Conference Agenda

This paper examines how sensory focused practice can decentre the role of the design educator-researcher within design education, reframing learning as a relational and embodied form of practice-led design research. Drawing on a sensory workshop with foundation-year design students in Lahore, Pakistan, it explores how listening, movement, and tactile engagement foster reflective awareness and co-creation. Informed by theories of embodied cognition and relational pedagogy, the study considers how agency in learning environments extends beyond the educator to include materials, atmospheres, and collective experiences. Sensory practice is presented not as an adjunct to design but as integral to it, cultivating attentiveness, empathy, and care. Through this lens, the paper argues that design education can nurture designers who learn and make with others, redefining practice as a shared, decentred process of knowing and becoming.

This study examines how design projects function as actors within studio-based pedagogy, drawing on Actor-Network Theory. Data were collected over a nine-month fieldwork at a higher education institution, covering courses in architecture, industrial design, and ceramics design. The study was conducted as a Research-Practice Partnership, uniting education researchers and design practitioners to shift the focus away from practitioners' specialized knowledge and experiences by positioning them alongside critical perspectives from K-12 educational research. Our findings demonstrate how students and instructors view projects as active actors in the design process across three main dimensions: 1) Through language: instructors and students personify projects, assigning needs that create challenges to address; 2) Through space: gestures, sketching, and presentations manifest the project's presence; 3) Through shifting alliances among the student, instructor, and the project. These insights highlight how projects, alongside instructors and students, become integral actors in the generation of design knowledge.

This paper argues that the positionality of the practitioner-researcher often remains centered in the self-reflective question “Who am I?”, fixing identity at the core of a relational web. We propose shifting this inquiry toward “Who can I be?” and “Who can I be in relation?”, recognising identity as fluid, contextual, and co-constituted through relationships. The paper unfolds through a conversational method that unpacks the ongoing PhD research of the first author. The authors navigate this landscape of lived research and practice in dialogue with two simultaneously held identities - the Practitioner-Researcher and the Scholar-Provocateur. Drawing from decolonial praxis, we conceptualise a Relational Navigation System: a way of orienting oneself temporally and contextually within the living network of relationships one inhabits. Here, conversation itself becomes method, a site of inquiry and knowledge production, revealing how decentering the practitioner allows for a more responsive, plural, and relational practice of research.

This paper theorizes meandering as a dispositional heuristic in design research, foregrounding how researchers can encounter complexity through nuanced, situated journeying. Drawing on the case of SoilTrust nutrient-cycling praxis in Hong Kong, the study identifies four key dispositions – nimble resistance, contextual reasoning, temporal suppleness, and deliberate ambiguity – that enable practitioners to respond to structural challenges with humility, curiosity, and strategic indirection. Rather than pursuing fixed goals, meandering researchers cultivate relational awareness, embrace uncertainty, and reconfigure material and social systems through iterative, practice-led inquiry. Anchored in agential realism and indirect action, meanderability reframes design as a life-embedded mode of inquiry that honors entanglement, resistance, and unpredictability. Meanderability as a situated heuristic is the practitioner’s capacity to meander and be meandered simultaneously: as we shape our milieu – organismically, materially, socially, customarily, and deliberatively – the milieu reshapes our relational constitution, movement, habit, and potentiality.

Co-design emphasizes the outward connectivity of perspectives and aspirations, while autoethnography foregrounds the inward exploration of the personal and intimate. Recent trends in design research that integrate these approaches prompted this literature review, guided by the question: How might combining co-design and auto-ethnographic approaches contribute uniquely to design practice and research? Drawing from design studies in education, healthcare, HCI, and community engagement, the review identifies five methodological variations of co-design and auto-ethnographic integration: solo, dialogic, triangulated, cumulative, and solidary. It suggests that these collaborative-reflective–narrative approaches empower co-design practitioners to (1) navigate their evolving and layered roles and identities in relation to others, (2) develop sensitivity to cultural plurality, power dynamics, and epistemological differences, and (3) enact ethics through authenticity. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of combining co-creative and introspective approaches to cultivate authentic collaborations essential for design to engage with the world’s complex challenges.