Conference Agenda

Design students often hesitate to use drawing as a thinking tool, wary of

expectations for figurative outcomes and the evaluative traditions that shape the

status quo in product design. This study draws on object-oriented ontology (OOO)

and vibrant materialism to explore how a drawing tool—specifically the pencil—

might act as an agent in rethinking the pedagogy of semiogenic design visualcy. The

study proposes micro-camera activities that capture the pencil’s perspective to

produce a radically altered visual and auditory encounter with drawing. Tracing the

pencil’s entanglements reveals drawing not simply as representation but relation.

The line becomes both a mark and an event. In this reframing, authorship and

perception blur in the pencil’s quiet acts of resistance. Through small experimental

interventions, the pencil invites a reimagining of relationships between tools, space

and authorship. This shifts drawing from depiction toward encounter, opening

possibility for new pedagogical approaches to visual thinking in design.

Designers often converse without speech, for example, through sketches and artifacts. These conversations transverse across layers through gestures, time, and materialities. In this paper, we report on a demonstration at a design conference, where we brought together the practices of two designers, into a collaborative real-time sketching environment. Through this unfolding exchange, we explore how sketching can move beyond individual expression to become a collective emergent record of thought and relation. The demo drew together digital and physical media while listening to a theoretical prompt, in a shared conversation with the audience. From this process and its tensions, we derive a set of agreements and actions for designing collective layered sketching practices: considering voice, encouraging relationality, and supporting the embodied performative choreography of drawing together. In doing so, we propose sketching as a shared, relational practice of conversation and reflection within design research.

Sketching is a vital form of communication across creative industries. As an essential part of the filmmaking process, costume illustration functions as a mediating design practice where sketching translates concept art into wearable garments. Historically rooted in hand-drawn fashion illustration, contemporary costume sketching has evolved into a globalised digital practice that bridges artistic vision and physical construction. Through this lens of design mediation and embodied expertise, the study draws on industry interviews and reflective practice to examine the costume illustrator’s changing role as translator between the digital concept and physical costume. Costume sketching solves practical challenges based on knowledge of tangible garment construction, however, the hierarchical dominance of visual development departments within film production presents increasing challenges to translating fantastical concept art into wearable clothes. While visual development artists often prioritise aesthetic and narrative spectacle, costume illustrators reinterpret these designs through tacit, material knowledge of fabrics, fit, and movement.

As a society, we are confronted with polycrisis. An epistemic shift, that means shifting our way of knowing and changing our ways of looking at complex societal issues, is necessary to be able to transform our practices. Tim Ingold offers such an epistemic shift through the concept of ‘minor key’, fostering open-endedness, imagination, and experimentation. Designing for transformation in the minor key requires different forms of co-creating and communicating. In contrast to a major key, closed style of visualising, minor key drawing might fit, due to its potential for imperfection, open-endedness and imagination. In this pictorial, I’ll reflect on a 4-year journey exploring minor key drawing in different multi-actor ecosystems. I discuss two topics that emerged: its qualities for affording commoning, and the relationship between the medium and the message. Overall, drawing in the minor key affords pluriversal eco-systems to experiment, collaborate and learn in vulnerable, open-ended and imaginative ways.

In this paper, we explore sketching as a speculative and reflective practice for imagining social robots. Through a series of participatory design workshops, participants observed two prototype robots and then produced sketches and word maps envisioning possible appearances, behaviours, and social roles for robots in everyday life. Analysing the artefacts of these workshops reveals how non-expert human users perceive and imagine future robots in their worlds. We examine common themes of emotion, familiarity, discomfort, and relational values in the artefacts produced by the workshop participants. Our work highlights a way that sketching and written idea generation by non-designers can serve as a tool for thinking through affective, aesthetic, and relational possibilities in human-robot interaction. By situating sketching as a medium for speculative imagination rather than technical specification, our paper contributes to an emerging understanding of Sketching Futures as a relational, situated, and iterative process.

When designing Information Visualisations for Media and Information Literacy (MIL) initiatives, a significant challenge lies in ensuring that they effectively transmit and consolidate knowledge, particularly when the Information Visualisation literacy of the audience is unknown. Applying a Research through Design approach, this article describes a meta-process: the reflective and iterative path that led to the definition of DDENSO, a replicable design methodology for creating and evaluating Information Visualisations that allow for knowledge retention. Grounded in prior theoretical and practical experience in Information Design, DDENSO emerged through the development of the artefacts for a MIL exhibition exploring the social implications of Artificial Intelligence. It is structured around what we call Knowledge Objectives which, we argue, can contribute to the broader debate on Information Design as a critical tool for transmitting knowledge that sticks, by integrating evaluation as a core element of the design process.