Theme

NORDES 2025 takes up the open theme Relational Design to offer perspectives and means through which we may together investigate and discuss complex dilemmas and current responses, along with design’s futures and futures designing.

Relational Design gives attention to ontological multiplicity in evolving processes of becoming and emergence. It accentuates working with possibilities, tensions, paradoxes and contraditictions in re-framing and shaping resonances, alliances, linkages and networks of making and researching.

Working within and across difference, Relational Design instantiates interrelations, intersections and distinctions. It facilitates non-normative, situated knowledge experimentation and its generative practices. Relational designing treasures linked, participative and dynamic agency to bring forward pragmatically viable, equitable and bearable transformative potentials and their resonant effects.

Designing and researching relationally asks us to consider the shaping of re-directive design as well as analytical and methodological frames and practices linked with values, ethics, concepts and methods centred on repair, regeneration and reinvigoration.

This includes how agency be realised when embedded within alliances, networks and webs of relationships to cultivate incipient ventures and bolder analyses in articulating relational design activities and pluralist design research formations.

Overall, rethinking and re-making design relationally invites engagement in working with entanglements – of places, zones,values, processes and participation – that are enmeshed in living and regenerative situations, environments, systems and situated acts of worldmaking.

The following are open prompts for consideration:

How might we re-think and re-work design researching in a way that remains rich and responsible in its situated, exploratory and critical practices while charting pathways and networks, alliances and diversity which contribute to wider structural, systemic and ecological transformation towards sustainable tomorrows?

What are the pragmatic, political and creative-critical characteristics of a linked, re-positioned design inquiry that reaches beyond the logics of immediate market gain and commercial extractivist expolitation and their continuing ecological destruction?

How might we elicit diverse potentials and possibilities for realising plural, mutual, malleable and participative change in which human and nonhuman entities and ecologies are interwoven and interspersed, reflexively, recursively and regeneratively?

What design tools and techniques might be applied to work with temporal and spatial intersections and relations that support shaping creative, multimodal and transductive design literacies in order to steward practices, ethics and cultures of care and environmental justice for near and farflung regenerative futures?

In what ways might we rethink and decolonise roles and relations, activities and responses in shaping counter-narratives and collaborative storying in design inquiries that are infused with context-rich alternatives, plural perspectives and multiple mediational formats?

What non-essentialist, transdisciplinary design-thick intersectional critiques of circular thinking and economic models might inform socially, technically and ecologically responsible and vibrant sustainable change?