architecture, design, dance, and the medical and social sciences. Through archival research and oral history, I analyse these overlooked teaching practices and situate them within broader societal changes. Informed by disability studies, I examine how the seminars negotiated between models of the medicalised body, grounded in measurement and physiology, and the social body that emphasised variation and lived experiences. I argue that the seminars neither rejected nor embraced either model but explored frictions between them. I conclude with reflections on the bodily imaginaries they fostered in education.

The field of behavioral design uses insight into humans’ cognitive tendencies to help people make better, more rational choices. Yet individuals’ perceptions of what seems rational—let alone viable, or even conceivable—are not universally shared and are often informed by their embodiment as much as cognition. For example, fear of being scolded can inhibit overweight or obese individuals from seeking preventive healthcare, people with ‘invisible’ disabilities may feel pressured to pass as able-bodied to fit in, and Black individuals may avoid ordinary activities likely to prompt ‘birding while Black’ confrontations. Depicting cognition as the single site of judgment and decision-making therefore underestimates how an individual’s risk calculus or perceived agency may be informed by their particular physical embodiment or accumulated embodied experiences. This paper explores how embodiment can influence judgment, decision-making, and behavior, and how behavioral designers can better incorporate these factors when crafting solutions.

This paper explores how divergent thinking generates creativity and innovative ideas, exploring multiple possibilities and connections. Designing a musical instrument is an opportunity for knowledge and experimentation, combining the need for high performance with aesthetic qualities and, the tradition of handmade production with cutting-edge technologies and materials. Methodologically, the study is exploratory based on qualitative research methods. It comprises academy and the local productive sector, which includes luthiers, musicians, and an audiovisual and film studio. The paper highlights other research projects that demonstrate this team's ability to create connections with design, music, culture, and social issues. The creation of a musical instrument is a multidisciplinary endeavour that connects handmade and industrial contexts, generates and transfers innovation to other productive and cultural sectors, moving beyond exclusive either-or paradigms to foster cooperative and beneficial interactions, promoting an urgent reflection between sustainability and society.