Conference Agenda

This scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) study examines how African philosophies can function as pedagogical infrastructures, not decorative add-ons, in first-year design education. Through a 12-week introductory studio with 25 students meeting twice weekly (2.5 hours per session), I embedded Ubuntu (relational being), Sankofa (retrieving wisdom from the past), and rhythm (cyclical temporality) into the course structure. Learning artefacts comprise studio materials, anonymised teaching feedback collected as part of routine class activities, and my own teaching observations reviewed thematically around space, time, and feedback relations. Observed teaching indicators suggested higher participation in critique (average peer comments per student rising from 3.1 to 7.8), earlier sharing of work-in-progress, and more iterative refinements when these philosophies structured studio practices. The study demonstrates how decolonial pedagogies can operate within existing institutional frameworks, transforming first-year studios into spaces of collective learning, cumulative memory, and rhythmic renewal rather than competitive individual achievement.

Western philosophy has often framed the gaze as alienation: for Sartre, the self fractures through being-for-others, while for Lacan the subject becomes object within the visual field. Norman Bryson (1988) expands this view by engaging Japanese thought—particularly Nishida and Nishitani—to propose a relational gaze grounded in śūnyatā (emptiness). This paper argues that Alexander McQueen’s fashion materially performs this philosophical shift. Across four feminine archetypes—the Armored, Vulnerable, Elegant, and Transformative Woman—McQueen stages a movement from confrontation to relation. Through these tensions, McQueen’s fashion operates as existential design discourse: a mode of design in which form interrogates what it means to see and be seen.

This research is situated at the intersection of design and Science and Technology Studies, focusing on training as a form of mediation which provides a pathway to rethinking our relationship with smart technologies. It draws on a provocation from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), with particular attention to the relationship between Private Pyle and his rifle during the training sequence. The rifle foregrounds the way that technology cannot be reduced to purely material, moral, or constructivist accounts, but is constituted through the mediating role of training. The analysis mobilises translation as a design method, treating the film prop as a discursive resource for exploring alternative technological relations. Building on this, I propose a reconfiguration of smart technologies by repositioning training as a third force that shapes the relationship between user and system.

This paper critiques dominant design pedagogies for their alignment with positivist and modernist paradigms, which limit design’s capacity for serious philosophical inquiry. It argues that Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) pedagogy offers an alternative philosophy, functioning as a powerful method for fomenting critical engagement by enabling students to materialize abstract concepts. Drawing on a case study from an undergraduate course on human-robot-cyborg relations, the paper employs the metaphor of 'portals' to analyse three thematic case studies. Each portal opens onto a distinct philosophical debate: the nature of reality and the self, the biopolitics of the body, and the networked subject. The analysis of student work and reflections indicates how the pedagogical framework enabled students to independently enter into dialogue with these complex themes. The paper concludes by presenting a model for 'portal-making,' positioning design education as a critical practice for exploring the ethical and ontological dimensions of a posthuman condition.

Contemporary design theory and practice have long taken user need-oriented as the core principle. Need has become the ethical and practical foundation of design. It has suppressed the creativity and initiative of both users and designers in the name of functionality. Tracing the origin and evolution of need in design history, this paper points out its inadaptability to complex contemporary design scenarios and diverse demands. On this basis, it introduces the Desiring Production theory of Deleuze and Guattari, reinterprets desire as a more productive and relational life power than need, and explores the feasible path for the ethical intervention of desire in design practice. Combining connectiveness, disjunction and conjunction, it proposes the core metaphor of desire lines, pointing to a design ethical action path that transcends the need paradigm, responds to pluriverse and faces subject concerns and desire generation.

Dominant paradigms have confined imaginaries to narrow, hegemonic narratives, severing them from plural, relational, and non-domesticated possibilities. This paper challenges monolithic views of language and material craft by offering a transformative lens on cultural and linguistic dynamism within design research and practice. Drawing on “savage” futures (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) and “translanguaging” (Lee, 2015; García & Kleifgen, 2020), we highlight the situated creative practices of peripheral craft makers as mediums for multilingual storytelling, identity negotiation, and speculative futures. Translanguaging extends beyond language, involving embodied, material, and affective communication as non-hierarchical resources for collective worlding and shared meaning-making. Through participatory craft projects in the Global South, ‘making’ emerges as a situated site for dialogue, situated learning, and reworlding, enabling new coexistence imaginaries. This work contributes to design by introducing a lexicon and methodology that amplify marginalised voices and promote equitable, dynamic, pluralistic futures responsive to ecological and social crises.