Conference Agenda

This paper explores how slow design and care can inform reflective data physicalization practices. Physicalization has been recognized to widen participation in data exploration, but how can it serve communities with varied relationships to power, access, and exclusion? We explored this question through a case study that aimed at supporting a long-term community project through physicalization activities. We found that language around data and representation created barriers to participation, even when demonstrated through established physicalization activities. Centering design processes around participants’ reservations we arrived at Build & Connect, a constructive, participatory physicalization activity and toolkit which, based on the analogy of jigsaw puzzles, invites situated reflection on community-based qualitative data. Reflecting on our design process and the community’s use of Build & Connect, we argue for physicalization processes that embrace participatory, inclusive and situated practices from the stage of data construction and familiar slow forms of making for collective reflection.

Foregrounding the voices of vulnerable communities in future-oriented co-design workshops is a growing concern in design. Yet, their participation in multi-stakeholder settings may be limited by factors such as power imbalances, cultural differences, low self-efficacy or limited availability. In this paper, we present a case where a care-oriented approach to vignette making and use was adopted to foreground the voices of migrant care workers (MCWs) in a multi-stakeholder co-design workshop. Through this approach, vignettes (1) fostered our critical reflection and affective understanding, (2) supported the articulation of MCWs’ lived experiences, and (3) provided a medium to highlight the interconnectedness and complexity of MCWs’ experiences with technology. We argue that a care-oriented approach to creating narrative tools can help foreground vulnerable communities’ concerns, support participation in workshops, and foster more care-full inclusion.

Conversations about end-of-life (EOL) care are often delayed until moments of crisis, leaving little time or emotional capacity for people to reflect on what matters most to them. This paper reports on a reflective co-design workshop in which fifteen participants used material-facilitated methods to explore their imagined EOL experiences. Through landscape making, journey mapping, and collaborative service model building, participants expressed hopes, fears, values, and priorities that are difficult to articulate through direct questioning. The materials created a low-pressure and supportive environment, allowing participants to approach a sensitive topic at their own pace and translate personal meaning into ideas for more compassionate systems and services. The findings show how design can function as a form of care by fostering emotional safety, agency, and shared understanding. The workshop demonstrates the potential of material-facilitated co-design to support proactive EOL conversations, strengthen patient-centered care, and encourage reflective dialogue in community and clinical contexts.

This paper explores the intersection of new materialism and co-design workshop practices, suggesting that design materials are not passive resources but active agents in collaborative meaning-making and future-making processes. Drawing on new materialist philosophy and care ethics, particularly the work of Barad, Haraway, and Puig de la Bellacasa, we examine how workshop artefacts such as canvases, sticky notes, tactile tools, and other ephemeral materials participate in and shape co-design processes and engender more care-focussed design futures. Through observations of co-design workshops in health futures contexts, we demonstrate how attending to material agency extends the value of workshops and forms sites of collaborative meaning and future making. In this paper we explore how materials actively constitute the social fabric of co-design work. This perspective builds on the material affordances of workshop assets and challenges human-centred design paradigms by recognising materials, environments, and other non-human actors as active participants in imagining and enacting futures.

Hand-based paper-ripping collage-making (PRCM) promotes wellbeing through

circular engagement with re-purposed papers as transitional materials, demonstrating a threephased framework (apprehension, confidence, co-creation) that is potentially transferable to

bio-based materials and other substrates. The study introduces paperpeutic, a neologistic term

describing the therapeutic value arising from mindful, improvisational engagement with

manual ripping in PRCM contexts, drawing inspiration from Japanese Chigiri-e and Western

collage traditions. The practice fosters mindfulness, creativity, and community through direct,

hands-on engagement, providing an accessible alternative to the abstraction and precision of

digital design. Salvaged paper is reframed as an active collaborator in the processes of

meaning-making and care, supporting inclusivity and relational design practices. In

responding to contemporary digital dematerialisation, PRCM offers a tangible, material

approach that encourages environmental responsibility while cultivating interpersonal

wellbeing. Beyond workshops, PRCM’s phases offer a scaffold for ‘deconstruct-re-design’

stations—non-guided ripping, disrupting cognitive patterns, allowing for generative ideation

to emerge.

Participatory designers in Singapore work within Bhabha’s “third space,” where identities and practices are continuously negotiated across cultural boundaries. This qualitative study, based on interviews and ethnographic observation with 18 designers addressing social welfare for marginalized communities, examines how designers’ intersectional identities—such as female, queer, Chinese, and gig creatives—shape an ethic of care rooted in Asianised neighbourliness. Designers strategically inhabit in-between spaces, balancing top-down and bottom-up approaches through critical curiosity and cultural competence. Findings identify three interlinked personas: (1) Facilitator—mediating perspectives and trust; (2) Maker—engaging in embodied, situated making; and (3) Reflexive practitioner—cultivating curiosity across demographics. This iterative ethic enables designers to mobilise creative agency and relational care, co-creating resilient, context-specific responses and new subjectivities for participatory social agency. The study highlights how iterative, participatory practices foster alternative, neighbourly care and pragmatic social agency within Singapore’s diverse, rapidly changing context.