Conference Agenda

In an era marked by increasing uncertainty and precariousness, feminist care ethics provide a conceptual foundation for reimagining alternative futures, challenging the persistence of "futures-as-usual" that often perpetuate dominant sociotechnical regimes. Care is a future-oriented and imaginative ethic: one that requires moral imagination to recognize the needs of distant others, the vulnerabilities of future generations, and the ethical entanglements of emerging sociotechnical systems. Building on an ethnographic study of design practices within a multinational technology company, we propose reorienting questions and tactics to integrate care ethics into future-making, addressing the disjunction between techno-futures and emergent care-informed design approaches. We outline how this reorientation can move from caring about to caring as an ongoing, future-oriented responsibility, supporting practitioners in making moral judgments that embed care in their work.

Fostering intercultural integration of students of diverse backgrounds is a key concern for design education. This study examines how design students at a culturally-diverse North American university perceive cultural inclusivity in their educational experience and effects on sense of belonging and integration. We surveyed 102 undergraduate and graduate students about expressing cultural identities in the design classroom, cultural inclusivity of learning materials, environment and interactions, and navigating challenging experiences in cross-cultural integration at the school. Although the study found a considerable level of cultural inclusivity, findings suggest that efforts to foster diversity and integration are still necessary, since difficulties seem to disproportionately affect international students – communication barriers, group work imbalances, critique sessions not inclusive, and learning materials that do not reflect global, multicultural perspectives. Based on the findings, we indicate areas for improvement and share recommendations on making design education more inclusive, equitable, and responsive to diverse student needs.

Although underwater soundscapes of urban rivers are understudied, they can reveal urban and biological processes across multiple scales. We present a case study of the Charles River’s underwater soundscapes in Boston, Massachusetts. We approach underwater acoustic sensing as a method to attune to infrastructural, non-human, and environmental dynamics. Given that water is an ideal medium for sound propagation, the river becomes a magnifier for ignored aspects of the city, such as the urban infrastructure’s impact on the river's soundscape or aquatic fauna activity. In the sensing process, the river’s underwater environment becomes a space where human, more-than-human, environmental, and infrastructural actors converge, shaping what is audible and recordable. Based on fieldwork observations of organisms dwelling on the sensing device, we reflect on the device’s influence on the environment and speculate about possible sensor-organism interactions. This highlights underwater acoustic sensing as a method to produce data in interaction with the environment.

Conversations about end-of-life (EOL) care are often delayed until moments of crisis, leaving little time or emotional capacity for people to reflect on what matters most to them. This paper reports on a reflective co-design workshop in which fifteen participants used material-facilitated methods to explore their imagined EOL experiences. Through landscape making, journey mapping, and collaborative service model building, participants expressed hopes, fears, values, and priorities that are difficult to articulate through direct questioning. The materials created a low-pressure and supportive environment, allowing participants to approach a sensitive topic at their own pace and translate personal meaning into ideas for more compassionate systems and services. The findings show how design can function as a form of care by fostering emotional safety, agency, and shared understanding. The workshop demonstrates the potential of material-facilitated co-design to support proactive EOL conversations, strengthen patient-centered care, and encourage reflective dialogue in community and clinical contexts.

Through Tower of Babel, a spatialized sound installation based on field recordings at the U.S.–Mexico border, we examine how sonic boundary objects translate bureaucratic infrastructures into embodied, perceptual encounters. The installation treats borders as culturally constructed virtual spaces rather than geometric lines, enabling movement across sonic channels and challenging fixed notions of data and identity. We argue that sound-driven artifacts can function as boundary objects in design contexts by mediating knowledge, exposing hierarchies, and fostering collective sense-making. These artifacts support cooperation across diverse stakeholders through sonic habitability: auditory conditions that reframe relations among human, technological, and environmental actors. While auditory perception enables shared recognition of structured and atmospheric information, the experiential knowledge of our sonic memory enables the same acoustic events to acquire different meanings depending on context and setting of the listener.

Sonification and visualization practices usually take "data" as a given, without considering the complex ways in which data is collected or the complexity of the phenomena that data represents. Autographic design is an emerging field approaching this issue by starting the design process before data collection with the phenomenon itself, treating data as a material trace rather than an abstract reference. An autographic display uses a phenomenon's self-inscription, rather than its mediation and representation in symbolic encodings. While the existing framework of autographic design has a strong relation to the visual domain, a phenomenon may also reveal itself through its sonic trace. The contributions of this paper are threefold. We extend autographic design into the sonic domain, introduce autographic sonification instruments, and propose a design continuum.

Public-sector innovation units across Latin America increasingly use design methodologies to reimagine policymaking and service delivery. However, fragmented and inconsistent documentation continues to limit institutional learning and sustained impact. This study maps how public design is practiced through a multilingual literature review of 84 sources (from an initial corpus of 700 sources) analyzed across English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Coding findings at institutional, project, and individual levels reveals four critical patterns: inconsistent terminology hindering synthesis, uneven geographic coverage leaving vast regions underrepresented, superficial methodology documentation describing tools without unpacking adaptation or context, and striking temporal gaps with minimal longitudinal evidence linking pilots to sustained policy change. These findings expose how scattered documentation prevents innovations from compounding into embedded governance capacity. Our analysis is the first step in building an open repository that builds collective memory in a field too often starting from scratch.

This qualitative study examines social isolation among Boston's elders aged 65 and older. We explored ways to employ service design and interactive encounters to connect different generations around history. Our focus was on Boston’s Seaport—a district shaped by redevelopment and technology. This study involved four interviews with museum professionals, elders, and locals to understand how memories influence community connections. The Time Travelers app features an Interactive Memory Map of stories along with guided walks and collaborative memory threads that encourage intergenerational exchange. Complementing the app, a Seaport boardwalk installation features televisions from different decades displaying memories from each era. Visitors can browse stories and record their own through connected telephones. Together, these experiences transform public spaces and technology into portals of living history, promoting social engagement and purpose across generations. Future studies may examine Time Travelers’ long-term impact on social connections and expand participation to include more elders across Boston.

This paper explores materials in transition through Living Textiles, a platform that integrates genetically engineered whole-cell biosensors into textiles for on-body physiological and environmental sensing. The project investigates how textiles can act as computational and ecological systems, integrating living cells that sense their environment and communicate through material change. By combining biological sensing with textile craft, Living Textiles reframes smart materials as regenerative and cohabited rather than extractive and disposable. The research contributes to the field of transitional materials design by: (1) presenting new interaction possibilities with microbial cells; (2) developing methods for designing microenvironments that sustain life and sensing; and (3) creating textile architectures that integrate textile fluidics to support designed textile biomes. Instead of relying on electronics, these textile ecologies invite new ways of thinking about care, microbiome design, and material intelligence.