Conference Agenda

Embedding an ‘ethics of care’ into relational and collaborative design research practices benefits from a reflexive and reflective iterative approach. Through this process new ways of elevating multiple forms of knowing are developed, power asymmetries are disrupted, and inclusivity can be expanded. While care may often be included in our mindsets and principles for design research, care itself is often invisible or under talked about. Using the example of our project — Care-full Co-production — a practical perspective on co-producing research is taken. Through a case study of women’s health in Aotearoa New Zealand, this perspective highlights the everyday acts of care and the high-level care-filled thinking that are woven throughout the project. These examples are shared in a detailed and practical approach to inspire application across other contexts.

In an era marked by increasing uncertainty and precariousness, feminist care ethics provide a conceptual foundation for reimagining alternative futures, challenging the persistence of "futures-as-usual" that often perpetuate dominant sociotechnical regimes. Care is a future-oriented and imaginative ethic: one that requires moral imagination to recognize the needs of distant others, the vulnerabilities of future generations, and the ethical entanglements of emerging sociotechnical systems. Building on an ethnographic study of design practices within a multinational technology company, we propose reorienting questions and tactics to integrate care ethics into future-making, addressing the disjunction between techno-futures and emergent care-informed design approaches. We outline how this reorientation can move from caring about to caring as an ongoing, future-oriented responsibility, supporting practitioners in making moral judgments that embed care in their work.

In contemporary design practice, care risks becoming an imperative that obscures asymmetric power relations. This paper interrogates the relationship between design and care, asking: how can design shift from producing solutions to cultivating relations of care without reproducing paternalistic logics? Through a comparative analysis of case studies through the lenses of knowing, making, and defining with care, we treat caring about, caring for, and caring with as simultaneous and co-present dimensions to examine how care operates within design processes. The analysis identifies a structural pattern: while caring about and caring for are compatible with existing design logics, caring with encounters systematic resistance. It is not sufficient to design for care; we argue for designing with and through care as a relational practice capable of repair, listening, and regeneration. The contribution outlines a critical-analytical framework as a vocabulary for interrogating when care becomes transformative and when it reproduces the asymmetries it claims to address.

Design’s vocabulary is saturated with metaphors of control (targets, strategies, impacts), revealing a militarized ontology that frames design as domination over problems, contexts, and futures. This paper examines the politics of wording and introduces Unwording Design as a practice of ontological care: dismantling violent grammars that sustain extractive imaginaries and cultivating vocabularies grounded in affection, reciprocity, and relational ethics.

Drawing on Haraway’s insight that the thoughts we use to think matter (2016), Butler’s performativity (2006), and Escobar’s ontological design (2018), we argue that transforming language transforms the worlds design brings into being. Unwording shifts from languages of war to languages of tenderness, from users to companions, from targets to relations, from innovation to care. In dialogue with feminist, decolonial, and earth-being perspectives (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993), this paper envisions design evolution through a living vocabulary of care, inviting plural, situated practices that affirm coexistence and collective flourishing.

This paper emerges from a reflection on what counts as success in design. We examine how the relational qualities of care can guide design practice, approaching design as a continuous and socially embedded practice of responsiveness. Drawing on two projects in China, an age-friendly digital service initiative and a community governance intervention, we analyse how design unfolded through incremental adjustments, shared responsibilities, and situated betterments. Across both contexts, value developed through chains of responsiveness involving institutional uptake, resident participation, and evolving collaborations that extended the influence of the work beyond the designers’ immediate involvement. By bringing design into dialogue with Mol’s logic of care, the paper approaches design practice as a form of relational maintenance, through which designers help sustain the networks that allow concerns to surface, be recognised, and be carried forward. From this perspective, design contributes to making things better by supporting ongoing and collective processes of responsiveness.

Design researchers are increasingly being exposed to stressors while empathizing with their participants such as feeling emotionally charged, leading them to feeling vulnerable. Currently, there is a lack of clear consensus on how this vulnerability arises and manifests, hindering both individual and collective awareness and support. To address this gap, we conducted an empirical investigation into the vulnerability of design researchers. We conducted exploratory workshops with PhD students working in the field of design research in sensitive settings. The workshops consisted of three approaches to understand researcher vulnerability: (1) Reflecting on individual and collective vulnerability, (2) Exploring embodied experiences, and (3) Establishing a collective narrative. Through these approaches, we contribute an understanding of design researcher’s vulnerability, which changes over time, is manifested in bodily experience, and poses systemic challenges.