Conference Agenda

Urban design education increasingly calls for methods that prepare designers to act within complex public systems. This paper reframes the Malmö CityLab, an experimental module within a master’s program on post-industrial cities, as a situated pedagogy for public design learning. Combining worldbuilding, design fiction, and persona storytelling, the CityLab enabled students and stakeholders to collectively speculate on Malmö’s futures across themes of regeneration, migration, and climate transition. Drawing on student artifacts and expert interviews, the study explores how speculative storytelling cultivates political sensitivity, collaborative reflexes, and systemic awareness, key capabilities for acting as public designers. Findings show that worldbuilding supports reflective, plural, and civic learning, positioning CityLabs as infrastructures for collaborative knowledge production and inclusive urban imagination. The paper contributes to emerging discussions on speculative pedagogies and their role in shaping the competencies, sensitivities, and methods required for public design education.

This paper reports on an EU research project involving 12 cities in a multi-thematic innovation network. The project supports innovation and the testing of innovative procurement practices, and also generates or improves design capabilities in public administrations. Once local challenges were defined and two solution providers were selected for each city, civil servants worked in Sandbox mode, experimenting in their own urban contexts. This paper focuses on the Sandbox phase, which provided an opportunity for knowledge exchange, inspiration, and the diffusion of design capabilities. Given the extreme difference in local practices, knowledge exchange and shared learning must be accurately planned; it is itself an experimental practice. The project team used a set of design tools to work across different situated practices. A narrative approach highlighted differences in languages, organisational processes, and institutional cultures among the pilots, while also helping to share knowledge and learning across local practices.

This paper presents the ROOTS Project, developed by interdisciplinary student teams from Esade, UPC, and IED within Fusion Point's Challenge-Based Innovation framework, in collaboration with IdeaSquare at CERN. As part of a challenge proposed by IDAEA-CSIC (Spain) and the Sankandi Youth Development Association (SYDA, The Gambia), students co-designed low-cost environmental monitoring tools to support community-led mangrove restoration in the River Gambia region. A two-week field deployment in Sankandi embedded the project within a layered local governance structure (the Alkalo, the Village Development Committee, and its Environmental Committee) through which the technology was formally adopted and transferred. Drawing on student reflections and stakeholder feedback, the paper analyses how learners developed public design competencies including empathy, systems thinking, and collaborative reflexivity, illustrating how challenge-based, community-engaged education can operate as a situated public design practice within, rather than beyond, institutional governance structures.

This paper explores the integration of Generative AI (GenAI) in design education through the lens of public design learning. Drawing on critical pedagogy and a situated classroom case study, it examines how GenAI reshapes the epistemic and ontological journey of becoming a public designer. The study foregrounds ethical, cognitive, and systemic challenges associated with human–AI co-creativity, highlighting the pedagogical implications for cultivating political sensitivity, collaborative reflexive capabilities, and design agency. Through an in-class activity involving persona co-creation with GenAI, the paper illustrates how students engage with plural and contextually grounded design practices. It concludes by advocating for inclusive, reflexive, and sustainability-aware pedagogical frameworks that support responsible GenAI integration in public design education.

Recent studies in Design Education emphasize the importance of teaching Design as a contextually situated practice, and ways for leveraging local knowledges and embracing plural epistemologies. Within this framework, it becomes crucial for designers to be able to acknowledge their own assumptions, biases, and identities and how they influence their design decisions when dealing with cultural complexity. Yet, an effective practice for cultivating this awareness, defined as critical self-reflection, remains underexplored in Design Education. This paper aims to outline key ways to foster the practice of critical self-reflection in teaching and learning Public Design. Drawing on interviews with design educators, this study introduces the pedagogical approach of Identity Mapping—which helps students to surface hidden layers of identity and bias. The findings contribute to strengthening Public Design Education by articulating perspectives that highlight contextual understanding and inclusivity, hence, cultivating a more thoughtful and socially responsive design practice.

This paper examines how sensory focused practice can decentre the role of the design educator-researcher within design education, reframing learning as a relational and embodied form of practice-led design research. Drawing on a sensory workshop with foundation-year design students in Lahore, Pakistan, it explores how listening, movement, and tactile engagement foster reflective awareness and co-creation. Informed by theories of embodied cognition and relational pedagogy, the study considers how agency in learning environments extends beyond the educator to include materials, atmospheres, and collective experiences. Sensory practice is presented not as an adjunct to design but as integral to it, cultivating attentiveness, empathy, and care. Through this lens, the paper argues that design education can nurture designers who learn and make with others, redefining practice as a shared, decentred process of knowing and becoming.

This study examines how design projects function as actors within studio-based pedagogy, drawing on Actor-Network Theory. Data were collected over a nine-month fieldwork at a higher education institution, covering courses in architecture, industrial design, and ceramics design. The study was conducted as a Research-Practice Partnership, uniting education researchers and design practitioners to shift the focus away from practitioners' specialized knowledge and experiences by positioning them alongside critical perspectives from K-12 educational research. Our findings demonstrate how students and instructors view projects as active actors in the design process across three main dimensions: 1) Through language: instructors and students personify projects, assigning needs that create challenges to address; 2) Through space: gestures, sketching, and presentations manifest the project's presence; 3) Through shifting alliances among the student, instructor, and the project. These insights highlight how projects, alongside instructors and students, become integral actors in the generation of design knowledge.

This paper argues that the positionality of the practitioner-researcher often remains centered in the self-reflective question “Who am I?”, fixing identity at the core of a relational web. We propose shifting this inquiry toward “Who can I be?” and “Who can I be in relation?”, recognising identity as fluid, contextual, and co-constituted through relationships. The paper unfolds through a conversational method that unpacks the ongoing PhD research of the first author. The authors navigate this landscape of lived research and practice in dialogue with two simultaneously held identities - the Practitioner-Researcher and the Scholar-Provocateur. Drawing from decolonial praxis, we conceptualise a Relational Navigation System: a way of orienting oneself temporally and contextually within the living network of relationships one inhabits. Here, conversation itself becomes method, a site of inquiry and knowledge production, revealing how decentering the practitioner allows for a more responsive, plural, and relational practice of research.

This paper theorizes meandering as a dispositional heuristic in design research, foregrounding how researchers can encounter complexity through nuanced, situated journeying. Drawing on the case of SoilTrust nutrient-cycling praxis in Hong Kong, the study identifies four key dispositions – nimble resistance, contextual reasoning, temporal suppleness, and deliberate ambiguity – that enable practitioners to respond to structural challenges with humility, curiosity, and strategic indirection. Rather than pursuing fixed goals, meandering researchers cultivate relational awareness, embrace uncertainty, and reconfigure material and social systems through iterative, practice-led inquiry. Anchored in agential realism and indirect action, meanderability reframes design as a life-embedded mode of inquiry that honors entanglement, resistance, and unpredictability. Meanderability as a situated heuristic is the practitioner’s capacity to meander and be meandered simultaneously: as we shape our milieu – organismically, materially, socially, customarily, and deliberatively – the milieu reshapes our relational constitution, movement, habit, and potentiality.

Co-design emphasizes the outward connectivity of perspectives and aspirations, while autoethnography foregrounds the inward exploration of the personal and intimate. Recent trends in design research that integrate these approaches prompted this literature review, guided by the question: How might combining co-design and auto-ethnographic approaches contribute uniquely to design practice and research? Drawing from design studies in education, healthcare, HCI, and community engagement, the review identifies five methodological variations of co-design and auto-ethnographic integration: solo, dialogic, triangulated, cumulative, and solidary. It suggests that these collaborative-reflective–narrative approaches empower co-design practitioners to (1) navigate their evolving and layered roles and identities in relation to others, (2) develop sensitivity to cultural plurality, power dynamics, and epistemological differences, and (3) enact ethics through authenticity. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of combining co-creative and introspective approaches to cultivate authentic collaborations essential for design to engage with the world’s complex challenges.

The development of the foundational body of knowledge is a primary concern of Design Research. This body of knowledge is essential to design education and practice, which shape the human-made environment. This article presents Design Knowledge Archaeology, an emerging approach for systematically rediscovering and developing this foundation by analyzing the evolution of knowledge structures within design discourse. This article outlines and evaluates three distinct methods: the Focused approach, the Discourse approach, and the AI-enabled Semantic Similarity approach. The Focused approach reconstructs the intellectual lineage of a single perspective or recovers marginalized accounts. The Discourse approach maps competing perspectives and discontinuities across a topic. The AI-enabled Semantic Similarity approach identifies thematic patterns in large datasets. This article contributes to Design Research by providing practical guidance and illustrating each method with concrete examples, equipping researchers with a Design Research methodology for developing a more robust, diverse foundational body of design knowledge.

This paper interrogates the persistent claim of design’s neutrality by tracing how notions of the political have surfaced, receded, and re-emerged across design discourses in Western contexts from the late 1960s to the present. Building on Arendt’s understanding of the political as the space of collective world-making through human plurality, and Mouffe’s agonistic perspective that foregrounds conflict and power, the paper proposes a genealogy revealing how design has always been entangled with ideological, economic, and socio-technical transformations. The analysis maps political trajectories across Radical Design, Participatory Design, Critical and Speculative Design, Social Design, Design for Social Innovation, Design Activism, Adversarial Design, Transition Design, Design for the Pluriverse, and Design Justice. Rather than treating these movements as isolated, the paper tracks their shared political imaginaries and tensions, arguing that the political is not a late addition to design discourse but a constitutive dimension of the discipline itself, whatever in research, practice or education.

In recent decades, Design Research Labs have proliferated across design educational institutions worldwide, emerging as dynamic spaces that challenge traditional pedagogical models. However, understanding this contemporary phenomenon requires contextualizing it within the historical origins of the laboratory metaphor in design—a concept repeatedly reimagined over nearly a century.

Building upon Hasenhütl's (2018, 2023) identification of two historical generations from the early to mid-20th century, this research extends the genealogy to encompass contemporary developments, with particular attention to socio-ecological themes. The analysis reveals four distinct generations of Design Research Labs that do not follow strictly linear chronological progression but represent "expanding parameters" shaped by evolving societal, technological, and scientific contexts generating multiple parallel developments.

This genealogical approach situates current practices within broader historical trajectories, enhancing comprehension of how design research laboratories have transformed as fundamental concepts in design education and practice, while illuminating their continuing potential to shape design's future.

Aside from design theories and design methods, the design research field has built numerous methods for observing design practices. Most of them can be classified into two categories: ethnographies, which consist of sharing the daily lives of designers, and experimental approaches, which reconstruct design situations in the controlled environment of a laboratory. This study retraces the history of these methods, that exist almost independently from one another creating silos within the design research field. Throughout their respective developments, both ethnographies and experimental approaches indicate the same blind spot: the study of material traces of processes that have already taken place. Yet both traditions repeatedly gesture toward the potential value of doing so. Following this thread, I examine existing (yet underdeveloped) attempts to reconstruct design processes through the analysis of sketches, models, drawings, and other artifacts; an approach described here as an archaeology of design processes.

The problem–solution co-evolution model proposed by Dorst and Cross (2001) remains highly influential for understanding design processes. This paper contributes a scoping review of DRS conference proceedings (2001–2025) revealing how the model has been adopted, developed, and critiqued. A thematic synthesis of a corpus of sixteen DRS papers shows how the model has been used to frame, connect, and extend foundational design theories by pointing to the crucial role of mutual adaptation of problem and solution. We find that problem and solution spaces are considered distinct and interdependent. Co-evolution is conceptualized and studied through several conceptual lenses, e.g., cognitive, social, and systemic, based on a pluralistic, yet interwoven collection of classic design theory. We discuss how problem–solution co-evolution research might be advanced through 1) design space representation and visualization, 2) co-evolution seen as a flexible boundary concept, and 3) psychological creativity research on problem construction.

Design methods have long occupied a central yet ambiguous role in design research. They are invoked as distillations of procedural knowledge and recipes for action but also function as placeholders for more complex performances. Yet the persistent assumption that methods are checklists—mechanical sequences of steps that can be validated or optimized—has obscured their performative and situated dimensions. This paper revisits the nature of methods through an architectural model that distinguishes between meta-methods, proto-methods, and method building blocks. Drawing from historical, theoretical, and empirical discussions, we argue that methods are best understood as assemblages of prescription and performance, whose coherence emerges through current and speculative future patterns of use.

Hidden Constellations examines how queer sapphic spatiality in New York City is shaped through everyday negotiations rather than formal venues. While official data record only four lesbian bars, this paper argues that scarcity in data does not signify absence in lived experience. Drawing from qualitative interviews and participatory cognitive mapping, the study treats mapping as a queer design method that transforms memory, emotion, and silence into spatial knowledge. Informed by queer phenomenology, feminist and critical cartography, and data feminism, the research reframes mapping from representation to resonance. The paper shows how sapphic individuals tactically inhabit, sense, and remake urban space through affective and relational practices. By translating unrecorded experiences into spatial knowledge, this study introduces layered overlay mapping and relational comparative analysis to foreground embodiment, reflexivity, and the politics of belonging.

This article explores the methodological approaches developed within the Tropicuir research project, an investigation of activist queer art and design practices in Brazil, started in the 2010s. Through a combination of activist research, sentimental cartography, and collaborative curatorial practice, the study examines how aesthetic-political actions function as strategies of micropolitical resistance, collective memory, and worldmaking. Drawing from fieldwork in exhibitions curation, archival practices, art auctions and activist networks, the research articulates a methodological framework that blurs the boundaries between design and art, embracing embodied, affective, and relational modes of inquiry. By engaging concepts such as anthropophagy, micropolitics, and localized knowledge, Tropicuir proposes a queer epistemology that feeds from South perspectives and challenges normative academic paradigms. The project demonstrates how design research, when queered, can contribute to social transformation by creating experimental archives and networks that reimagine ethics, politics, and aesthetics of gender and sexuality dissidents in contemporary Brazil.

Trans and queer individuals, particularly transmasculine, transfeminine, nonbinary and genderqueer folks, remain underrepresented in contemporary design practice despite a growing awareness of the community’s existence. This project creates a set of translational materials co-created by members of the queer community. These materials are intended to educate industry professionals on queer perspectives and provide actionable methods to help design solutions that meet the needs of queer people. Co-creation processes centering the queer community were used to identify and describe key queer-inclusive design principles: discretion, perception, inclusion, and motion. These principles were then translated into an educational zine intended for creative professionals, as well as a product that embodies queer-inclusive design: Tac-tiles, an inclusive fidget system. Together, these materials provide a framework to jumpstart the design of queer-positive products, spaces, and experiences that will improve the lives of queer users and many other marginalized populations.

This paper examines how design research can unmake AI's classificatory ontologies through situated and embodied annotation practices. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical data epistemologies, it reframes bias not as a technical flaw but as a generative condition that reveals how knowledge is produced and negotiated within human–AI assemblages. An autotheoretical experiment grounds the inquiry. The researcher creates and annotates a dataset of self-representations using subjective, affective, and relational labels, training a small-scale model to probe classification as an interpretive encounter shaped by embodiment, ambiguity, and positionality. Building on the shift from debiasing toward reflexive data practices in design and HCI, the paper proposes situated annotation as a design inquiry for unsettling inherited AI ontologies and repositioning machine vision as an accountable, partial, and embodied way of knowing.

This article examines hacking, understood as the alteration of an object’s function, as a queer and feminist design practice that disrupts normative relations between bodies and things. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist snap as a moment of rupture and reconfiguration, we define hacking as an embodied act of refusal that reconfigures everyday things. Through "Función Rota", an audiovisual research project that gathers product hacking scenes in movies, we identify hacking as a form of both critique and speculation: it reveals the normative logics embedded in things, while opening up the possibility of re-prototyping from below. Through feminist and queer frameworks, hacking emerges as a meta-design methodology that decentralises authorship, transforms apparently closed things into participatory ones, and reimagines artefacts as open-ended prototypes. The article proposes a perspective on hacking as a generative practice of queer world-making, cultivating plural material futures that extend beyond standardised design paradigms.

Co-design with marginalised communities in developing settings —and their experiential knowledge—often collides with expert rationalities and hierarchical logics in public health institutions, undermining power-sharing, sustained participation, and institutionalisation. This paper explores how co-design mediates these competing logics to bring structurally produced health injustices back into the formal institutional field of vision. Based on seven months of immersive fieldwork in Shenzhen, China’s largest migrant city, the paper analyses a social design case addressing rural–urban migrants’ psychological well-being in an informal settlement. It integrates community-based participatory research (CBPR) and co-design to initiate the process of returning public health concerns to the institutional domain through four stages: relational trust-building, macro-meso-micro social analysis, asset-based co-design, and public inquiry. Findings indicate that integrating multi-level empirical evidence with experiential knowledge enables a more persuasive response to the concerns of diverse stakeholders, thereby mitigating the community–institution divide within co-design for marginalised health issues.

Although co-design is widely promoted in healthcare, it is seldom true co-design. In practice, power imbalances persist, and (former) service-users’ voices rarely shape design decisions. This study examines how design processes can nevertheless surface these much-needed perspectives. Using a multiple-case study design, nine peer-reviewed healthcare design projects were selected and reformulated into analytical scenarios, enabling systematic comparison of methodological strategies. Thematic cross-case analysis explored how user perspectives were elicited, how insights informed design decisions, and where representation broke down. A key finding is that lower levels of direct involvement require more methodological steps to capture and translate users' needs adequately. The results offer a modest compass for designers designing within healthcare contexts. They might prevent situations in which co-design or participatory approaches are merely performative because they align with current trends, while the service users’ perspective is not genuinely embraced in the process.

Healthcare providers’ participation in the design process is essential for developing effective care interventions. However, engaging them through traditional design methods is challenging due to heavy workloads, unpredictable schedules, and hierarchical roles within care teams. Traditional co-design approaches, such as synchronous workshops, are often less effective in capturing clinical realities and may not fully embody participatory principles of collaboration and shared ownership. Our study addresses these challenges through a situated, self-paced co-design approach created with provider input and embedded within clinical workflows. Conducted in a pediatric cardiology clinic, fifteen providers participated over one month to refine a hybrid educational intervention for children with congenital heart disease. This approach shows how embedding co-design within clinical settings can foster provider engagement and equitable participation across roles without disrupting care. It offers a practical framework for enhancing provider involvement and improving the relevance of interventions, with potential to inform other complex, multi-stakeholder contexts.

This study explores how participatory and emotional service design can improve patient experiences and equity. Conducted in a Spanish public hospital, it involved breast and melanoma oncology patients as well as healthcare professionals, highlighting the importance of effective communication during initial consultations to help patients better cope with treatment and engage in self-care. The objective of this study is to analyse how oncology patients’ experiences change, from an emotional perspective, when a co-designed prototype is introduced in initial consultations. A comparative analysis between the initial state and post-redesign process was conducted using the EMPATHS methodology, which identifies patients’ emotional variations through service design-focused role-play sessions. Results indicate improvements in key aspects of the patient experience, information assimilation and uncertainty and stress during the process. By combining emotional design analysis with participatory methods, the study demonstrates how service design can contribute to health equity and patient-centred care.

Empowerment in chronic disease management (CDM) is often treated as an outcome delivered to patients, leaving limited attention to how empowerment is negotiated in practice. This study develops the Needs-Means-Values design empowerment framework and demonstrates how it can be materially enacted through a co-design toolkit. Drawing on literature review, interview, policy and case data, the framework conceptualises empowerment as a situated and relational process shaped by how needs, resources and values are interpreted across different actors in CDM settings. The resulting toolkit consists of four modules that support stakeholders in articulating multiple enactments of needs, exploring resource configurations and generating context-sensitive empowerment strategies.

Procedural ethics—applying for approval—alone may fail to address many issues that arise during fieldwork (ethics in the field), particularly when designers enter sensitive contexts such as healthcare. Building on our earlier contribution (DRS 2024: Embedded Ethics in Practice), we reflect on shadowing recently diagnosed cancer patients through a set of ethical considerations. Using framework analysis, we examine challenges encountered by what we term shadowers—five designers and one nurse who accompanied 14 patients throughout the service journey, from consultations to treatment. By noting the actions taken and feelings experienced as ethical issues emerged, we question how to navigate such complexities. Examining the shadowers’ narratives alongside relevant literature, we generate five themes that describe their experiences whilst proposing speculative, creative ways to address ethical challenges: On doing, not doing and harm; Toward risk-and-benefit consent forms; The researcher’s right to withdraw; Who is who?; and The before, during and after of embedded ethics.

Embodiment, affect, and symbolic modelling remain underexplored dimensions of designerly identity formation, despite its recognition as a central outcome of design education. While existing research emphasizes cognitive-skill acquisition, little is known about how studio instructors shape identity through aesthetic, relational, and performative means. This study examines the influence of instructors within the socio-aesthetic ecology of the design studio. Using abductive thematic analysis of focus group interviews with teaching assistants across architecture, industrial design, interior design, and fashion design, the study highlights shared cross-disciplinary patterns across international contexts. Findings reveal that instructors shape designerly becoming not only through teaching but also through aesthetic modelling, emotional attunement, and embodied presence. Students internalize designerly ways of being through symbolic cues, language, and spatial rituals. Identity formation thus emerges as both epistemic and ontological, reframing design education as a site of embodied transformation.

As the central platform of design education, interior design studios function as dynamic learning environments that advance creativity and sensitivity to the social and spatial dimensions of design. Although the experiential qualities of space are conceptually acknowledged within studio pedagogy, the notion of ‘interiority’ remains unstudied compared to the emphasis placed on technical requirements. This paper positions interiority as a critical yet underexplored component of interior design pedagogy. Through a literature mapping and thematic synthesis, this paper defines five core dimensions of interiority as (1) spatial, (2) sensory, (3) affective, (4) identity-related, and (5) temporal, then correlates these dimensions in terms of their relevance and potential inclusion to the sequential stages of studio process. Mapping these intersections, the paper opens a reflective discussion on the pedagogical value of interiority within project-based learning, and argues for its broader consideration in contemporary interior design education.

Quintessential products, forms widely perceived as typical examples of their category, are embedded in everyday life, yet their influence on product design ideation remains largely unexplored. This study investigates if and how such products can affect inspiration in the creative process of students and suggests approaches on how to address fixation, should it arise from the quintessential stimuli. Through a multi-modal case study with design students working on product development briefs, the research captures both self-reported and observed data to reveal patterns in creative decision-making. The findings indicate that quintessence is not particularly perceived as highly inspirational; however, there might be an opportunity to employ it in education as purposeful stimuli for helping students overcome creative challenges in convergent stages. This research offers insights into the design inspiration and education literature, offering perspectives on the cognitive processes relating to innovation.

This study proposes a cognitive framework for design thinking education that translates expert-derived strategies into systematic, classroom-ready moves. Drawing on in-depth interviews with experienced design thinking educators in higher education, a reflective thematic analysis surfaced seven themes and sixteen persuasive strategies from teaching practices developed through university-level design thinking workshops and courses: simplifying processes, bridging gaps, constructing repetitive experiences, providing contextual empowerment, adding evaluation criteria, changing perspectives, and introducing breakthroughs. Three teaching mindsets anchor these strategies: lowering the entry threshold, expanding engagement with complex, public-facing issues, and foregrounding authentic, first-hand experience. Integrating these strategies with pedagogical content knowledge supports plural pedagogies and situated learning across diverse settings. The resulting framework enables educators to design transformative learning environments within design education, positioning learners and partners to respond more effectively to the challenges of the VUCA era.

This paper reports on the evaluation of a funded teaching initiative for two undergraduate studios, one architecture and one landscape architecture, within an Australia-based design school. The initiative funded the expansion of a virtual site visit, as well as production of detailed digital and physical models. This suite of resources was meant to reduce demand on students related to searching for contextual and historical background, thus allowing them to grapple with the site’s complexities in a deeper fashion than they might otherwise. Students reported satisfaction across a range of criteria, including engagement, interaction, and feedback. Teaching staff reported more sustained and sophisticated site engagement compared to previous years, with place-based learning resources effectively complementing in-person visits to the site. This study contributes to recent scholarship on site-based learning in built environment disciplines, specifically in the blended, post-pandemic context, in which the interplay between technology and design is fundamental.

Bodystorming is a design method for generating new insights and ideas for service improvement through improvised, embodied roleplay. However, it is not easy to learn how to use bodystorming as a generative method. Guidance for learning focuses on how to engage in embodied social-technical interactions, but it does not specify clear goals for wanting to do so. In a case study of an out-of-hours primary care service we explored how goal setting can stimulate novice users to use bodystorming to generate insights and ideas. Over three iterations of bodystorming, a group of novice bodystormers focused on goals that they derived from the service design literature, and from weekly feedback of service workers and a user of the service in the case. The study demonstrates how goal setting informs the generative use of bodystorming, and as such can provide additional guidance to novice bodystormers.

This paper investigates habitability in extreme environment habitats by examining how occupants contribute to the evolution of functional infrastructures into human-centered environments that support wellbeing. Through fieldwork at the Bulgarian Antarctic Base (BAB), the study combines architectural on-site observations with interviews, questionnaires, and participatory workshops. Three trends emerged from the combined material, highlighting the importance of regulating social interaction through semi-private spaces, the value of flexible spatial organization across work and leisure, and the role of personalization in supporting emotional stability, helping occupants claim the base as a lived habitat over time. By using occupants’ evaluations and spatial adaptations as evidence, the study informs design in a context rarely experienced firsthand by designers and proposes a participatory framework for assessing habitability in constrained environments already shaped by standardized planning and logistics. It offers an informed approach for translating lived spatial experience into qualitative interior characteristics.

Shared dormitories are the most common living arrangement for Chinese university students and have a crucial impact on their sleep and well-being. Most studies on sleep among this group primarily focus on the physical environment and the individual person, giving far less attention to the interpersonal and social aspects of living in shared dormitories. To address this gap, this paper presents the findings of a co-design workshop with 23 participants which explored their experiences of shared sleeping spaces and involved them in prototyping interventions for improving sleep experience. Findings reveal interpersonal interference as a major factor behind sleep disruption. Even though students experience negative emotions, they tend to adopt passive coping behaviours, reflecting conflict avoidance linked to broader cultural tendencies in Chinese society. This study also highlights the crucial role of interpersonal dynamics in shared dormitories, concluding that future design interventions should prioritise improving communication and consensus among roommates.

A large share of private rental housing in Flanders, Belgium, is unsuitable for older people who want to age in place, which can negatively affect their well-being. Since it is often unclear what changes tenants are allowed to make, this study examines landlords’ attitudes toward age-friendly housing adaptations and their impact on the tenant’s well-being through the self-determination theory. Using student-designed adaptations, exploratory interviews were conducted with five landlords. Our findings reveal landlords' negative attitudes frequently stem from the desire to protect their own well-being by avoiding potential hassle and property damage. However, this can negatively impact tenants’ feeling of autonomy and competence. Therefore, this research underscores that to design impactful, age-friendly adaptations, it's crucial to consider the well-being of both the tenant and the landlord. A focus on both may help create rental housing settings in which aging in place becomes a more realistic and sustainable option.

In high-density cities, window-view green walls (GWs) are implemented to improve psychological well-being, but their design often ignores context. Existing research overlooks how GW geometric forms interact with ambient urban soundscapes. This study investigates this critical audio-visual interaction. We conducted a 4 (sound: between-subjects) × 4 (visual: within-subjects) experiment in Virtual Reality (N=80). Participants were exposed to four visual forms (No-GW, Triangle, Square, Rectangle) within four dominating soundscapes (No Sound, Traffic, Conversation, Ventilation), reporting their Stress and recovery results. Results revealed a significant interaction effect, showing the optimal GW shape for psychological well-being was context-dependent: rectangular forms were best for traffic dominating soundscape, square forms for conversation dominating soundscape, and triangular forms for ventilation dominating soundscape. These findings demonstrate that green wall effectiveness is not uniform; design strategies must match geometric forms to the specific acoustic environment to maximize psychological benefits.

This paper investigates how generativity, understood as showing care and contributing to the next generation's lives, shapes visitors’ engagement, experience, and psychological wellbeing in the Hong Kong Space Museum. We conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews to explore how generativity unfolds in museum interactions. Building on Fan and Luo (2022), we extend the generativity model by introducing bidirectional and recursive relationships among generativity, engagement, and experience. Our findings show that generativity can be understood as a designable, relational and temporal pathway to wellbeing. Thematic analysis further reveals that different types of installations scaffold generativity and wellbeing through distinct design features such as low initial complexity, visibility of others’ actions, shared control, and layered annotation. These features enable visitors to guide, share, and explain, contributing to others’ experiences. The findings highlight museum design as a medium for situated wellbeing.

As office practices improve, green walls are increasingly deployed to ease work stress; however, research on whether their overall geometry yields differential individual effects remains limited.In this study, virtual reality was used to construct four office scenarios: curvilinear green wall (CGW), linear green wall (LGW), polyline green wall (PGW), and no green wall (NGW). Restorative effects after stress induction with the MAST were evaluated using two subjective scales, the fatigue scale and the restorative outcome scale. Results showed that all three green-wall forms significantly promoted post-stress psychological recovery at the subjective level. Further comparisons indicated that CGW produced the strongest effect, LGW ranked second, and PGW was relatively weaker. These findings suggest that although green walls generally provide positive restorative benefits, wall morphology is a key moderator in the recovery process, which leads different forms to show differentiated advantages across dimensions of psychological restoration.

Regenerative textile design begins in the soil, and ends in the oneone (soil). In this paper oneone is described and articulated by Papahoa Fibreworks (Papahoa or the organisation) as their context and guide for designing a textile production system in Aotearoa. The kaupapa (purpose, foundational approach) of context based design, alongside Hua Parakore has led Papahoa to offer organically grown linen, dye plants, and dye services for the local fashion industry. As a case study, Papahoa demonstrates both soil to oneone textile processes in Waitaha (Canterbury) historically, and looks into the future of how fibre production could be remodeled in Aotearoa as a regenerative industry. In this paper the practices of the organisation show the relationship both below and above soil. The interdependent relationships of local systems, and the opportunity to achieve textile motuhake (autonomy) in Aotearoa for successful regenerative, soil to oneone production.

As the Anthropocene increasingly undermines natural systems, there is an urgent need for design to move beyond harm reduction toward active ecological restoration. Regenerative Design (RD) has emerged as a promising paradigm to complement sustainable design; however, fragmented knowledge and inconsistent terminology hinder designers’ systematic understanding. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, this study first reviews the philosophical stances and key approaches of RD, then examines its implementation in a coral reef restoration project on Weizhou Island. Reflection on the project revealed three major challenges: limited capacity for interdisciplinary collaboration, insufficient tools for stakeholder engagement, and inadequate dynamic assessment models. To address these challenges, the study proposes corresponding strategies: enhancing designers’ foundational cross-disciplinary knowledge to improve collaboration; developing guided tools on digital platforms to support stakeholder understanding; and employing artificial intelligence to analyze data from dynamic assessment models, providing scientifically grounded evaluations of RD practice.

This paper defines regenerative design in relation to current collaborative, sustainability-oriented innovation. Production and consumption patterns are largely linear, with circular economy efforts largely focused on recycling. Regenerative approaches are emerging but underdeveloped. Literature describes the Regenerative worldview and theoretical framework, and the few papers on methodology and practice highlight a need for greater definition of the field. An actionable design- and innovation methodology for the regenerative field is lacking. We conduct a scoping review and define the Regenerative design approach in relation to the current Circular Oriented Design approaches. We present the characteristics of the Value Preserving and Regenerative approaches found in literature. This contributes to a clearer, more actionable method of regenerative, post-anthropocentric design for design practitioners, and addresses the gap in academic literature. This framework aims to bring implementation closer, as conducting, managing, and structuring Regenerative Design is crucial to the ecological and cultural transformation needed.

This paper considers the development of a regenerative design practice as a grounded and participatory method that fosters sustainable design and solutions, sensitive to relational practices and values, even when these are thought to be negligible. We draw upon theories of ecological relationality, in combination with posthuman theory, to argue that holistic regenerative design should aim to foster ownership of the design processes amongst affected actors. To do so, our regenerative design practice allows participants to search for, promote, and expand existing practices of relationality, a focus we argue have been missing in the existing research on regenerative design. Drawing upon our research with industrial farmers in Norway, we illustrate how even the most modernist farmers care for their plants and soil. From this acknowledgement, we build a method for an inclusive regenerative design practice for identifying solutions to complex socio-environmental problem.

The design field is increasingly engaging with the challenge of regenerating Earth systems within planetary boundaries, yet the epistemic foundations of regenerative ecological design remain diffuse. This paper introduces Three-Eyed Seeing as a design framework that brings Western empirical methods, Indigenous relational knowledge, and futural imaginaries into accountable dialogue. The framework supports plural ways of knowing without collapsing them into a single worldview and positions designers as mediators across multiple ontological commitments. Drawing on an autoethnographic field encounter with pollinators at Kaʻena Point in Hawaiʻi alongside ecological systems-oriented design research, the study explores how these distinct ways of knowing can be practiced together within regenerative design inquiry. The encounter illustrates how observation, accountability, and futural imagination interact in practice, reframing regeneration as a collaborative process shaped by human and more-than-human partners. Three-Eyed Seeing provides conceptual grounding and methodological orientation for designers seeking to practice ecological regeneration as co-constitutive worldmaking.

This paper explores the possible contribution of ‘gap system’ within the context of regenerative design, highlighting how ‘gaps’, as overlooked, unexplored, and unrecalled dimensions of creative practice, can provide critical opportunities for regeneration. Drawing on ongoing research into weave structures conceptualised through the holes in between yarns, and by presenting the outcomes of a workshop, we illustrate the potential of thinking through ‘gaps’ as a nuanced perspective for regenerative design. Here, ‘gaps’ become sites of reflection, emergence, and transition. We show how this approach reshaped participants’ ways of mapping systems by focusing on ‘gaps’ rather than existing linear knowledge, enabling them to rethink disciplinary futures and, through a regenerative lens, reshape both the boundaries of their own practices and their reflection on those practices. Drawing on participants’ reflections, we argue that such spaces, often overlooked and unnoticed, constitute an unstructured generative site for rethinking design as a regenerative practice.

With the increasing insertion of AI tools in creative work in recent years, concerns about misinterpreting creativity and rendering designers obsolete are growing. Moreover, progress in AI predominantly comes from computer science, often resulting in misconceptions about graphic design. In particular, when it comes to highly specialized practices like identity design, the use of AI often remains too generic and fails to reflect the diversity employed by designers in their practice, propagating the homogenization of trends in graphical artefacts. This paper aims to bridge the discourse and methodological gap between computer science and graphic design by presenting a detailed exploration of the creative process in identity design. Based on grounded theory interviews with 20 graphic designers, it identifies key phases where AI augmentation can be inserted to enhance co-creativity. We conclude by offering insights on potential new directions for hybrid research in the fields of graphic design and informatics.

This study explores the changing skills of industrial designers in the age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). It combines a systematic literature review covering 2020–2025 with a practice based investigation involving six designers who actively use GenAI in their design processes. Focusing on both novice and expert designers, the study examines how GenAI influences skill development through the lenses of upskilling, reskilling, and deskilling. The findings show that while GenAI enhances creativity, idea generation, and visualization, it also brings challenges such as increased cognitive load, information reliability issues, and a decline in production awareness. Differences between novice and expert designers reveal that experience level plays a key role in how GenAI driven transformations affect design skills. Overall, the study demonstrates that GenAI not only accelerates creative processes but also reshapes the cognitive and practical dimensions of industrial design practice.

This paper presents the Imagery Modes framework for analysing the designer–genAI interaction, complementing established metaphor-based accounts. Developed through Constructivist Grounded Theory and structured using Activity Theory, the framework focuses on the micro-dynamics of a single input–output exchange. It identifies four sequential sub-actions—crafting, processing, generating, and evaluating—that trace the relations between subjects (designer, genAI) and instruments (input, output). Central to the framework is the concept of “output imagery”, defined as the clarity with which the designer envisions the expected output prior to the interaction. Three modes of interaction are identified: Before, During, and After Imagery. The findings highlight the fluid and non-linear character of the designer-genAI interaction, showing how designers shift between modes across sequences. Finally, the framework clarifies the interplay between agency and sense of agency, showing that while agency varies linearly, sense of agency depends on alignment between expectations and outputs within each mode.

This paper presents a vocabulary for co-speculation with AI, developed

through an experimental design studio with 55 postgraduate students who used

generative AI tools to explore more-than-human design practices of decentering.

The vocabulary spans multiple scales of interaction—from individual prompting

acts to extended collaborative sessions—serving descriptive, analytic, and

generative functions. Whilst it was developed through the specific context of

decentering practices, we argue that this vocabulary is transferable to diverse

design domains. It offers designers and researchers a framework for more

reflective and intentional engagements with AI, contributing to emerging

discussions on how design practice evolves when speculation becomes a shared

activity between humans and machines.

As artificial intelligence evolves into agentic, adaptive, and generative systems, design research faces an epistemic shift. AI assistants, once reactive interfaces, are increasingly experienced as proactive presences that shape everyday life. This transformation reframes trust, no longer limited to technical reliability, transparency, or explainability, but also emerging as a relational and experiential phenomenon formed through interaction. While industry emphasizes technical trust, including privacy, security, and system reliability, design research must also address experiential trust, a felt confidence grounded in the lived quality of human and AI coexistence. Focusing on the smart home as a case of everyday domestic life, where these dynamics are visible, this paper introduces an experiential trust paradigm that repositions trust as an embodied, relational process. It contributes a framework for design research in the age of agentic AI by distinguishing experiential trust from technical trust and proposing new directions for designing trustworthy, co-living AI companions.

AI uncertainty has been proposed as a design material that provides practitioners with a foothold to engage with technical attributes of these technologies beyond any given output. However, it is unclear what role AI uncertainty can play in tangible product design processes. In this paper, we investigate this through two design research projects following a studio methodology; combining first-person reflective making with autoethnographic elements, incorporating a variety of AI technologies (e.g., object detection, image and video generation, mesh extraction). Through the analysis of these first-person accounts and reflection on design processes and outcomes, we find qualitatively different types of uncertainties manifesting across design methods and materialisation. As our contributions, we present (1) methodological and practice-oriented insights on the potential of specific affordances of AI uncertainty for tangible product design and (2) a discussion of the value of employing hands-on, studio-type design research in the aftermath of generative AI.

Historical materials can support generative design work, however a tendency to focus on new and emerging technologies as design material mean the creative qualities of the past are underappreciated. This paper presents findings from four workshops that explore material and immaterial forms of history to better understand how the past might serve as material for design. Our findings illustrate how different material forms afford or limit relational connections to the present design context; that design references can hinder transformational experiences in practice; and how archival gaps and personal memory can also serve as design material. Our analysis underscores the need for designers to critically reflect on the biases embedded in historical materials, as well as the material traces they produce.

Since its inception two decades ago, biodesign has consistently been conceptually hazy. It´s an emerging interdisciplinary field lying somewhere between biology and material sciences on one hand, and art and design practice on the other. Despite efforts by academia and industry to define and contextualise biodesign, the lack of shared vocabulary between its two sides and clear standards for who qualifies as a biodesigner continues to hinder its development. This study combines a literature review to examine how biodesign has been defined over time, alongside a survey that analyzes who identifies as a biodesigner. The aim is to explore the range and depth of scientific and creative knowledge needed for effective collaboration, reflecting on the diverse pathways through which expertise in biodesign is developed, in order to support the articulation of a disciplinary framework, termed biodesign literacy: a framework combining biological knowledge and design ways of knowing.

As car interiors transition toward emerging sustainable materials, exploring historical patterns of material use may inform future iteration and adoption. While automotive exterior literature is abundant, historical studies of interior trend evolution are rare. This study investigates over 60 years of interior material and form trends using Australian Wheels magazine’s annual ‘Car of the Year’ winners (1963-2024). Objective visual observations of 57 car interior image-sets built an abductive-coded matrix, followed by visual pattern analysis. This identified a cyclical trend in metal usage, and an evolutionary transition of gloss to matte surface finishes. Subjective scoring of interior shape using scales of simple-complex and curved-angular generated a scatterplot demonstrating form language evolution across the four quadrants. This study contributes to Australian car history literature and establishes a replicable visual analysis method to explore similar datasets globally, paving the way for a comparable body of material-form data in interior automotive research.

This research explores ornament as a form of material intelligence in large-scale additive manufacturing. Through the evolution of two design case studies, this paper investigates how micro-scale design articulation evolves from surface tectonics to the traces of the machine’s toolpath and material behaviour. One reveals itself as an organic, agent-based, data-informed modulation. The other integrates a woven toolpath strategy that transforms 3D printing into a spatial composition. Considering ornament not only as an aesthetic element but as a manifestation of process creates a dialogue between matter, performance, and application. With the help of computational design and data, this intervention expands the discussion of digital craftsmanship across multiple scales of design.

Online presentations of digital art place artists in an ongoing trade-off between gaining exposure and protecting copyright, one that current platforms inadequately support. As a result, artists often rely on aesthetic watermarks, yet how they manage this balance remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted a co-creation workshop with 18 digital artists and examined how they design aesthetic watermarks in practice. Analysis reveals three key concerns shaping their decisions: aesthetic integrity, semantic fidelity, and protective functionality. Participants struggled to manage the tension between protection and artistic completeness, while also expressing growing concerns about the security of their work, facing rapid AI advancement. These design choices reveal how artists are forced to compensate for gaps in platform governance and technical systems through their own effort. We argue that copyright protection should move beyond technical solutions toward institutional redesign that empowers artists and restores dignity within the digital art ecosystem.

Faculty and students in our Architecture Department have been engaged as one of the four research teams in an interdisciplinary and interjurisdictional collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The overall goal of this research is to develop the science, technology, design, and educational frameworks focused on the utilization of wood waste to make 100% bio-based materials for the Advanced Housing Manufacturing Industry of the Future. The Architecture Cradle-to-Cradle Design Team (C2C) focused on: 1- developing design speculations and scenarios for wood composites and additive manufacturing architectural applications (research-by-design); 2- developing a customized assessment toolbox for determining performance benchmarks comparable with other commercial building material metrics; and 3- developing curriculum and pedagogical strategies for educating the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry and community on transformations suggested by this research. This paper discusses outcomes and insights from our C2C third goal regarding contributions to education of the AEC industry.

As intelligent cockpits transition toward experience-centered scenario design, designers must organize increasingly complex relationships among users, behaviors, and system responses. While Generative AI (GenAI) accelerates early-stage exploration, it often struggles to interpret designers’ intentions, resulting in semantic drift and inconsistencies. This study proposes NarratAIve, a structured narrative–driven framework for human–AI co-creation in intelligent cockpit design. The framework encodes users, actions, contexts, and feedback into computable narrative units that serve as clear semantic inputs for cross-modal AI generation. Through two workshops with 24 participants (including graduate students and industry experts), six cockpit concepts were produced, demonstrating how narrative acts as a controllable mechanism for guiding AI and enabling iterative alignment between narrative text and AI-generated spatial, interaction, and formal expressions. The findings show that structured narrative significantly improves design clarity, enhances human–AI negotiation, and expands the breadth and precision of scenario-based concept development.

This study examines how generative AI can transform original characters (OCs) into interactive agents that improve character believability in design contexts. We propose a human–AI co-creation workflow that integrates dialogue, image, and context modalities, stabilizing style and behavior through structured prompts and expert feedback. In a mixed-method evaluation with five expert creators and a general audience, the approach increased perceived realism and emotional authenticity, while psychological complexity changed little—indicating the need for longer-horizon design. Dialogue contributed most to credibility, with context reinforcing coherence and images showing limited gains. We distill design principles for cross-modal alignment, style stability, and progressive complexity, offering a practical path to scalable, collaborative character design and more engaging interactive experiences.

In the wave of artificial intelligence development, employing computer technology to advance the innovative design of Chinese-style furniture and optimize the intelligent development of cultural products is crucial for revitalizing the industry and strengthening cultural confidence. This study identifies issues of homogenization and cultural dilution in intelligent furniture design and proposes an intelligent design model based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and a latent diffusion model (LDM). CNNs are used to recognize cultural features in Chinese-style furniture, while the LDM generates design schemes, rapidly producing Chinese chairs that meet contemporary aesthetic preferences while retaining traditional cultural attributes. The study enhances the intelligent recognition and application of fine cultural details, avoids weakened aesthetic value caused by single-algorithm approaches, improves the efficiency of intelligent design for Chinese-style furniture, and offers new perspectives for the creative development of cultural products.

Current food tracking applications are largely designed to support behaviour change among users who track their food intake to meet predefined goals. As a result, individuals who are curious about food tracking but do not have specific goals remain underserved, limiting the potential of these tools for preventive care. To address this gap, we conducted a three-phase interview study using an existing food journaling application as a probe to reimagine food tracking experiences for inexperienced users. Thirty-one participants used the app for 14 days and discussed their views on healthy eating, food practices, and their tracking experiences. Our analysis identified four distinct roles that food tracking applications can play to support inexperienced users during early engagement; each is tied to different communication styles and feature needs. We offer design implications that align with inexperienced users’ values, motivations, and learning needs, advancing more inclusive and preventive approaches to food tracking applications.

Artificial intelligence is bringing comprehensive impacts to the approaches, methods, and efficiency of creation. As a result, designers are being driven to tackle more untried tasks, rather than engaging in work they have long been proficient in. This study organised a co-design experiment involving novice designers and Textual GenAI to investigate the influence of prior experience and AI literacy on collaborative design outcomes. We conducted a detailed coding of collaborative activities in the design process. This uncovered the activity characteristics, shifts, and collaboration patterns in the co-creation process. These findings deepen the understanding of the Human-AI collaborative design process and the impacts brought about by prior experience and AI literacy. They also provide valuable insights for formulating adjustment measures when different types of designers collaborate with AI.

Research on AI and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) often reflects a static, object-centered perspective. This paper instead explores how generative AI can be embedded in the living practices of ICH. Through a speculative intervention in a Huayao embroidery community in Hunan, China, we reframe AI not as a tool for content generation, but as a social mediator within local craft networks. By performing as an “AI Cross-stitch Pattern Merchant” during the local festival, the study reveals how AI’s creative empowerment of young women sparked intergenerational tensions around legitimacy, labor, and authority. While youth embraced GenAI for playful self-expression, elder embroiderers judged its outputs by communal aesthetics and moral hierarchies, revealing the moral economy shaping creative legitimacy. These dynamics show how after-AI practices can unsettle the domestication of women’s creativity in heritage. We argue for a shift from generation to negotiation, toward socially embedded and relational AI practices in ICH.

Queer(ing) is a practice of questioning, unsettling, and liberating that resists normative ways of knowing. This paper advances a Queer(ing) epistemology for intersectional data science and offers TMI (Too Much Information)-WEB as a working case. This open source, theory-driven qualitative data analysis ecosystem treats identity, lived experience, and power as relational, contextual, and co-constructed. Built on a human-centered graph data model, it reimagines databases as dynamic knowledge systems rather than neutral containers. Authentic, identity-driven personas emerge from participants’ own narratives, while affective queries invite researchers to explore (and experience) patterns of harm, coping, joy, and self-acceptance across intersectional lives and social scenarios. We argue that Queer(ing) epistemology shifts data science from describing populations to knowing with people—centering embodiment, vulnerability, and relational dynamics. In doing so, TMI-WEB demonstrates how Queer(ing) epistemology through intersectional data science can generate open, complex, hopeful ways of knowing—otherwise.

Creativity in collaborative design unfolds under conditions of unspecific and ambiguous information. While such epistemic uncertainty is inherent to many design projects, its impact on creativity is underexplored. This study investigated how epistemic uncertainty induced through problem briefings affects creativity during idea generation, and how tolerance for epistemic uncertainty moderates this relationship. A between-subjects experiment with 67 student participants collaborating in 18 groups tested idea generation under high versus low epistemic uncertainty conditions. The results showed a dual pathway effect: high epistemic uncertainty, compared to low epistemic uncertainty, increased idea originality, but decreased idea usefulness. Average group tolerance for uncertainty did not significantly moderate this relationship. Instead, a tolerant-anchor effect emerged: having at least one highly tolerant individual in a group supports idea usefulness under uncertain conditions. The findings contribute new insight into the complex ways in which epistemic uncertainty shapes creativity in collaborative design.

Can Western design theory be a universal panacea? Celebrating Design Issues' 40-year legacy (1984-2025), "The Unfolding Culture" exhibition asks how culture will shape design's future, yet overlooks whose culture dominates design discourse. Through critical analysis of Design Issues, the author reveals three structural absences that question theoretical universalism: (1) Medium constraints—text-based format systematically excludes sound, video, and material-based knowledge production, eliminating epistemologies that resist textualization; (2) Temporal lag—non-Western topics arrive decades late, revealing one-way delayed recognition rather than dialogue; (3) Divergent concerns—East and West simultaneously focus on fundamentally different design questions yet lack mechanisms for synchronous exchange, resulting in parallel monologues rather than cross-cultural conversation. These absences expose design theory's provinciality: decades of isolated development, occasional belated recognition, but no sustained dialogue. The author argues for infrastructures enabling real-time, reciprocal, pluriversal conversation across divergent concerns.

Empathy is widely used as the initial stage of the design process to understand users and meet their needs and desires. Recently these methods have been critiqued for commodifying empathy in commercial practice, centering the designer instead of the user, and failing to account for power dynamics. Empathy is also under attack in political spheres, increasing the dehumanization of others. To address these criticisms, we explore the value of empathy in design processes and examine how queer theory and queering methodologies can help designers move past “walking in someone else’s shoes” towards intersectional design processes rooted in political responsibility. Synthesizing these insights, we offer six orientations that help designers to: challenge the normative, claim our terms, attend to the body, cultivate an ethics of care, focus on materialities, and redirect power. Queering empathy can provide new strategies for a more ethical, contextual, and reflexive approach to understanding others.

As design becomes increasingly automated and abstracted, the act of designation, once tied to human intentionality, appears to be lifting away from the human. In the era of exocapitalism, defined by Poliks and Trillo as a system unbound from the human condition and driven by self-replicating logics of value extraction, design too is being reconfigured through machinic and algorithmic processes. This paper introduces the concept of exodesign to describe this shift: the deterritorialisation of design’s human-centred agency amidst the rise of software stacks, machine learning, and cybernetic optimisation systems. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s notions of epiphylogenesis and general organology, alongside ontological and meta-design theories, it argues that design’s locus of operation is now distributed across recursive, inorganic strata that sense, adapt, and redesign themselves. Rather than opposing this exogenic drift, the paper proposes a hybrid account of design’s organological condition, an exo/endo interplay necessary for rethinking practice under planetary-scale automation.

This paper addresses a design dilemma: how can designers engage with materials that exhibit recognizable yet unpredictable behaviors? Traditional design relies on predictability and control. However, in an era of crises and complexity, we must acknowledge non-human agency and recognize that materials inherently respond and adapt. Complex material systems, characterized by self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, and emergent patterns, resist deterministic control, requiring an alternative approach. Drawing on material agency and play perspectives of rules and chances, we develop an operative framework of negotiating control, exemplified through clay fractals using the Lifting Hele-Shaw cell (LHSC). We identify three progressive modes of engagement: 1) Parametric Conditioning, adjusting variables without prescribing forms; 2) Structural Guidance, reinforcing pattern tendencies; 3) Orchestrated Formation, for goal-oriented control. These agentic patterns shift the designer’s role from form-function giver to facilitator of complexity, emphasizing coordination and responsiveness over control, where unpredictability becomes a valuable resource for collaboration.

Pain is universal, yet its invisible nature makes it difficult to express or understand.

Understanding the intricate mechanics of chronic pain and how to manage it effectively can be particularly challenging. This paper describes research exploring how human-centred design, transdisciplinary collaboration, and participatory approaches can produce diverse design outcomes that support the management and treatment of chronic pain. Two case studies are presented: 1) an exploration of how pain might be expressed through illustration and storytelling to offer insight into lived experience, and 2) how experiences of pain could be made more tangible through physical artefacts to support patient–clinician communication.

The resulting design outcomes – an illustrated resource for patients and a tangible toolkit for use in therapeutic settings – present novel alternatives to existing communication tools. The involvement of both learned experts and those with lived experience ensured these outcomes were relevant, usable, and implementable in real-world contexts.

This paper presents a design intervention study, conducted at Peking University Third Hospital (PUTH), which developed artefacts to support doctor-parent communication during neonatal care. Through a series of design interventions, a set of design probes and toolkits were developed to understand the current doctor-parent communication context within local care settings, and to prompt incremental changes in these communication practices. Field observations and evaluation interviews, based on these artefacts, demonstrated that the artefacts helped to change patterns of communication from consultative mode information delivery to collaboration by partner mode. They also increased parents’ confidence in their ability to maintain the health of their babies themselves, and enabled doctors to understand parents’ requirements and views. This paper presents the design process and provides practical guidance to designers intending to use artefacts as design research tools in healthcare settings.

Co-occurring trauma and substance use disorder (SUD) are common and clinically consequential. Evidence supports concurrent, integrated responses within trauma-informed systems, yet implementation remains uneven. This study aims to identify design principles for integrated, trauma-informed care pathways by examining current service pathways and workforce capabilities across mental health (MH), alcohol and other drugs (AOD), and community health. We report insights from two interrelated co-design workshops (n>40) that included AOD/MH clinicians, hospital staff, peer and lived-experience practitioners, and community partners. Workshops used personas to surface barriers, enablers, and attributes of an enabling environment. Thematic analysis yielded five themes: Consumer experience; Workforce culture; Service environment; Service model & pathways; and Governance & leadership. We translate these into seven pathway principles — No-Wrong-Door & Single-Story Choice; Care in Parallel; Right-Time Navigation; Trusted Transitions; Role Clarity & Shared Accountability; Cultural Safety by Design; and Supported Workforce — framed as levers to operationalise integrated care.

This paper presents a co-designed, nature-based intervention supporting NHS staff wellbeing through food growing. The NHS Home Growing Group (HGG) was collaboratively developed by DesignHOPES, NHS24, and a community garden. Home growing was identified as a feasible and meaningful activity compatible with shift work, with the potential of improving mental wellbeing in line with the NHS’s Five Steps to mental wellbeing model: connect, be active, keep learning, give, and take notice. Following a feasibility study, the 12-week intervention (April–July 2025) engaged 60 NHS staff using windowsill-growing kits designed for flexibility, autonomy, and asynchronous participation. Kits were sustainably sourced through recycled pots, donated seeds, and cuttings, and included creative materials, a reflective diary, and access to an online sharing platform. Analysis of participant diaries evidenced wellbeing benefits across all five pathways. The HGG demonstrates a simple intervention that can translate organisational wellbeing strategies into accessible, meaningful, and sustainable everyday practices.

We report on a series of sensory workshops and research interview training conducted with young Autistic people with lived experience of eating disordered behaviour. This under-researched co-occurence has been explored by a collaborative of clinical psychologists, peer researchers and participants through creative methods novel in this domain, led by a participatory design researcher. The paper outlines the design of the workshops, and discusses the insights generated around the key themes of environment, eating utensils and foods. It proposes a set of recommendations and creative opportunities for the hospitality industry to explore a range of approaches including ‘Autism-friendly days’ that may make eating space more accessible to individuals who are currently excluded due to sensory issues. It finishes with our reflections on learning to adapt participatory sensory workshop materials and processes for Autistic research participants.

This paper details the development and impact of the "Lembrei de Você" (I Remembered You) project, an inclusive design initiative that created a digital platform to combat loneliness and promote autonomy among the visually impaired, especially the elderly, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Using participatory methods, the research led to the creation of a platform that manages and distributes audio messages through a solidarity network of readers and listeners. The study describes the design process, from accessibility requirements to implementation using WordPress. Results show the platform successfully optimized project logistics and fostered an inclusive digital environment, enhancing social interaction and cognitive engagement through orality. The project is concluded to be a replicable model of social innovation, contributing significantly to inclusive design at the intersection of digital accessibility, psychosocial support, and aging.

This paper investigates how structured pedagogical interventions can foster reflective Learning within design studios. Conducted as an action-based case study with fifteen interior design students, the research integrated principles of Research through Design (RtD) and Action Design Research (ADR) to link educational practice with reflective inquiry. Four iterative interventions, including model making, circulation mapping, vertical connection, and inside–outside exploration, were designed to disrupt habitual thinking and enhance metacognitive awareness. Data from observations, interviews, and evaluations were analyzed through a three-layer framework capturing behavioral, cognitive, and self-regulatory dimensions of reflection. Findings show that reflection did not arise directly from the interventions but from students’ internalization of the changes they provoked. Reflection occurred when external triggers turned into personal insight, transforming the studio into a dialogical environment for learning. The study highlights how purposeful interventions can cultivate reflective awareness, resilience, and autonomy in design education.

Reasoning is a central skill in design education, yet it often remains implicit in studio courses. This paper presents an instructional exercise that adapts methods of deductive and inductive reasoning, commonly associated with crime scene investigation, into industrial design education. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes’ investigative methods, students examined manufactured products as ‘crime scenes,’ collecting traces of production and assembly as evidence. By reconstructing these processes, they practised analytical thinking and transferred investigative reasoning into design reasoning. Implemented across three semesters with around 101 students, the activity was followed by interviews with 25 participants. Findings indicate that students reported stronger observation, more systematic reasoning, and greater awareness of material–process–form relations when products were treated as evidence. The study suggests that integrating cross-domain reasoning frameworks can make analytical thinking more explicit in design education and foster evidence-based, reflective approaches to design practice.

Reflection is a crucial component for the development of children's metacognitive abilities, which is foundational for their overall growth. However, current preschool practices often lack structured approaches for facilitating reflection. To promote children's reflection after autonomous play and thereby foster their metacognitive abilities, this study introduces a reflection system that integrates physical interaction and digital narrative. Using tangible icons, the system guides children in reconstructing their play experiences, which are then converted into personalized digital comics. Implementation in kindergarten settings demonstrates the system's high usability and its effectiveness in eliciting children's metacognitive statements. Furthermore, the socially shared reflective situations significantly enhanced the depth of children's reflection. This study provides a practical design framework for fostering metacognition in early childhood education.

As the design profession becomes increasingly diverse and fluid, many design students struggle to define a clear career direction. Existing reflection practices in education offer support, yet outcomes remain inconsistent due to limited mentoring capacity, uneven role model exposure and ambiguity in emerging roles. This paper investigates how the combination of generative AI and facilitated human reflection can support students in increasing their perceived career direction clarity. We present the results of an explorative investigation on IkigAI, an educational workshop combining the Japanese ikigai framework with GenAI as a co-reflective partner. Human reflection and three rounds of GenAI interaction with prompt templates aim to generate grounded career possibilities. Our findings show that GenAI can scaffold reflection, broaden role awareness and stimulate identity exploration when facilitated properly. While the depth of the impact depends on individual and contextual dimensions, career direction clarity emerges by providing students conceptual insights and practical action.

This study examines structured self-reflection as a formative assessment tool within a Visual Communication Design Studio incorporating the service-learning (S-L) methodology, analysing motivational dynamics experienced by twenty undergraduate students. Using Thematic Analysis of 420 weekly responses, the study draws on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to map reflections on strengths, weaknesses, and intentions against needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The analysis revealed a consistent pattern: strengths centred on competence and relatedness, while weaknesses highlighted motivational tensions and emotional blockages regarding self-regulation and project management. The dominant dynamic was the interplay between autonomy and relatedness, with “teamwork” emerging as the most recurrent goal. The reflective instrument helped externalise tacit struggles and, as a micro-intervention, guided students from reflection-on-action toward self-regulated, actionable goals. Findings suggest that design studio tutors could utilise this dual-layered evidence—addressing disciplinary and psychological processes—to provide targeted feedback supporting students’ relational and self-regulatory needs.

This study examines how novice designers justify prototype concept choices before and after parallel stakeholder testing in early-stage product development. Drawing on 99 survey responses collected across two checkpoints in a 16-week interdisciplinary design studio, we used an inductive-deductive coding approach to map emergent themes to innovation frames of desirability, feasibility, and viability. Six themes emerged: desirability (primarily perceived play value) dominated pre- and post-test reasoning, while feasibility (simplicity/modularity) and viability (production cost, market potential) shaped secondary trade-offs. Parallel testing prompted revisions when stakeholder engagement or client cues contradicted expectations; many students retained choices when testing validated initial impressions or when novelty and social validation reinforced commitment. Quantitatively, 67% (35/52) revised at least one choice in checkpoint 1, and 19% (9/47) in checkpoint 2. Findings show how novices interpret limited evidence under uncertainty and how testing redistributes attention, further informing our understanding of design practices of prototype testing and decision-making.

Mindfulness technology in Human–Computer Interaction research predominantly remains grounded in behaviourist and cognitivist paradigms. Such instrumental design logic emphasises goal achievement and behavioural compliance, conflicting with the core ideals of mindfulness—non-striving, non-judging, and acceptance. Drawing on phenomenological, pragmatist, and embodied perspectives, this paper proposes a non-instrumental approach to mindfulness technology grounded in aesthetic experience. It also introduces a theoretical framework consisting of four experiential dimensions: somatic, temporal, atmospheric and material to reposition mindfulness technology as a medium of experience rather than a means to an end. Through design practice, this paper explores two early interaction prototypes to generate insights about designing for a non-instrumental approach in mindfulness technology. In doing so, it aims to foster an experiential shift in mindfulness technology from doing to being and provides perspectives that may guide researchers in moving beyond instrumental paradigms in this emerging field.

Young adults increasingly face emotional stress, uncertainty, and a lack of accessible, non-judgmental support. While AI technologies are emerging as potential companions, many adopt anthropomorphic and chat-based models that risk emotional overdependence, blurred boundaries, and false intimacy. This research explores how AI systems might be reimagined to foster authentic and ethical forms of companionship that support young adults’ wellbeing. Grounded in Positive Technology and its focus on promoting human flourishing, this research adopts a research-through-design approach, integrating semi-structured interviews, co-design sessions, hands-on prototyping, and user feedback. The resulting prototype, ALONG is a calm, embodied AI companion designed to encourage personal reflection and emotional awareness through daily rituals—without mimicking human emotions. This work contributes to ongoing discussions in design for wellbeing and emotionally supportive technologies, and ultimately to emerging design discourses around AI, emotional experience, and the redefinition of companionship in a technologically mediated society.

This study presents the co-design of Hokkien Nursery Rhymes, an educational app supporting intergenerational language learning and cultural transmission. Grounded in Attachment Theory, the design promotes parent–child co-use to strengthen emotional bonds and create a secure, trusting learning atmosphere. Social Identity Theory informs the app’s cultural framing, reinforcing children’s sense of belonging to their linguistic and cultural heritage. Using participatory methods creative workshops with children and interviews with families from diverse sociocultural backgrounds—the study translated insights into tangible design features: emotionally responsive virtual companions, collaborative parent–child tasks, culturally meaningful narratives, reward mechanisms, and personalized audio from caregivers. These elements foster emotional security, shared engagement, and cultural pride. The research demonstrates how integrating psychological theory with inclusive HCI practices enhances emotional design, usability, and cultural resonance, providing a model for developing family-centered educational technologies that support both attachment and identity in heritage-language learning.

Research highlights the positive impact of creative modalities, such as drawings and images, in grief practice for children. However, more knowledge is needed to guide grief practitioners regarding the effects and contributions of these modalities to children’s coping strategies and wellbeing. This paper investigates the use of creative modalities in Danish grief support groups for children through a study involving participatory design research. The study provides a comprehensive overview of how creative modalities can support grieving processes and lay new ground for future work in codesigning creative modalities for and with practitioners and children. The concept of grief as an extended emotion has guided the study by examining creative modalities as embodied, social and material practices. The findings illustrate how extended emotions are enacted in grief practices and offers nuanced insights into children’s bereavement.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is characterized by executive dysfunctions that disrupt the initiation and maintenance of everyday behaviors, making habit formation challenging. As a result, many individuals with ADHD struggle to sustain healthy routines. Conventional behavior change approaches overlook the complexity and variability of ADHD, highlighting the need for adaptive and personalized methods such as Self-Experimentation (SE). This study explores the potential of SE in supporting individuals with ADHD to change health behaviors. Using a Research through Design approach, stakeholders were involved across three iterative phases. The process resulted in two prototypes that facilitated SE while generating insights on how individuals with ADHD engage with SE. Findings indicate that SE helps reframe behavior change by reducing perfectionism, promoting personalized strategies, and improving self-efficacy. However, challenges of cognitive effort, novelty seeking, and external accountability remain. This suggests that SE may be more promising when introduced in short, facilitated, and simple formats.

The rising prevalence of social loneliness among solo-living young adults indicates an urgent need for support. However, research addressing this issue, especially in Asia, is limited. This study aims to bridge this gap by introducing co-illustration workshops as a novel method to enhance social connections and wellbeing in this demographic. Employing a participatory action research (PAR) methodology, the study engages participants in five iterative co-design cycles to enhance social connections. The findings suggest that temporary co-illustration workshops serve as a conduit for conversation and facilitate the formation of high-quality weak ties, thereby alleviating social loneliness. This paper provides guidance and perspective on the iterative process of co-designing the visual toolkit-based workshops, which offer non-medical support to bolster young adults' social connections. The study contributes to enhancing social connectivity and wellbeing among young adults by designing to leverage the emotional connections potential of the visual arts.

Generative AI (GenAI) has sparked intense media debate, yet design research has often echoed these narratives rather than examining how GenAI reshapes everyday design practices. This paper presents a year-long auto-ethnographic study involving 34 games and apps created through vibe coding, a GenAI-native approach that uses natural-language prompts to generate code. The study reveals distinct qualities that unsettle design processes: playful intervention, creative forgetting, spectral echoes, inventive excess, and fragile limits. Two key insights emerge: designing with GenAI requires deliberate engagement with cultural archetypes and treating AI as an unruly collaborator. Drawing on John Oswald’s 1985 concept of ‘plunderphonics’, the paper situates GenAI within a lineage of experimental art and design tactics. The paper offers auto-ethnographic insights into how GenAI reshapes design practice and introduces ‘Plundergeist’ as a critical and playful ethos for designing with GenAI through cultural plundering and unruly collaboration.

In recent years, AI has become increasingly entangled with design practice, whether as a tool, a design material, or a collaborator. Alongside these opportunities, it is necessary to recognise AI as a socio-technical system that reproduces existing gender hierarchies. Treating design as a political site of intervention; this paper examines how designers can ground their practice in addressing gender bias in AI. Drawing on a scoping review of gender bias in AI, feminist design perspectives, and existing interventions in design research, we argue that designers occupy a consequential role as critical reflectors, bridge-builders, and sense-makers, uniquely positioned to question how AI systems are implemented and represented. The paper contribution lies in articulating how designers can embrace this position, and we conclude by reasserting the necessity of feminist design responses in shaping more equitable AI futures.

Empathy is a key differentiator in Nigel Cross' model of Design as a third discipline, and has become established as a vital component of both research and practice. Yet agreed definitions of empathy in design remain elusive, and the roles it should play have been questioned and problematised. Recent developments in the capabilities of Large Language Models have generated discussion of the possibility of both simulated and actual empathic behaviour by artificial intelligences. In this paper we gather and synthesise relevant philosophical debates on the nature and operation of AI-empathy. Concepts of alterity in the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas are deployed as a lens to illuminate key aspects of the challenge which the emergence of AI-empathy provokes for design. Ultimately we reflect that this challenge may be the stimulus required to compel design research to properly engage with the question of empathy in design.

This paper presents Small AI as a conceptual lever for designers to resist

the ‘bigger is better’ trend in the discourse and development of Generative AI. We

explore different types of Small AI: initially in relation to the size of models, as

smaller models require less computational resources for both training and

inference, thus implying a smaller ecological footprint. However, we extend the

meaning of smallness to apply to political, epistemic and cultural domains as well.

In this vein, the paper posits Small AI as an imaginary-in-the-making, and a rallying

concept for an alternative innovation agenda that holds, in the spirit of E.F.

Schumacher’s famous dictum, that it is small (AI) and not big (AI) that is beautiful.

The paper draws conclusions for those designing with/for AI, positing Small AI as a

form of ‘unmaking’ with which designers may re-articulate the entangled relations

between users, computation, and worlds.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a fundamentally hauntological

technology. This paper interrogates that character of contemporary AI systems and

explores why this feature undermines the goals of design research. We argue the

need for an exorcism of GenAI, or at least a constructive rebellion against the ghosts

it systematically produces. GenAI is convergence-driven and nuance-averse. It aims

for reasonableness as a first-order output. Its training data reflects a profound

anthropocentrism that extinguishes plurality. As a result, GenAI accelerates the

foreclosure of possible worlds by preferentially reproducing that which is

statistically probable and culturally dominant. By contrast, design relies upon

idiosyncrasy, rupture, serendipity, and the cultivation of plurality. In short, the very

qualities systematically eroded by the probabilistic logic of generative systems.

Through a lens of glitch feminism, we propose error, derangement, and an

enthusiastic embrace of the uncomputable as resistance strategies to retain what

is fundamentally human within inhuman systems.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly embedded in creative practice, offering new possibilities for ideation while raising concerns about reduced idea diversity and diminished cognitive engagement. This paper introduces generative analogical intelligence (GAI) as a human-centered approach that foregrounds analogy, material culture, and speculative reasoning to sustain creative thinking. Through a research-through-design (RtD) methodology, the study develops and refines the FABRIC framework (form, action, behavior, relation, intention, context) across three co-design phases involving design students, non-specialists, and design professionals. Findings suggest that analogy-based cross-pollination can reintroduce productive cognitive friction, support both divergent and convergent thinking, and generate varied outcomes. However, participants also experienced difficulty interpreting analogy objects without structured guidance. The FABRIC framework addresses this by scaffolding relational mapping across domains. The paper contributes a conceptual model (GAI), a methodological framework (FABRIC), and empirical insights into sustaining creative agency in the context of generative systems.

With the emergence of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, wearable design is gathering renewed interest. Although design has an obvious role to play in developing wearables for user acceptance, the understanding of the role of design in wearables is fragmented and poorly understood. Through a scoping review, we highlight the fragmentation of the wearable research field and the lack of design-led approaches to developing wearable devices. To augment this lack of design literature, we analyze six design cases. The result reveals a key tension: wearable practice is rapidly expanding into interdisciplinary, speculative domains, blurring evaluative boundaries. To bridge this gap, we propose a descriptive radar mapping model. This model functions as a shared map to address the field's fragmented cognition. By providing a framework to navigate diverse approaches, it enables unbiased critique from researchers and more comprehensive thinking from designers, thus better articulating design's significant role in the future of wearables.

Recent years have seen an acceleration in efforts to secure global supply chains of ‘critical minerals’ for defence, digital technologies, energy and transport. However, this rapidly evolving geopolitical context also impacts other sectors including healthcare which rely on some of the same resources. In orthopaedics, metals including titanium and medical grade stainless steel are used for implants. Supply chain disruption and rising costs therefore pose risks to product performance in the body, affordability and quality of patient care. Firstly, this paper shares findings from a content analysis of grey literature by leading orthopaedic manufactures. Secondly, it presents an illustrative re-use example of an ongoing collaboration between Canadian and East African paediatric orthopaedic health care professionals. The article makes an original contribution by identifying a list of ‘orthopaedic critical minerals’ and highlighting the potential for responding to material shortages in the sector and global health inequalities through product re-use.

This article analyses textiles as living materials endowed with their own agency. In addition to the emotions and memories they evoke, textiles are imbued with vitality. When they occupy an intimate and private space, such as a home, they act as a kind of soft architecture, absorbing the words, gestures, smells, memories and relationships that emerge within that environment. Steeped in everyday aesthetics and imbued with feminine care, these materials face a society with clear and visible power structures as they cross the threshold into the public sphere. This is accentuated when these textiles cover a body, revealing social hierarchies and gender distinctions. The research takes the apron worn by domestic workers in Santiago de Chile as its case study, serving as a starting point for critical reflection on how the vitality of the object transcends the space it inhabits and envelops the body with a distinct agency.

This paper explores alternative pedagogical approaches that centred the relationship between the human body and design in 1970s Denmark. Initiated by lecturers at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts – School of Architecture (today Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation), a series of interdisciplinary ergonomics seminars (1974–78) at Institute 3C2 brought together more than a hundred students and lecturers from architecture, design, dance, and the medical and social sciences. Through archival research and oral history, I analyse these overlooked teaching practices and situate them within broader societal changes. Informed by disability studies, I examine how the seminars negotiated between models of the medicalised body, grounded in measurement and physiology, and the social body that emphasised variation and lived experiences. I argue that the seminars neither rejected nor embraced either model but explored frictions between them. I conclude with reflections on the bodily imaginaries they fostered in education.

The field of behavioral design uses insight into humans’ cognitive tendencies to help people make better, more rational choices. Yet individuals’ perceptions of what seems rational—let alone viable, or even conceivable—are not universally shared and are often informed by their embodiment as much as cognition. For example, fear of being scolded can inhibit overweight or obese individuals from seeking preventive healthcare, people with ‘invisible’ disabilities may feel pressured to pass as able-bodied to fit in, and Black individuals may avoid ordinary activities likely to prompt ‘birding while Black’ confrontations. Depicting cognition as the single site of judgment and decision-making therefore underestimates how an individual’s risk calculus or perceived agency may be informed by their particular physical embodiment or accumulated embodied experiences. This paper explores how embodiment can influence judgment, decision-making, and behavior, and how behavioral designers can better incorporate these factors when crafting solutions.

This paper explores how divergent thinking generates creativity and innovative ideas, exploring multiple possibilities and connections. Designing a musical instrument is an opportunity for knowledge and experimentation, combining the need for high performance with aesthetic qualities and, the tradition of handmade production with cutting-edge technologies and materials. Methodologically, the study is exploratory based on qualitative research methods. It comprises academy and the local productive sector, which includes luthiers, musicians, and an audiovisual and film studio. The paper highlights other research projects that demonstrate this team's ability to create connections with design, music, culture, and social issues. The creation of a musical instrument is a multidisciplinary endeavour that connects handmade and industrial contexts, generates and transfers innovation to other productive and cultural sectors, moving beyond exclusive either-or paradigms to foster cooperative and beneficial interactions, promoting an urgent reflection between sustainability and society.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has demonstrated significant potential in the divergent phases of design, its role in the convergent phase (solution selection) is less understood. This study investigates how different AI-assisted selection modes impact a designer's creative efficacy. We conducted an experiment (N=40) with graduate design students, who used four distinct AI support modes—(1) Textual Description, (2) Pros/Cons Comparison, (3) AI Scoring, and (4) Direct Recommendation—to select a final design from a set of concepts. Efficacy was measured using behavioral data (selection time, choice), user satisfaction (QUIS), cognitive load (NASA-TLX), and technology acceptance (TAM). Results show that the AI Scoring mode performed significantly better, leading to the highest user satisfaction and acceptance while imposing the lowest cognitive load. Qualitative data further suggests that while designers value the efficiency of scoring, they also demand transparency in the AI's decision-making logic.

Node-based interfaces are rapidly gaining traction in AI-driven design tools, yet a clear and comprehensive design framework remains essential. This paper addresses this critical need by presenting 10 carefully distilled design principles. These principles emerged from a thematic literature review of 14 recent, impactful papers published between 2020 and 2025, specifically focusing on Human-AI Interaction and visual programming. We meticulously grouped these principles into three core categories: Interaction & Usability, Human-AI Co-Creation & Creativity Support, and Explainability & Extensibility. Crucially, we also analysed how these principles intricately interconnect at a detailed level, highlighting their dynamic relationships. Based on this foundational analysis, we introduce a hierarchical Conceptual Model. This model vividly visualizes the principles as layered foundations, systematically working towards a robust Human-AI Partnership. This framework evaluates existing node-based AI tools and guides new designs to boost usability, support creative co-creation, and build user trust.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automated processes hold significant potential to enhance service user experiences, by augmenting or fully automating aspects of service delivery. However, if not carefully designed, these systems also risk creating unintended, widespread harms, at unprecedented speed and scale. Drawing upon trauma-informed principles and developed in collaboration with social service delivery practitioners, we designed the Trauma Informed AI Assessment Toolkit (TIAKIT). TIAKIT supports users in critically designing, reviewing, and evaluating current or planned AI service integrations. We report on the iterative design process of TIAKIT and its adaptation across three formats — analogue, digital, and design game. Findings demonstrate the value and translating trauma-informed AI principles across different material forms and interaction modalities; offering insight into medium-specific affordances, their influence on participation and engagement, and how they shape different forms of dialogue and sensitivity about AI.

The rapid advancement of AI technologies necessitates a shift from reactive adoption to speculative inquiry into long-term consequences for educational systems. Grounded in Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," this research examines the epistemology of AI in design education. Methodologically, it employs speculative futurology, integrating speculative design, critical design, and scenario planning to explore possible futures, culminating in a philosophical mapping framework based on Heidegger's critical stance. The findings reveal a critical temporal mismatch between rapid AI capability growth and slower educational adaptation, creating urgency for human-centered frameworks. The research concludes that design education's future depends on consciously cultivating Critical AI Literacy while preserving uniquely human capabilities e.g. intuition, judgment, and creative reasoning. This approach ensures AI serves as a medium for "world discovery" rather than merely a tool for efficiency, positioning educators to shape technology's role intentionally rather than adapt to it reactively.

AI-powered voice scams are a fast-evolving public threat, combining rapid advances in synthetic speech technologies with sophisticated social engineering tactics. These scams are difficult to detect, exploit trust and familiarity, often resulting in deeply stigmatising experiences for those targeted. While anyone can be affected by scams, building awareness and confidence in navigating AI-related risks requires approaches tailored to the needs of diverse communities, particularly those who are more digitally excluded or marginalised. To address this, we developed AI & You—a suite of accessible, modular, and adaptable public education resources, collaboratively designed with the digital advocacy group Tactical Tech. We evaluated these resources in workshops with public learning facilitators and digital mentors from Good Things Australia. Our findings reflect on the process of designing AI safety materials, and the importance of translating AI literacy resources into actionable, contextually relevant knowledge that balances safety and risk awareness with empowerment and inclusion.

This study confronts the theoretical challenges arising from the increasing practical overlap of Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design. Existing research, largely confined to method comparisons, lacks an ontological perspective capable of explaining its underlying integrative mechanisms. To address this critical gap, this paper argues for a fundamental ontological shift. We introduce the concept of 'generative events' as the basic ontological unit of design, a concept constructed by synthesising Object-Oriented Design Ontology (OODO) with Process Ontology. This framework reframes design as a dynamic generative process where humans and non-human objects collaboratively construct relationships and meaning within specific contexts. The contribution of this research is to provide a unified theoretical foundation for understanding the fusion of PD and Co-Design, and it proposes a crucial methodological paradigm shift from a 'tool logic' to an 'event logic'. By doing so, this paper develops non-human centred methods and the ontological deepening of 'design as research'.

Design cognition is often described through a heuristics-and-biases lens that foregrounds systematic errors such as anchoring, fixation, and premature narrowing. Yet in professional practice, the same patterns may function as adaptive strategies for coping with ambiguity, constraint, and ill-defined problems. This paper examines how bias-like tendencies appear in expert data visualization work using a multi-phase qualitative study with 11 professional designers. We analyze situated episodes through two contrastive interpretive lenses: a bias lens that highlights potential distortions, and an adaptive-expertise lens that treats the same tendencies as resource-rational strategies. We situate these interpretations within a broader design cognition perspective, drawing on concepts such as framing, problem–solution co-evolution, and judgment. Our findings show that putative biases often enable tractable progress and sensemaking under bounded project conditions. We argue for a context-sensitive account of cognitive bias in design and discuss implications for theory, methods, and education.

Across contemporary design practice, an attitude has been consolidating design as diffractive sensemaking. It is not method- or outcome-oriented, nor even necessarily a discipline, but a habit of attention in which fragments, measures and memories, timings and routines, infrastructures and more-than-human traces are placed so they read through one another to develop conscious, situated practices. Often grounded in research practice, these approaches lead to diverse outcomes. In all of them, an ecosophic orientation keeps environmental, social and mental ecologies mutually in play without collapsing them into a single index or metric. In such practices, care appears as activism: framing, positioning, staging, doing and returning keep obligations alive beyond the designed event. Drawing on a diffractive reading of theory and exemplary practices, the article offers a compact synthesis that clarifies design’s role as situated diffractive sensemaking, making worlds more thinkable and, on that basis, more livable and answerable.

In today's world, AI technology is reshaping design practice. The modern design cognition is shifting from Cartesian disembodied rationality to phenomenological embodied intuition. This study draws on Nigel Cross's research on design thinking and the concept of “Shensi” from traditional Chinese aesthetics. It reveals the embodied essence of design cognition as a dynamic network of body, technology, and environment. This network reconfigures design problems, structures, and meanings. By comparing "Shensi" (embodied, intuitive, humanistic) with AI-mediated design (logical, data-driven, efficient), this study proposes a new design paradigm based on Eastern wisdom to broaden theoretical understanding of design cognition.

Design epistemology has long been divided by apparent dualities, such as science versus art and rationality versus intuition, which resist resolution within existing frameworks. This paper argues these are false dichotomies and that Critical Rationalism (Popper, 1963/2002, 1972; Deutsch, 1997, 2011) provides a universal account of knowledge creation that explains the distinctive character of design without requiring a separate epistemology. Knowledge is conjectural and fallible: progress occurs not through justification or verification, but through iterative creative conjecture and — crucially — error-correction via criticism. Deutsch's account of knowledge as physically instantiated information, subject to the same logic of variation and error-correction found in computation and biological evolution, further clarifies how design knowledge is created and improved. Comparison with pragmatism, constructivism, and phenomenology shows that each captures important features of design but none adequately explains how objective progress occurs. Implications for design practice, education, and research methodology are explored.

This paper argues that the question “How does the awareness of material sustainability change perceptions of aesthetics?” requires an interactionist framework from philosophical aesthetics, against both eliminativist and formalist models. Without treating materials as morally valuable entities, there is no room to integrate the ethical dimension into aesthetic evaluation. However, the question can be inverted, since aesthetic perceptions also contribute to how we ethically treat materials. Central to the argument is the claim that aesthetic properties, by virtue of their affective character, are partly constitutive of the moral dimension of visual representations, not mere embellishments but active elements in shaping ethical evaluation of materials. The framework is illustrated through analysis of visual strategies in fashion communication, examining how aesthetic smoke-screens occlude material ethics and how counter-images foster fine observation. Implications for design research and practice are discussed

Queerness in design often operates from the margins, yet to remain transformative it must also confront the heteronormative hegemonies embedded in central societal infrastructures. This paper examines how queer design intervenes in the fields of artificial intelligence, sport, and healthcare, identifying three strategies through which design can challenge normative systems: disruption, subversion, and circumvention. Through a comparative analysis of three case studies – Christensen and Conradi’s AI/IA experiments with queer artificial intelligence, Gabriel Fontana’s sport design projects Multiform and Sidelined, and the queer-led digital health platform Every Health – the paper explores how design practices reconfigure infrastructures that regulate bodies, identities, and participation. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer futurity, the paper argues that queer design operates not only as critique but as an infrastructural practice of worldmaking that materialises alternative relations of care, participation, and collective becoming.

When introduced to product language—the interplay between aesthetic qualities and conveyed meanings—design students often learn that objects embody gender. Soft, curved, and organic shapes are typically framed as feminine, while monolithic and sturdy shapes are most likely labelled as masculine. Although this vocabulary bridges human communication and aesthetics, it also risks reinforcing stereotypes. Building on ongoing doctoral research investigating how product language can reproduce or challenge discrimination, a five-day workshop with 23 bachelor's design students was developed. Through reflective and analytical activities, participants examined gender beyond the binary, exploring how products convey gender norms and how aesthetic qualities embed narratives of exclusion or neutrality. The workshop sought to cultivate gender awareness as a critical design sensitivity, rather than proposing a fixed methodology. The outcomes suggest that such reflection on gender meanings in design education can support more inclusive and non-discriminatory approaches to product language.

This paper puts forward a set of strategies for designing queer experiences for virtual reality. First, the paper will outline The Body Traces Archive VR experience, the primary practice-based outcome of my doctoral research. This will be followed by a discussion of the medium of virtual reality and three industry-standard design norms that serve to limit and foreclose the possibilities of virtual reality: militaristic mastery and control, seamless (dis)embodiment, and prioritisation of comfort. For each industry standard norm, I propose a queer counter-strategy that works to re-align VR towards other possibilities. In turn, they are: utopian worldbuilding, embodiment via friction, and working with discomfort. Each counter-strategy is presented with examples from the Body Traces Archive, showing how queer approaches can be implemented in practice in order to work towards queerer virtual worlds for us to inhabit.

The intersection of queerness and spatial practice has often been framed through the presence of queer individuals rather than queerness as a spatial principle that can shape and create opportunities within the built environment. While individual identity remains important, this paper argues that applying a queer-informed spatial approach to architecture and landscape architecture introduces broader inclusive design considerations often absent in binary or heteronormative practice. The paper examines this through situating current theory and practice; and then testing these ideas in a speculative design proposal for Portobello Promenade. Through themes including adaptability, queer ecologies, accessibility, safety and visibility, the project demonstrates how queer spatial practice can inform a more fluid, responsive, and inclusive design response. The paper reflects on what it means to embed queer spatial principles within architecture and landscape architecture, and how these might create a space for marginalised ways of living and being.

Tělák, a Czech slang term for physical education (PE) that also echoes tělo - body, is a theatrical exhibition, developed by an interdisciplinary team of educators, activists, architects, and theatre professionals, introducing expressions of gender as a spectrum for teenage audiences.

The exhibition unfolds across two layers. The first is a scenography evoking the familiar spaces of PE; corridors, changing rooms, bathrooms, gyms, reassembled within the museum’s own charged normative setting. The second is an archive of personal stories: fragments of experience retold by actors in sound, and others inscribed in situ by a local artist.

This practice-based paper traces the project from the perspective of one of its authors. It considers how the archive itself, the lived experiences of the predominantly queer design team and the spatial framework of the exhibition fold into one another, how the space of display becomes itself archival.

Many technologies are available that address menopause, yet more or less exclusively reflect and reinforce dominant narratives of ableism and normativity. To uncover untold stories of the menopause journey and add perspective to the pluralistic menopause experience, we conducted two workshop sessions with cis women and gender-diverse individuals who have experienced menopause. Through feminist and reflexive methodology and using critical disability studies (CDS) as an analytical lens, we present how menopause experiences are shaped through bodily transformations and relational social practices. Finally, we discuss possible future design directions for shaping the menopause experience beyond its conventional notion. We call for designing for interconnectedness as an approach to support a pluralistic menopause experience.

India is moving towards a health crisis, with a rapidly increasing population of older adults who have to deal with chronic health issues and declining family support. Remote health monitoring technologies offer opportunities for improved healthcare management; however, existing design guidelines often fail to address the cultural realities of Indian senior citizens. In this study, we identified six critical interaction areas for remote cardiac health monitoring, including self-monitoring, emergency response, and assistance-seeking patterns. Targeted cultural probes were designed for each area to evoke natural behaviours from 27 participants, aged 59-86, across diverse living situations. This participatory approach revealed that elderly dependency status was the most significant contextual factor in shaping digital health engagement. We also highlight the role of information presentation modalities and nature of medical equipment in shaping this engagement. These findings demonstrate how participatory methods can reveal culturally-specific barriers to health equity, challenging one-size-fits-all design approaches.

Living evidence refers to continual evidence synthesis and dynamic updating of clinical guidelines to support health decision makers with evidence that is up-to-date, reliable and trustworthy. The rapid take up of AI technologies and prevalence of unverified AI-generated medical advice create an urgent need to improve access to trusted, reliable evidence to support clinicians, policy makers and citizens with accurate health guidance. Developing a living evidence platform with South-East Asia and the Western Pacific - a region that includes almost half of the global population - requires a nuanced understanding of the diverse needs of clinicians, consumers, and policymakers across countries and contexts. Two co-design workshops engaged input from 10 countries, leveraging clinician and policymaker personas to understand experiences of accessing and using health evidence across settings. The process informed design principles for an AI-enabled regional living evidence architecture, and yielded learnings on inclusive regional co-design processes to envisage future technology solutions.

This paper develops the concept of "distributed care hubs" to describe the informal, relational infrastructures through which disabled people sustain everyday life amid insufficient formal care systems. Drawing on participatory research in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—combining community mapping, ethnographic interviews, and computational analysis—we show how community-built care emerges through ordinary social interactions, shared spaces, and reciprocal relationships. Distributed care hubs reveal that disability care and everyday sociality are inseparable; they challenge independence-centered policy frameworks by foregrounding interdependence as a universal human condition. Yet these hubs remain precarious, functioning as compensatory mechanisms shaped by systemic failures that force disabled people into informal survival arrangements. We outline policy implications that differentiate community-controlled care from responsibilities that must remain within formal systems, arguing for infrastructures that support integration rather than substitution. Ultimately, we demonstrate how community-generated care practices can guide more equitable, interdependent futures in disability policy and design.

Mass incarceration is a public health and architectural crisis in the United States. Extreme temperatures present mental and physical health challenges for incarcerated populations, exacerbated by the architectural strategies of carceral spaces. At the intersection of architecture and epidemiology we investigated how participants could leverage architectural drawings to analyze the inhumane temperatures they experienced in state prisons. Through interviews and focus groups with formerly incarcerated people, we found that the method of participatory architectural drawing allowed participants and researchers to spatialize the impact of extreme temperatures on mental and physical health as mediated by architectural space. Through a collaboration between public health, design, and sociology researchers we showcase how this method makes visible carceral experiences and builds reciprocity with researchers through the co-creation of architecture drawings. These findings are intended to support generation of policies and practices that mitigate mental and physical harm from extreme temperatures in carceral settings.

This paper explores the production and intended use of publicly available Geomatic Data Artefacts (such as geo-repositories, maps, and dashboards) and their relevance in the context of public health policies. We are an interdisciplinary team of academics with backgrounds in geomatics and design who began discussing the role of accessing and visualizing geographic data to support participation in public healthcare policy.

Specifically, this paper examines questions related to stakeholder involvement in the production and development of use scenarios for Geomatic Data Artefacts that inform public health policies. We reviewed existing artefacts, conducted a first round of conversations, and produced an introductory literature overview.

The aim of this paper is to spark a discussion on the human-centredness of such mapping endeavours, considering the potential of these designed artefacts to foster deeper engagement with healthcare service provision, planning, delivery, and assessment.

Café Séneca, the largest affinity chapter of the Uniandinos Alumni Association in Colombia, is dedicated to the wellbeing of older adults and led by retired members. Despite its popularity, the chapter lacked a strategic design structure, relying on inertia to shape its activities and limiting its ability to evolve sustainably. This paper presents a reflective case study of SenSilver, a situated participatory strategic design framework developed for organizations led by and for older adults. Combining business, positive, and empowerment-oriented design with biological, social, and psychological dimensions of aging, the framework was applied through a research-consultancy process with Café Séneca. The case revealed a dynamic of symbiotic behaviors, in which members continuously alternated between leadership and participant roles, shaping both organizational value and internal tensions while also countering the invisibilization of older adults’ contributions and agency in society. The study contributes a context-specific framework for strategic design in later-life organizations.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes embedded in design education and practice, global experts highlight a key challenge: preparing design students to engage with AI responsibly and contextually. This paper explores how liberal education’s interdisciplinary approach builds contextual understanding for designers to leverage AI tools effectively. ​​Informed by the philosophy of an Indian design school that is rooted in liberal education, along with insights from global design experts, the study introduces a conceptual model: CI-AID (Contextual Intelligence for AI in Design). CI-AID extends on the traditional double diamond, where interdisciplinary knowledge enables a comprehensive discovery of the context that the design problem lies within. It illustrates the role of a liberal approach in augmenting divergent thinking, and thus building deeper contextual intelligence. Ultimately, the paper elucidates how such intelligence guides designers toward more situated and deliberate engagements with AI, and can transform AI-driven design practice toward more thoughtful and enduring outcomes.

As generative AI tools increasingly permeate design education, questions arise about their impact on novice students’ creative competence. This study addresses two research questions: (RQ1) How does AI participation affect students’ creative outcomes, particularly the visual dimensions of their work? (RQ2) How do evaluators redefine competence amid AI involvement in novice design students’ creative processes? Using a mixed-method approach, Study1 analysed professional evaluations of 88 student projects, showing that AI-assisted works scored higher in creativity and visual elaboration but not in design logic, with greater score divergence.Study2 involved interviews with eight design experts, revealing tensions in evaluators’ attribution of competence and how AI reshapes judgment criteria. Findings indicate that generative AI alters students’ visual outcomes and evaluative norms, underscoring the need for a reflective, transparent integration of AI into design pedagogy. Results also suggest updating frameworks for assessing design competence in AI-augmented learning environments.

As artificial intelligence increasingly takes over the designer’s role in shaping interfaces for services and platforms, a key challenge is how to teach young designers to critically reflect on how design mechanisms shape users and their everyday lives.

Interface Cultures, Forever was a design workshop that challenged the conventional notion of the digital interface. Participants were asked to design critical interfaces - concepts that reveal tensions, paradoxes, and invisible mechanisms within digital life. Through speculative and ironic prototypes, students explored how interfaces shape behavior, emotion, and identity. The projects articulate a landscape of cultural critique, where the interface becomes both medium and message: from bodily automatism and sensory addiction to algorithmic control, mediated self-representation, temporal anxiety, and digital silence. Each prototype employs strategies of parody, over-performance, and inversion of norms, thus repositioning interface design as an act of commentary - an inquiry into the conditions of human experience within contemporary techno-social systems.

This study examines the influence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on design students’ self-efficacy and perceived confidence during a logotype creation task. Through an exploratory pre–post experimental protocol, 35 undergraduate design students generated manual sketches and subsequently refined them using a GenAI tool. The results show that, while GenAI effectively transformed manual sketches into more elaborate visual representations, its impact on students’ perceived creative mastery remained moderate. Self-efficacy and confidence levels showed no significant differences after the intervention, although slight improvements were observed in aspects related to imagination, collaboration, and willingness to face challenging situations. Students assessed the utility, novelty, and relevance of GenAI cautiously, suggesting a reflective rather than fully enthusiastic adoption. However, the results reveal GenAI's potential to support the creative process and incorporate these tools as part of exploratory processes in design. Future research should investigate long-term integration of GenAI within diverse design learning contexts.

The integration of AI into UX design presents both opportunities and challenges for UX education-how to leverage AI’s efficiency while developing students’ human skills. This pilot study examines LLMs as an analytical AI co-pilot in undergraduate user research. Students (N=17) conducted two cycles of user research: one using traditional methods, and another with Claude-assisted analysis. Findings show 14 (82%) of students perceived the Claude-assisted approach as faster in synthesizing data and extracting insights. However, the results also reveal a trade-off: AI's efficiency may reduce empathy-building, with 6 (35%) students reporting diminished user connection. This research illuminates the inherent tension in AI-augmented UX education and suggests a hybrid pedagogical model that requires traditional user research while leveraging AI for efficiency, providing a critical framework for future research. This pilot study underscores the need to balance technological augmentation with fundamental human skills in UX design education for the AI age.

This study investigates how Industrial Design (ID) programs can effectively adopt and integrate Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) into curricula, while respecting the well-established ID workflow and preserving the core ID values of originality and creativity. Through multi-perspective qualitative research (including 7 ID faculty members, 6 industry professionals, and over 70 ID students), this study maps current AI tools, roles, and use cases within the ID workflow, identifies key pedagogical challenges, and proposes strategies that bridge foundational design traditions with emerging AI opportunities. Findings introduces a progressive learning trajectory, supported by innovative teaching practices that cultivate an AI-collaborative design mindset. By emphasizing critical thinking, ethical reflection, and responsible use, this study positions AI as a complement to design heritage, enriching both ID curricula development and future career pathways for industrial designers.

Adversity is an inherent part of human life. This paper adopts a transformative approach to adversity, viewing it as fertile ground for personal growth. Through a theory-driven narrative review, we synthesise insights from positive psychology, post-traumatic growth, resilience, and wellbeing-driven design to introduce the Design for Adversarial Growth (DAG) framework, a guide for shaping designers' motivations and cultivating their sensibilities when designing for adversarial growth. This framework encompasses three key components of adversarial growth, each illustrated through design examples. We further discuss its contributions to design research and practice, as well as the ethical considerations for its application. With this framework, we seek to advance the discourse on wellbeing-driven design by situating it within a broader theoretical and practical scope.

As AI increasingly enters everyday life in intimate roles of companionship and emotional support, established understandings of wellbeing in design research are being challenged. Conventional approaches tend to frame wellbeing as an optimizable experiential state, typically enhanced by means of emotional design. However, as AI becomes a medium for emotional engagement, wellbeing shifts toward a relational outcome that emerges from ongoing interactions.This paper introduces fictionalized affective relations to describe how users, despite knowing AI lacks genuine consciousness and emotion, nonetheless disclose vulnerability, invest affectively, and derive experiences of intimacy. It identifies three ethical tensions: emotional capitalization, loss of affective sovereignty, and reinforcement of anthropocentrism.In sum, this paper’s central contribution is to frame fictionalized affective relations in two ways: first, as a mechanism constituting human–AI relationships; and second, as a designable space of imagination that supports public reflection on the ethical implications of such relationships.

As the population of solo-living older adults grows, hundreds of AI-enabled smart home solutions have entered the gerontechnology market, yet adoption remains below 15%. Technology- or market-driven solutions often overlook integrated, multi-stakeholder value perceptions. Guided by Service‑Dominant Logic, we explored how misaligned stakeholder value perceptions hinder the development of compelling value propositions. We conducted 20 in-depth interviews across three stakeholder groups: users (solo-living older adults, their family members, and their caregivers), design experts, and technology experts. Through thematic analysis, we elucidated three value perceptions: (1) orchestration needs, (2) relational maintenance, and (3) transparency and explainability. Based on these findings, we propose an integrated value proposition framework for AI-enabled smart homes that aligns the value perceptions of users, designers, and technologists. Theoretically, we extend Service-Dominant Logic by translating value perceptions into integrated value propositions. Practically, we offer actionable guidance for designing AI-enabled smart homes to support solo-living older adults’ wellbeing.

Loneliness has become a prominent public health issue that causes negative consequences at both individual and social levels. Concurrently, the market is actively responding and gradually forms the loneliness economy, addressing human emotional needs by offering related products and services. However, the largely implemented digital solutions remain problematic. This paper aims at investigating how design research has addressed the loneliness issue and what roles design plays in addressing loneliness. A mixed methodological approach was adopted, combining analysis of keyword co-occurrence and a meta-narrative review. The results identify the threefold design contributions: building and enhancing social connectedness, creating artificial companions and social agents, and developing novel tools and participatory methodologies. The analysis also highlights the dual impacts of tech-based design interventions: design not only as a loneliness mediator but also a producer. In response, the paper proposes the PAT framework to advance effective and ethical methodologies in designing for human emotional well-being.

Design students are expected to engage with wicked problems as part of their learning. Since these problems have no definitive solutions, the learning process can be challenging and may negatively affect students’ wellbeing. Cultivating resilience becomes critical. Although the conceptualisation of designer resilience has gained attention, it remains underexplored. This paper proposes a new conceptual model of resilience in design education, suggesting two capacity clusters: one emphasising short-term recovery and balance restoration, and the other focusing on long-term sustained engagement. It further frames resilience cultivation in design education as a wicked problem in itself, characterised by the inherent complexity within the design education system, the uncertainty in measuring resilience outcomes, and the potential value conflicts with designers, stakeholders, design, and institutional goals. This paper concludes by calling for further empirical and exploratory studies to validate and deepen the understanding of designer resilience.

Children’s hospitalisation affects more than physical health; it shapes children’s subjective wellbeing (SWB). Yet design researchers rarely systematically capture SWB. This study introduces the Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire for Hospitalised Children (SWBQ-HC), a tool that measures children’s perceptions of themselves, hospital services, and spaces. Developed by combining validated psychological scales with service- and space-specific items, the tool was piloted with 19 paediatric patients (aged 4–13) and 35 parents. Factor analysis revealed four dimensions: Positive and Negative Feelings about Self, and Feelings about Hospital Services and Spaces. The results highlight the interplay between relational and environmental factors in shaping SWB and reveal gaps in parent-child responses. The SWBQ-HC offers a practical instrument to guide design, evaluate interventions, and track service improvements over time. By operationalising SWB as a measurable outcome, this study positions design as central to the creation of paediatric services that support both emotional and experiential needs.

The recent more-than-human turn in design calls for attentiveness to nonhuman beings. Yet—as Thomas Nagel's famous "What is it like to be a bat?" thought experiment highlights—human experience is constrained by our own sensorium and an irreducible gap in phenomenal access to nonhuman Umwelten. Grounded in eco-phenomenology and eco-somatics, this paper proposes Experiencing the More-than-Human through Human Augmentation (MtHtHA, or ">HtH+"), a design approach that repurposes human augmentation technologies—typically aimed at enhancing human capabilities for human optimization—to create temporary, embodied, first-person experiences that modulate the human sensorium to approximate nonhuman sensory experiences, cultivating ecological awareness, empathy, and care across species boundaries. We articulate seven design principles, report five design cases—EchoVision (bat-like echolocation), FeltSight (star-nosed-mole tactile navigation), FungiSync (fungal network attunement), TentacUs (octopus-like distributed agency), and City of Sparkles (urban data from an AI's perspective)—and discuss implications for more-than-human aesthetics and design practice.

This paper investigates biodiverse design as a practice through which environmental ethics can inform architectural production. Drawing on the concept of bioempathy—understood as the recognition of the intrinsic value of the biotic community—it develops an ethical and operational framework for guiding design reasoning. This framework is then applied to a reflective analysis of biodiverse wall prototypes developed by the author with an interdisciplinary team, used as an empirical ground to examine how ecological intentions were translated into material and spatial decisions, and how observations of plant establishment and spontaneous colonisation contribute to reassessing the assumptions embedded in those intentions. The case highlights how designed systems interact with more-than-human processes that unfold beyond full designer control. Through this combined theoretical and empirical inquiry, the paper reflects on the methodological implications of engaging living systems in design research and examines how biodiverse design may challenge certain conventional architectural values.

This paper employs environmental humanities theories through design, translating them into a more-than-human experiential pedagogy. Drawing on Haraway’s (2016) concept of humans as “humus” and Braidotti’s (2013) notion of the subject as embodied and embedded, it presents an approach that uses the human body to cultivate ecological literacy and make ecological relations tangible through personal involvement. In two public workshops, participants produced phosphate fertiliser from their urine, revealing connections between bodily and planetary metabolisms. This linked the biogeochemical flow of phosphorus within the Planetary Boundaries framework (Rockström et al., 2009) to everyday routines, reframing urine from taboo to resource. The experiments deepened awareness of human entanglement in ecological systems and demonstrated the practical implications of more-than-human design. Three interrelated learning dynamics emerged: embodied ecologies, aesthetic resonance, and planetary intimacies. The project shows design's role beyond the professional realm by following Fry's (2012) view that every-body is a designer.

This study explores how design researchers in Europe understand and enact nature-centred biodesign for regeneration: an emerging approach that bridges design, biology, and ecology to foster regenerative futures. It proposes an evolutionary framework of design agency, mapping the transition from imitation to co-evolution and from instrumental ethics to ecological justice. The framework highlights four paradigmatic quadrants: Anthropocentric Planning, Emerging Bioeconomy, Socio-Ecology, and Regenerative Biodesign that capture how ethical, ecological, and material orientations shape practice. In parallel, it employs a qualitative analysis of a questionnaire with 32 researchers from COST Action DESIGNAE (2025), which investigates how design operates between scientific, material, and social domains in biodesign. Findings reveal that while cross-disciplinary collaboration and material experimentation are flourishing, current approaches remain mechanistic, rooted in optimisation, scalability, and urban-technological paradigms. However, emerging translational and participatory practices indicate a gradual shift from design as problem-solving towards design as a mediator of ecological relationships.

Creative AI technology (AI used in creative practices) is predominantly designed through human-centered approaches, and more specifically human-centered framing of creativity. Drawing on More-than-Human (MTH) design, in this paper, we argue for the need to shift from designing for human-centered creativity to designing for sympoietic making-with within situated ecologies, when it comes to creativity technology. We approach this through a relational, site-oriented design research inquiry that starts with a multispecies ethnography in a local ecology. Through this, we develop insights of more-than-human co-creation processes within the environmental ecology and bring these insights to a materialized form in speculative designs to examine them further. Subsequently, we examine the speculations through the critiques of human-centered conceptualization of creativity, providing an analytical tool for examining human-centered vs. more-than-human-centered notions of creativity in the design processes of creativity technology.

AI devices are structured by “seamless” and “emotional” design, which conceals many underlying mechanisms and algorithmic rules. By contrast, behavioral objects – through defamiliarization and misbehavior – prompt critical reflection on our relationship with technological artifacts and expose their inner workings. However, most behavioral objects, particularly in art contexts, are designed to ensure predictable outcomes and audience interactions, revealing an underlying desire to tightly control the discourse produced by the work. This paper contends that their critical significance can instead emerge from their material presence through a frictional, more-than-human approach in which dysfunction becomes a source of unpredictable expressivity and cooperation. Drawing on the analysis of two prototypes (Data Airbag and CamIA), the paper shows how their design processes and public interactions reveal that integrating friction and alterity from the earliest stages of creation fosters ongoing processes of co-elaboration between humans and artifacts.