DESIGN ISSUESPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2026-04-02DOI: 10.1162/DESI.a.710
Liesbeth Huybrechts;Moniek Driesse;Mela Žuljević;Colm mac Aoidh;Henric Benesch
{"title":"Introduction: Design and Articulations of Pasts","authors":"Liesbeth Huybrechts;Moniek Driesse;Mela Žuljević;Colm mac Aoidh;Henric Benesch","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.710","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue focuses on how designing consciously with the past can play a pivotal role in repoliticizing notions of time in design research. The articles gathered here further discussions on the critical potential of addressing the past in Design Issues. They challenge ideas of being out of time—not only in an ecological sense and because of broken worldly relations but also on an institutional level when tight timelines tied to funding mechanisms create obstacles in reaching design project goals. The authors encourage persistence, endurance, and determination in design practices that, in one way or another, acknowledge human and more-than-human past engagements.","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"3-14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DESIGN ISSUESPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2026-04-02DOI: 10.1162/DESI.a.716
Susanne Fredholm;Ulrika Jansson;Petra Adolfsson
{"title":"Storying Multispecies Heritage: Artistic Approaches to Designing Urban Futures","authors":"Susanne Fredholm;Ulrika Jansson;Petra Adolfsson","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.716","url":null,"abstract":"The paper examines how art-based, multispecies storytelling can inform heritage and urban planning through the case of The Conference of the Birds (CoB) in Frihamnen, Gothenburg. Bringing together artists, designers, architects, and ornithologists, CoB demonstrates how emotional and sensory engagement can deepen understanding of historical and ecological layers of place. Using a critical heritage ecologies lens, we show how the project reframes heritage as a dynamic ecosystem service. A boundary-work perspective further illustrates how artist-created spaces that bridge species and disciplinary divides can support sustainable planning, multiprofessional collaboration, and participatory urban development.","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"87-103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DESIGN ISSUESPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2026-04-02DOI: 10.1162/DESI.a.717
Paola Pierri
{"title":"The New, the Old, and the Habitual: A Design Anthropological Outlook on the Question of Time","authors":"Paola Pierri","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.717","url":null,"abstract":"The article draws from a design anthropology project in community mental health services with “Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller” communities to reflect on the value of designing with the past. Drawing on anthropological understanding and framing of temporalities, the article argues the need for design to engage with time more holistically, including dealing with the past. The past could be considered a (so-far) unused material for design, a source of creativity, and a crucial dimension for framing and enhancing agency and action toward the future.","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"104-113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Overcoming Fatalism: Fostering New Notions of Temporality through Participatory Design Futuring","authors":"Luca Simeone;Hadas Zohar;Chris Muashekele;Rike Neuhoff","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.711","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary crises are often viewed through a lens of despair, underpinned by the conviction that humanity is doomed and its fate sealed. Such views stem from and are reinforced by fatalism. Fatalism can be associated with a specific temporal perspective that understands time as a linear sequence of events that unfold inexorably and beyond one's control. This article adopts a temporal lens on fatalism and conceptualizes it according to three aspects: Time is seen as linear, predetermined, and monodimensional. A fatalist mindset can have various negative implications for individuals and societies, among others, undermining personal agency and discouraging collective efforts to address problems. Drawing insights from workshops conducted in Namibia and various European countries, this study explores whether participatory design futuring methods can be used to confront fatalism and promote a shift toward an understanding of temporality as pluriversal, nonlinear, and open.","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"15-31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DESIGN ISSUESPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2026-04-02DOI: 10.1162/DESI.a.714
Sam van der Horst
{"title":"The Design Archeology Research Kit: Exploring the Past through Conducting “Design Archeology”","authors":"Sam van der Horst","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.714","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.714","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"114-118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DESIGN ISSUESPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2026-04-02DOI: 10.1162/DESI.a.715
Roberta Burchardt
{"title":"Over Wooden Planks: Sounding Colonial Inheritance, Engaging Material and Affective Ecologies","authors":"Roberta Burchardt","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.715","url":null,"abstract":"This article emerges from a practice-based doctoral research project that critically engages with colonial history through the inheritance of a listed house in southern Brazil, proposing personal heritage as an epistemological stance. It investigates how decolonial, feminist, and multispecies perspectives can inform the study of material culture and coloniality. Employing decolonial listening and affective writing as methods, the research explores the polyphonic sonic and material environments of the house, emphasizing the South American Global South as a critical orientation. The first part shares embodied interactions with colonial heritage, while the second narrates the house's historical materiality with theoretical references, interweaving images from the 1980s and the present to reflect on its materiality.","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"66-86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DESIGN ISSUESPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2026-04-02DOI: 10.1162/DESI.a.713
Markus Wernli;Kam-Fai Chan;Daniel Keith Elkin
{"title":"Design with the Past through Organizational Exaptation in Rural Hong Kong","authors":"Markus Wernli;Kam-Fai Chan;Daniel Keith Elkin","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.713","url":null,"abstract":"Overcoming eco-social disconnects between urban and rural areas is a critical design challenge. This article explores organizational exaptation as a strategy to regenerate opportunities in rural regions with scarce organizational capacities. Exaptation as social reinvention involves repurposing local resources for new uses. Examining a pilot in rural Hong Kong, a social enterprise for reengaging untapped local legacies, we demonstrate how exaptation can create eco-social opportunities in previously lagging areas. Through the collective efforts of locals, entrepreneurs, and designers, exaptation reveals new affordances using what is locally available. Thus, we see that designing with the past requires strategies like collaborative encounters, material prototyping, adaptive social formats, and inspiration transfer. Overall, exaptation as a catalyst for social innovation is not predicated on historical determinism but on reenacting existing resources.","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"49-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DESIGN ISSUESPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2026-04-02DOI: 10.1162/DESI.a.712
Noémi Zajzon
{"title":"Redesigning Relations: Attachments in Citizens' Participatory History Making","authors":"Noémi Zajzon","doi":"10.1162/DESI.a.712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.712","url":null,"abstract":"Departing from the premise that participation is experiential and historical, this article proposes that attachments can redesign our relationships with society, as individuals, a collective, or a movement. It extends our understanding of attachments beyond sociotechnical acting capacities by examining their entanglement with affect and history to inform relationality within participatory design. Drawing on three movement-based initiatives in Romania and Hungary, the study illustrates how (civic) attachments secure and mobilize affective values to drive political participation and recontextualize citizen histories within the spatiotemporal settings of collective identity formation. It demonstrates that attachments create participatory forms which, through their affective register, deepen understandings of the past and inform the transformative potential of relational antagonism for design practice. In doing so, the article broadens the conceptual and methodological scope of attachments, contributing to the politics of participation and relationality in design research.","PeriodicalId":51560,"journal":{"name":"DESIGN ISSUES","volume":"41 4","pages":"32-48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147588274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}