This contribution conceives the interaction between humans and artifacts as a relational threshold in which body, interfaces, and contexts co-produce themselves through affective dynamics. Through a genealogy of listening technologies - from domestic radio to voice interfaces - the article examines how design orients desire, pleasure, and behavior by crafting affordances that stabilize postures, attention, and daily rituals. The notion of affective openings is proposed as a critical-operational criterion to distinguish design configurations that produce capture from those that preserve practicable reversibility, contestability, and plurality of trajectories. Design emerges as an affectively and politically responsible practice when it organizes conditions of experience capable of translating human action into desirable action without transforming it into a closure of the field of possibilities.
In collaborative projects involving Indigenous communities and tackling local and situated issues, new ways of engaging in collective design practice (CDP) are essential, as highlighted in discussions on the decolonization of design. This article examines the "dynamic of trust" as an ideal condition for such work: a fluid process that supports collaboration, creativity, and relational development in meaningful CDP. Using a practice-led approach and a systemic lens, the study explores the dynamic of trust based on learnings from two international projects that took place in 2020-2022: (a) Dialogues and Encounters in the Arctic (DEA), set in a S & aacute;mi context with institutional partners from Finland and Sweden; and (b) Solutions for Engaging and Empowering Youth with Trans-Atlantic Mirroring (SEEYouth), a project concerned with marginalized youth involving partners from Brazil, the UK, Canada, and Finland. This process included the use of multiple qualitative methods to document experiential knowledge held by project collaborators. The findings suggest that designers should focus on organizing projects and relationships in ways that strengthen trust on multiple levels (in oneself, in others, and as an atmosphere), supported by transversal skills and collaborative approaches rooted in (Indigenous) collective action. More significantly, the study contends that embracing a dynamic, relationship-centered approach to CDP is the key to socially responsible design.
This paper outlines the understanding of imaginative agency - the confidence, capacity, and creativity to imagine plural and equitable collective futures and move toward them - through examples from workshop-based participatory research. It shows how emotions play a vital role in animating imaginative agency and enabling its affective and bodily complexity. This approach counters the common neglect of feelings as world-making forces in design practice - an evasion that reproduces dominant narratives and unjust structures. The discussion is anchored in work on affect, bringing these insights together with practices of design that materialize and explore futures. More concretely, imaginative agency at work is illustrated through systems-shifting and future-oriented projects, demonstrating how participatory co-design workshops engage emotions and embodiment to create space for anticipating life otherwise. Through three themes - orienting, imagining, and locating -imaginative agency activated in practice is explored, showing how people's emotions and embodied sensemaking bring possible futures closer.
The ecological crisis is the result of colonial capitalist domination over lands and peoples. It is therefore impossible for more-than-human design to achieve its goal of creating a more socially and environmentally just world without engaging in substantive action toward decolonization. However, critiques from Indigenous and decolonial scholarship have also highlighted the ways in which posthumanism - the dominant philosophy of more-than-human design - has inadvertently reified coloniality. This is likely because the field benefits from a perceived goodness, which can limit its ability to assess itself critically. To counter this, I analyze my own more-than-human design work alongside that of others using the concept of colonial performances as a critical reflexive framework for more-than-human design. I identify and discuss the implications of two colonial performances in the field: aesthetic plundering and recentering whiteness. By promoting a deeper awareness of positionality, this paper contributes to more-than-human design's capacity for critical reflexivity and improve research and decision-making processes to support decolonization.
This project, comprising thirteen digitally composed watercolor images accompanied by narrative text, explores the transformation of southern Italian women historically labeled as terronas. Once marginalized and defined by labor-intensive rural tasks, the terronas' deep connection to the land, nature, and family becomes a source of transformation, resilience, and strength. The artwork traces their journey from constrained, stereotypical roles to accomplished post-terronas who together build their cultural identity and influence. Through ancestral knowledge and a profound bond with the land, post-terronas offer solutions to contemporary global challenges, such as environmental preservation, the creation of thriving communities, and the formation of fulfilling, joyful lifestyles. This project aims to be a healing artifact; a narrative involving painting and imagination meant to promote well-being and inspire activism. By offering visuals and stories of transformation, it encourages viewers to perceive themselves as capable of enacting positive change in their communities through connections with human and more-than-human beings.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Greek Ministry of Health launched a campaign titled "Mu Epsilon Nu Omicron Upsilon Mu Epsilon Sigma Pi Iota Tau Iota" [MENOUME SPITI (WE STAY AT HOME)] to encourage citizens to stay home in order to prevent the virus from spreading. The campaign gained social media traction as the government announced further precautionary measures, including the suspension of civil services and public gatherings, the cancelation of national and religious festivities, and the closure of shops, schools, museums, and archaeological sites nationwide. Against this unprecedented socio-political context, this visual essay takes on the role of a social statement, in the form of a visual poem, while refraining from taking positions in socio-political and economic debates around containment measures.
This statement of practice explores the use of reflective pedagogical strategies to address age-related biases among design students, focusing on two key exercises: assumption dumps and time capsule letters. Rather than addressing ageism solely through user-centered approaches, the two pedagogical strategies introduced in this paper encourage design students to critically examine their own assumptions and to imagine their future selves. These exercises were applied across a range of design cohorts in higher education and continuing learning contexts, including undergraduate design students, recent design graduates, and professional designers. Participants engaged in structured reflection and introspective writing, designed to make aging a personally relevant concept and to surface unconscious biases. Results indicate that these strategies fostered greater empathy, heightened awareness of age-related bias, and, in some cases, ongoing critical reflection. By positioning introspection as an entry point into age-inclusive design thinking, we suggest a flexible and scalable strategy for embedding age-related issues into design curricula.
This article tells the story of a tri-colored yard sign, the "welcome neighbors sign," that originated in a small religious community in Virginia. Through Mennonite social networks, the sign became a popular symbol of political resistance to the dominant immigration narrative around the 2016 presidential election cycle and beyond. Using a case study approach, this article explores the evolution of the sign from a neighborhood conversation to a national campaign, the political context in which the sign was created, its cultural and religious context within the Mennonite faith, its design and distribution, and, finally, its message and impact. This case study speaks to graphic designers who are interested in using their skills to influence social and political spaces. It examines how one small act of design had the power to spark a broader socio-political movement, and it considers how the use of nontraditional media can illuminate alternative stories and points of view, amplify disenfranchised voices, and create social change.
African interlaces are continuous "over-under" paths that can be found in designs throughout the African continent. They include lusona drawings, Orisha beadwork, and related designs from hair braiding, textiles, and other media. But there has been little research examining the common cultural themes expressed, or the common elements of their shape constructions. We begin with an ethnocomputing methodology to show how their visualization of "circulating vital energy" is expressed by their formal properties as "dynamic grids." In the second part of the paper, we examine their relationship to diverse Black interlace designs in the Americas: cornrow hairstyling, Haitian v & egrave;v & egrave;, Brazilian capoeira, and other forms show dynamic grids as "heritage algorithms." The final part of the paper looks at how contemporary Black designers have utilized these cultural and formal properties as heritage algorithms, highlighting their contribution to liberatory practices in what we are calling "diaspora design ecologies."
