Conference Agenda

This paper proposes an Epimethean mode of design that works with reproductive labour as a counterpoint to Anthropocenic narratives of progress. Rather than innovating new futures, design is approached as a practice of aftercare, sustaining endangered forms of life-making within existing institutions. Drawing on a long-term participatory design project at a large hospital maternity ward, the paper theorizes Epimethean design as a mode of infrastructuring that resists the translation of care into productivity and reclaims reproduction as a site of ontological and political contestation. At the same time, it argues that confronting reductionist ideas of productivity requires a double movement: undoing, by protecting fragile reproductive practices from capture within technosocial regimes, and doing, by cautiously reworking these regimes from within. This dual stance positions design as both an act of maintenance and a generative force, enabling reproductive labour to contest and redefine what counts as productive work.

This paper reconsiders what it means to be critical in design studies under Post-Anthropocene conditions. It proposes slow relational critique as an orientation. In doing so, it stays with the fragile entanglements through which oppression is enacted by both human and more-than-human entities. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory, the paper revisits a case of a cradle in a caste-oppressed community in Sri Lanka to show how power and inequality are relationally produced through mundane associations of “things.” The analysis demonstrates how critique can remain empirical and attentive to objects while resisting the purification of problems into grand Anthropocene social explanations. Rather than presenting ANT as a new method, the paper reflects on how its attentiveness can open a more cautious and situated descriptions of objects—one that lingers with things, holds contradictions in view, and contributes to a slower, more careful design scholarship in the age of posthuman design.

Planet B emerges as a practice-based-fiction responding ironically to the slogan “There is no Planet B.” The project speculates on the discovery of an alternate planet and the task of replicating Planet A under the principle “if it looks the same, it is the same.” Through absurd protocols for selecting the perfect rock, flower, and stick, the experience enacted a satire of technoscientific control. Developed within the School of Materialist Research’s exploration of Nature and Artifice, it asks: what sensory, political, and aesthetic implications would the discovery of a Planet B bring to the design practice? Children spontaneously took over the installation, turning the stage into a space for free play, revealing an ecology of gestures beyond our initial intention. Planet B reflects how design can host open-ended processes, proposing irony, attentiveness, and affective responsiveness as modes of engaging with planetary fragility and the paradox of fabricating the natural.

What if the future of fashion lies not in novelty, but in endurance? This paper proposes patina, the visible traces of wear, repair, and time, as a philosophical lens for rethinking design’s relationship to sustainability, identity, and value. Drawing on collaboration with Red Thai (Thái Đỏ) artisans in Vietnam, the research reimagines denim not as commodity, but as memory cloth: garments as temporal archives of land, ritual, and community. The work asks whether fashion can exist outside imperatives of novelty and speed, locating beauty instead in incompleteness, opacity, and repair. By framing patina as “unfashionable knowledge,” it positions endurance and imperfection not as failures but as alternative epistemic values. This paper contributes to debates on design ontology, epistemology, and axiology, inviting the DRS community to consider how time, wear, and repair might inspire alternative design futures.

This paper presents a situated, plural, and horizontal curatorial methodology centered on questioning rather than providing solutions in response to posthuman thought and practice. It inquires whether we might be witnessing the emergence of a New Romanticism in contemporary design and architecture concerned with interspecies relations. This romantic turn arises by acknowledging subjectivity and imagination while engaging critically with the complexities of the climate crisis. To this end, this paper examines the making of an exhibition that assembled material evidence from science, art, technology, and design. The exhibition was developed through a three-step curatorial framework aligned with the decentering narratives of posthuman philosophy, through which a group of researchers collectively constructed a narrative. The paper outlines the principles, methodology, and structure of this curatorial framework. Following audience feedback, we reflect on how the exhibition evoked interspecies emotional responses, embodied memories and critical reasoning, opening directions for future inquiry.