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A Relational Design Framework for Designing Feminist Futures in the Finnish Popular Music Sector
No full textDesigners often address wicked problems using collaborative tools with stakeholders. Transition arenas are one such method used to co-create future agendas of change that is increasingly used in design research. Building on community organisation, we argue for more critical assessment of participant interrelations to achieve lasting social change. Consequently, we call for a shift of focus from the transition arena tools and processes to consider relational aspects of participation. Our research context is promoting gender equality in the music sector. Based on expert interviews, a pilot workshop, and an expert panel, we identify and elaborate design considerations for effective community organisation, and we construct a relational, value-based framework to guide the design of our future equality transition arenas
Intentional Action at the Margins: Unpacking Agency in Public Service Ecosystem Design
No full textThis paper examines how public service ecosystems shape the agency of marginalized residents, focusing on immigrant job seekers. While ecosystem perspectives in service design have highlighted marginalization and actor interconnectedness, the role and intricacies of agency remain underexplored. To address this gap, we draw on a service design project in the City of Espoo aimed at improving an employment service for immigrants. Our findings reveal that immigrant job seekers’ agency is affected by (i) limited psychological, financial, and temporal resources, (ii) distorted information flows, (iii) the dependence on community support, (iv) biased attitudes of service staff and managers, and (v) the relationship between agency and serendipity. We demonstrate how a service design approach can surface these hindrances, uncovering how relational aspects within public service ecosystems shape marginalized residents’ agency. Responding to the identified barriers, we propose service design strategies and interventions, offering pathways to better facilitate marginalized residents’ agency within the public sector
Tangible theory as tool for attuning to non-human voices in domestic gardens
No full textThis paper introduces a design research tool that integrates anthropological perspectives on non-human agency to reimagine biodiversity in garden design. While gardens comprise a minor portion of global biomass, they are critical sites for urban biodiversity and multispecies interaction. A central challenge lies in learning to attune to non-human actors. Building on theories of ecological inter-dependence in the Anthropocene, we ask how such perspectives can be operationalised in design practice. Grounded in the Patchy Anthropocene framework (Tsing et al., 2019), the tool translates theoretical insights into an actionable prototype. Drawing on interviews with garden owners in six European countries, it supports collaborative, situated approaches to garden transformation and multispecies ecological stewardshi
Poetic layers: Exploring the aesthetics of bias
No full textAs new technologies enter everyday life, designs have to address new interactions between ethics and aesthetics as new possibilities also come with new consequences. A current example concerns Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the issues of bias that seem to come with its predictive and generative capacities. To explore bias further, we start with the question that if bias is present (and perhaps cannot be completely eliminated), what could it be like to instead work with its expressions? And could exploring an ‘aesthetics of bias’ allow us to come closer to where bias comes from in the first place, in how people relate to others? By practice-based research, this paper investigates how bias can be creatively expressed in technology design. We describe the interactive installation, “Poetic Layers”, consisting of a window, a sugar jar, a coffee pot, and a table, trained and acted by AI and Machine Learning (ML). Through these design experiments, we introduce four interactions to mirror and amplify biases in human relationships - dominance, exclusion, hostility, and fractured balanc
Designing for relay-tional co-becoming
No full textThis paper explores how the relay conversation approach can facilitate designerly co-becoming in rural communities working towards emerging futures. Building on relational perspectives in design research, we engage with the idea that participation in design is not merely about including diverse voices but about fostering conditions for mutual becoming. We examine how this approach unfolds through ongoing engagements and situated moments, where designers and communities navigate uncertainty and collectively shape new potentials. Rather than treating design as a predefined problem-solving activity, the relay conversation approach works with the evolving dynamics of place, social relations, and ecological entanglements. Through autoethnographic reflections, we discuss how these engagements challenge conventional roles of designers and require a heightened sensitivity to the situated nature of futures-in-the-making. We suggest that this approach not only supports new ways of designing together but also nurtures conditions for co-becoming—where designers, participants, and worlds emerge together in perpetual reciprocal transformation, often revealed through subtle yet significant moments of sensitivity
Shaping Space and Forming Dimensionality through Origami Practice
No full textSpace surrounds and enfolds the breadth of our doings. It is vital in relational perspectives on designing because relations exist both in and because of space. This is especially apparent in practice-led design research, in which world-building is predicated on repeated flows that form becomings. Through diverse documentation of the author\u27s origami research, this exploratory paper investigates how engagement with space in the making process provides a rich medium for new perspectives on relationality. Specifically, when space is perceived as alive and dynamic — physically made alongside the artifact — its activation reveals new potentialities for identifying relations and interdependencies. This exploration draws on concepts from philosophy, psychology, and mathematics to propose an alternate view of how relations constitute processes of becoming, and its aim is to present a specific case of making that may be abstracted to shape discussion around the role of relationality in designing
Towards eco-social contracts through an entangled manifestation of digital litter
No full textMany of the current debates in technology concern the extractive practices around planetary resources and data, which produce electronic waste as well as everyday sense of clutter among media channels and files. In this paper, we engage with this problem space through a specific focus on Terms of Service agreements, which have become a prerequisite for even the most rudimentary use of technology. We do this by presenting an exploded view of an existing Terms of Service policy ecosystem, in the form of an outdoor installation, temporarily littering a patch of nature. Through this installation, we expose eco-social contracts as a design opening for more-than-human data governance, ecological temporalities, and the right to patchwork as generative concepts
The Relational Becoming of a Participatory Design Commoner
No full textThis research expands the understanding of the collective designer behind Scandinavian Participatory Design with the Latin American notion of relational ontology, which posits a worldview where everything and everyone are mutually constituted through evolving relationships. Drawing from three thematic workshops with design practitioners and scholars that explored intersections between commoning and designing, this research unveils the relational becoming of a participatory design commoner. This includes the production of a shared subjectivity—the collective designer—as integral to commoning design and designing commons. Specifically, we explore the role of participatory designers in commoning through their subjectivity in their infrastructuring actions and affective engagements with objective commons
Lost in generation: illustrating Stable Diffusion AI’s colonial bias in representing South African communication design
No full textGenerative AI (gAI) image models are increasingly being used as tools for conceptualisation and visualisation in design. These models are, however, not neutral owing to training datasets that prioritise Western aesthetics. Consequently, an emergent challenge is that AI-generated images tend to disregard nuanced representations. Li et al. (2024) echo this critique, acknowledging AI’s inability to comprehend cultural complexity, a critical issue in South Africa’s given its colonial and apartheid past. Accordingly, we use a relational design lens to critically examine how Stable Diffusion fails to engage with South Africa’s diverse cultural makeup; we present a qualitative content analysis of AI-generated datasets in response to communication design prompts. This paper contributes to discussions on AI’s role in shaping contemporary visual culture and its broader implications for design. Additionally, we explore how designers can influence AI training to foster more culturally inclusive and representative algorithms
Linguistic hospitality: Thinking with language to reflect on positionality within more-than-human participatory design.
No full textThis text is a reflection on an ongoing PhD research on more-than-human hospitality, more particularly on how farmers live with water. Within my research, I will undertake an ethnographic study paired with participatory design, through which I will attempt to bring water home - shift mindsets towards water and build capacity for an environmental transition. In this contribution I will address a relatively under-discussed issue of multilingualism within participatory design and reflect on the process of entering a sensitive context without speaking the native language. Taking the form of a polyphonic essay, this text will explore paradoxes and possibilities lying in thinking with language(s). I will claim that embracing the uncertainty translation poses and taking a more quiet and humble approach may spark a more genuine connection between me and the participants and, in turn, form the basis for poetics of relation. (Glissant [1990] 1997