Conference Agenda

Holding the Question offers a pause in the rush toward answers: a space to stay with questions long enough for something honest to surface. Design research has strong conventions for stabilising knowledge, but fewer shared practices for working with fragility,  taboo, or emotional charge. Many questions collapse when pushed too quickly into clarity, losing texture, stakes, and lived complexity.

The conversation builds on The Young Questions, , a long‑term editorial research practice by The Young in Rotterdam. The series emerged from repeatedly encountering topics that are clearly alive in culture yet consistently postponed and only addressed when they become personal, bodily, or politically unavoidable. The Young Questions exists as physical publications that circulate between clients, collaborators, and the public; publishing is treated as a research method rather than a final output. Across editions on vulva, death, union, and denim, we work with interviews, fragments, contradictions, and careful editing to hold questions open rather than close them down.

This conversation will run in dialogue with Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS Some Reservations Exploration session, which examines how design artefacts mediate research on taboo topics. Holding the Question serves as a conceptual prelude, focusing on the pre‑artefact phase when taboos are still emerging and forming language. Together, both sessions trace the movement of a question – from sensed, to spoken, to materialised – bridging conversational and artefactual mediation.