Nicholas Sebastian Stevens

Designing for democracy often emphasizes values but underestimates the role of relationships in shaping civic life. This workshop explores how relationality - our social ties, political agency, and economic conditions - affects grassroots democratic design experiments and the technologies they inspire. Grounded in deep democracy and participatory approaches, we engage in small-scale experiments using Relational Sandbox to explore how new technologies that support democratic values can reshape power dynamics and how locally rooted, tailored designs can counteract capital-driven technological development. By experimenting with relational civics, we will collectively imagine new design strategies that prioritize meaningful technologies for deep democracy over profit-driven ones. This workshop invites designers, activists, and researchers to co-develop strategies and design guidelines that place relationships at the heart of democratic practice.

Design plays an integral role in shaping our everyday lives by providing and mediating the objects and relationships we surround ourselves with. As we find our lifestyles inherently unsustainable, design is therefore also implicated. If design is to fully address this issue and meaningfully contribute to future sustainable lifestyles, then it must undergo significant transformation. Part of this transformation must include design education. While many agree on the necessary transformation of design education, disagreements arise as to what this new education might entail and, significantly, how it might be implemented. This article explores how transformations happen in design education and to what extent such education should tackle significant societal issues, including sustainability, amid the increasing complexity and interdependence of modern-day challenges. It investigates practical issues around implementing such education, its challenges and opportunities, as well as how geographical location might help or hinder through aspects such as social or cultural tendencies, infrastructures or regulation and historical context. To this end, six in-depth interviews were conducted with educators at the forefront of this transformation in Scandinavia, most of whom have established courses and programs that address systemic problems and engage students in reflecting and designing to mitigate current challenges. The analysis of interviews utilised an emergent coding method. It led to four important findings that require attention when considering sustainable design education. The findings are (1) these transformations are often driven by impassioned and visionary individuals, (2) new variants of design must incorporate collaborations at all scales and in various formats, (3) increased responsibility arises from immersion in collaborative projects concerning long-term visions, values, and continuity in design beyond current practices and finally, (4) there are some unresolved tensions found in the balance of practical, reflective, and analytical skills needed. At a more abstract level, this paper positions design education as a significant force in transitioning to sustainable futures.

We believe that challenging times demand HCI education to pay attention to current real-life, complex, systemic problems. Therefore, we suggest an integrated framework for teaching HCI that involves combining the transition design framework, which suggests long-term, future-oriented design on a large scale toward more sustainable lifestyles, and speculative and critical design. The integration of the two creates spaces for dialogues and debates enabling students to take a more critical perspective concerning possible futures and technology design. We suggest studio-based pedagogy and explicate various aspects of the course, including its theoretical and practical underpinnings, pedagogical approach, and provide examples of projects to illustrate how the framework was used and ways in which speculative and critical design and thinking were crucial for learning. Finally, we highlight six learning facets that might contribute to orienting students’ upcoming professional work towards desirable futures.