Conquering the silence, exploring the uncomfortable together: A collective exploration of discomfort as a design resource
Monday, 12 June, 9:30 – 13:45
Max participants: 12
Organisers: Kristina Popova, Joo Young Park and Arife Dila Demir
Building on feminist HCI, care ethics and soma design, we invite design practitioners to collectively explore otherwise hidden and isolating experience of discomfort. By discomfort we understand a range of first-person experiences: from physical pain to a slight sense of unease related to social interaction. The purpose of the workshop is to explore uncomfortable feelings and sensations, which are present in our bodies but whose existence is rarely acknowledged and shared. We will engage in the exploration through a one day workshop combining bodily exercises with collaborative design activities. The first goal of the workshop is to materialise corporeal discomfort and experiment with different ways of articulating experience. The second goal is to explore and change the process of designing together through. We will pay attention to the uncomfortable in order to develop the ways of working together that are based on our shared vulnerabilities rather than privileges and shed light on how collective immersion of bodily discomfort could spark a caring and generative design process.
Bringing the forest around the table: How to support other-than-human participation in urban regeneration processes through design?
Monday, 12 June, 9:30 – 14:45
Max participants: 12
Organisers: Hadas Zohar and Rike Neuhoff
Complex systemic challenges such as urban regeneration projects that strive for a positive long-term impact, must take into account views and needs of multiple stakeholders, both of humans and other species (e.g. animals, plants, landscapes etc). While human actors can directly engage and articulate their own perspectives, other species depend on humans to represent them. Humans who seek to represent other-than-human needs must be equipped with relevant knowledge, empathy, and imagination to do so. Additionally, they can benefit from having communication and representation techniques to support them in this task. While participatory design suggests a rather rich toolkit to support the joint work of stakeholders, the representation of other species in this context is understudied. The purpose of the workshop is to address this gap. Through a combination of hands-on activities and discussions, participants will have the opportunity to collaboratively explore and reflect on how design can support the participation of multi-species actors in participatory workshops in urban regeneration projects.
Fabulating Futures for Flourishing and Vibrant Worlds
Monday, 12 June, 9:00 – 15:00
Max participants: 20
Organisers: Tom Jenkins, Marie-Louise Juul Søndergaard, Pedro Sanches, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Nadia Campo Woytuk, Noura Howell, Karey Helms, Laurens Boer and Jason Tucker
This one-day workshop will explore fabulations in design research. Bringing together design researchers and practitioners in hands-on exploration and critical dialogue, we will explore emerging practices and potentials of using fabulations in futures-oriented and exploratory practice-based design research. Drawing on fabulations’ relations with feminist technoscience and more-than-human concerns, we seek to understand if and how the practice of fabulating can contribute to designing vibrant worlds that can flourish in new ways.
(Re)Narrating the Holobiont through Design
Monday, 12 June, 9:00 – 15:00
Max participants: 20
Organisers: Danielle Wilde and Tau Lenskjold
As part of design’s transformation towards sustainable practices, growing interest has been directed towards the inclusion of more-than- human perspectives. This workshop seeks to engage questions of giving voice to our microbiomes—the plethora of critters who co-constitute us as embodied and social beings but are most often invisible in both human experience and design practices. The aim is to experiment with collective and experiential ways of making tangibly present the microorganisms that live around on and within us and make us hosts of living assemblages, or what biologists refer to as holobionts. Beginning from past individual experiences, workshop participants are invited to collectively materialise, narrate, and perform more-than-human knowledge in the present. From these perspectives, we engage microbial-human interdependence, making it conceptually and methodically relatable by means of experimental design inquiry before re-narrating the collective experiences as microbial design futures.
Earth Logic Local Governance Linköping
Monday, 12 June, 9:00 – 13:00
Max participants: 20
Organisers: Mathilda Tham and Kate Fletcher
Urgent and intertwined social, cultural, economic and ecological challenges require design to move beyond the frameworks – such as the economic growth logic – which have spawned the problems. The Earth Logic plan (Fletcher and Tham, 2019) framed three possible action areas which can liberate design from both the focus on growth and focus on the tangible object. The action area of governance – directed to regulation, organisation, negotiation – allows design to engage concretely with complex relationships and entanglements. Drawing on feminist technoscientific notions of care (Puig dela Bellacasa, 2017) we position governance as a regulatory activity available to everyone specific, in a situated everywhere. In a pilot study, we have explored the potential of this almost ‘blank space’ by prototyping a local fashion government in the Northwest of England. Drawing on the concepts, methods and tools we have developed, the workshop invites participants to form a temporary government specific to the site of Linköping and the conference.
Shame Cues: Detecting shame in disguise and playing with new perspectives to inform the design process.
Monday, 12 June, 9:00 – 15:00
Max participants: 15
Organisers: June Trondsen and Casper Boks
This workshop offers a playful learning experience where participants are introduced to various ways of thinking about shame and learn to understand how this emotion takes shape through social concepts such as guilty pleasures, euphemism, vicarious embarrassment, forbidden fruits, stylizing, satire, stigma and taboos. The workshop aims to test and discuss the usefulness of a prototyped design tool named Shame Cues, specifically focusing on its applicability for the problem framing stage of a design process. Shame Cues is a card deck comprising 64 cards and describes a broad range of phenomena and manifestations of shame, as observed through culture, social interactions and physical objects. The card deck is a result of an ongoing research project and is made in an attempt to give designers a hands-on tool to discuss, critically reflect upon, and play with social concepts where shame and other self-conscious emotions play (or could play) a central role.