TRACKS

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now ubiquitous, influencing many aspects of life. Ensuring AI’s acceptability requires addressing ethical issues like bias, fairness, and transparency, its impact on labor and the environment. The development of frameworks is needed for the responsible design, development and deployment of AI technologies, including for robotics and IoT devices, from testing AI’s datasets to measuring its environmental impact.  

Advancements in virtual and extended reality bring new dimensions of user engagement and unique ethical concerns, such as user safety and psychological impacts. How do we design innovative and responsible immersive experiences? This track offers a platform for critical reflection and discussions on digital ethics, inspiring designers to lead with ethical principles and shape a just and desirable digital future. 

Designers play a crucial role in shifting the mindset around food consumption and production, which is the most impactful and challenging leverage point. We frame this discussion around the question: ‘How can designers valorize and emphasize food serenity to contribute to environmental preservation through their methods and practices, while also ensuring that design takes a leading role in driving this food transition?

 The theme of Food Serenity involves a focus on enhancing food well-being (better eating habits), embracing sobriety (such as low energy consumption, local sourcing, slow food principles, and sustainability), improving food access (through policy and food safety), and ensuring transparency (regarding the origin and production conditions, food ethics of highly processed foods, and the acceptance of alternative protein sources). »

 The concept of Food Serenity challenges designers to balance individual well-being in relation to consumption with environmental and societal responsibility. Designers working on food-related topics are imagining sensemaking new food production models, driving innovative processing methods, facilitating the adoption of sustainable eating and consumption habits, and developing visions for regenerative food systems of the future. Using design methods like a transdisciplinary systemic design approach can stimulate a paradigm shift for by acting on different levels: Micro (individual), Meso (companies), and Macro (public sector). In the future, this will empower designers to position their impact and take on a strategic leadership role in the food sector. 

Various analytical frameworks have been developed, focusing on creativity, innovation impacts, and stages of transformation in projects and work cultures (Salinas et all, 2024). We call for new analytical taxonomies on design for policy to evaluate contexts like hospitals, urban bodies, or community centers, ensuring elderly well-being. Our aim is to review public innovation landscapes through social, economic, and political impacts, exploring design-led strategies, governance, and impacts through co-design practices or collaborative management, and evaluation. Designers’ roles in public sector transformation and ethical leadership are ought to be highlighted (Buchanan, 2020). 

Buchanan, C. (2020) What is strategic design? An examination of new design activity in the public and civic sectors. Doctoral thesis. Lancaster University, UK. 

DiSalvo, C. (2022) Design as Democratic Inquiry: Putting Experimental Civics into Practice. The MIT Press. 

Salinas, L., Yarrow, L., and Lagedamont, M. (2024) Critical service design for government innovation, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.532  

Tronto, J., 1993, Un monde vulnérable. Pour une politique du care. Paris. La Découverte 

To address these dead-ends, transforming and regenerating existing cities is a key lever for ecological and social transition, as 80% of the cities of tomorrow already exist (Leconte, Grisot, 2022). Regenerative design aims to go beyond sustainable design principles to foster the co-evolution of natural and social systems (Blanco, 2022) and calls for systems perspectives and a territorial approach (Attia, 2016; Brown et al., 2018; Zhang, Skitmore, De Jong, Huisingh, & Gray, 2015; Cole, Oliver, & Robinson, 2013). 

We call for contributions analyzing methodologies, processes, projects, and outcomes of design and co-design linking public authorities, urban citizens/citizen groups, and professionals such as designers, urban planners, landscape architects, architects and/or developers. It involves questioning equitable territorial development that incorporates the needs of all, including the special needs of disadvantaged populations, while promoting sustainable cities and territories (Harvey, 2012; Glasser, 2011; Gehl, 2010; Florida, 2002; Sennett, 1992). It also explores the current and emerging roles of designers for city and territory shaping and transformation that include notably regenerative design, inclusive design, nature-inspired design, resilient design, circular design, speculative design, etc.

It also examines devices that encourage user engagement in knowledge and critical thinking, or conversely that exploit user attention and related ethical issues. It looks at how they contribute to economic and information service models. It explores the current and future roles of designers in shaping and processing information and knowledge, and how new digital product teams are being structured.  

We will highlight the unique perspectives designers bring as their ethical influence increases, identifying and addressing gaps in their capacities to fulfill this new frontier. Discussions will focus on the dilemmas of maintaining creative essence while assuming leadership responsibilities, in addition to changing organizational models by ethically evolving with new tools, shared language, creative cultures. The track encourages research on how trained designers take on leadership roles outside traditional design disciplines, particularly as they extend into entrepreneurs. We will discuss the power of purpose in designing more ethical businesses, including the levers of equitable business models, sustainable practices, and public-private partnerships. Join us to engage in discussions and contribute to the evolving landscape of design and entrepreneurship.