Organisers: Jörn Christiansson, Thomas Binder, Gabriela Quintana Vigiola.

Over the last two decades, Participatory Design (PD) has expanded its scope towards the democratisation of design in diverse settings, embracing the entanglements of humans and non-humans in sociomaterial arrangements. Despite the foregrounding of relations in these entanglements, little attention has been given to what role spatiality and places may have in PD. This workshop explores the entanglement of participatory design, spatiality, technologies and places based on design cases from participants. Using a design charette methodology, participants will collaboratively (1) map how participatory entanglements shape and are shaped by design research and practice; (2) identify and unpack disciplinary tensions and opportunities; and (3) co-create a vision and action plan for bridging silos and fostering collaboration across disciplines. The aim is to build an interdisciplinary understanding of the intimate entanglement of humans and non-humans, spatiality and places in the complex social-material arrangements we engage with in PD.

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Organisers: Ian Johnson, Margaret Hughes.

In this workshop, we focus on values misalignment as a central problem and use a “confessions” format for collective knowledgebuilding. The format deliberately creates space for vulnerability and honest reflection that typical academic formats discourage. This workshop emerges from our ongoing research on digital civics, civic technology, and values-sensitive design, representing a critical turn in our work from developing methodologies to questioning their limits and appropriate application—a move we believe is essential for the maturation and continued relevance of participatory approaches. What we have discovered through informal sharing of stories at conferences and in private conversations is both the widespread nature of these challenges and the tremendous relief researchers feel when given space to discuss them openly. These conversations have been valuable and cathartic, creating rare opportunities to feel heard, to recognize that struggles are shared rather than individual failures, and to begin collectively developing more honest and helpful guidance. This workshop extends that opportunity to a broader community of practitioners, creating a brave space for sharing “confessions”, giving and receiving advice, and hearing from expert witnesses who can share both best practices and the messy realities of lived experience. Our goal is not to discredit participatory design, for we remain convinced of its democratic potential and transformative possibilities under proper conditions. Instead, we aim to strengthen the practice by acknowledging its limitations, examining when and how practitioners should apply it, and developing more honest, nuanced guidance for navigating its complexities.

• We ask for the submission of a brief “confessions” (250-500 words) or “provocation” (up to 1,000 words) to seed workshop discussion.
• Confessions are story-based and based on a moment or experience over time. They do not have to be personal, but can be.
• Provocations are more observational or academic. They should ask questions and prompt discussion. They do not have to be empirical and could draw on literature or ideas from beyond Design and HCI. 
• Please share them when registering in the form.

This workshop is already full.

Organisers: Marijana Pantić, Tamara Maričić, Ana Perić, Dušanka Milosavljević, Milovan Vuković.

This workshop explores participatory methods for spatial planning in mining regions, combining role-play and analog GeoDesign experiences with a Digital Participatory Toolkit developed within the MINIPART project, aimed at improving public participation. Participants, representing diverse stakeholder roles, will collaboratively test tools including SWOT analysis, ranking, polling, and mapping exercises. Through structured negotiation and evaluation of tradeoffs, they will gain insight into context-sensitive planning. The toolkit will be encouraged for ongoing use, equipping participants with skills to implement in participatory approaches in the future.

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Organisers: Krity Gera, Andrea Navarrete Rigo.

This workshop intends to repurpose the language arising from the experiences of ’care’ (from a feminist perspective) as an agency to critically inform design research and practices that promote collaborative and bottom-up, citizen-centred practices at a societal level. This workshop will bring together participants from different backgrounds to reflect upon their experiences and perceptions of ’care’ through participatory design methodologies to guide alternate design approaches characterized by citizen initiatives and participation elements. This co-created knowledge will contribute towards creating a conceptual framework that can extend beyond the workshop, one that is based on a flexible structure that (1) promotes social inclusion and collectiveness, rather than an individualistic and hierarchical structure; (2) generates human capacities guided by social values rather than economic interests; (3) increases society’s engagement and its members’ role in inclining towards participation and action; (4) encourages participants for further collaborations to foster informal horizontal productive models.

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Organisers: Pedro Sáez Martínez, Begoña Sáiz Mauleón, Jimena González-del Río Cogorno.

Designing for living together requires going beyond an anthropocentric (Human-Centered) view to a more-than-human approach that considers all living stakeholders as well as technologies, policies and other kinds of agents. It also requires going beyond the extent of discrete projects, that often produce short-term benefits for some organizations without installing long-term benefits for communities, towards ensuring long-term participation and sustained impact. For this necessary paradigm shift, we propose a design methodology – product of our previous research and practical experience – to be tested and iterated via this workshop together with all participants.

This workshop is already full.

Organisers: Danielle Lake, Sandy Marshall.

This workshop builds on PDC’s 2026 call to reimagine peace as a process, not a product; it is an invitation to explore plural pathways towards peace through 1) community-led counterstorying, 2) relational, place-based design thinking, and 3) transdisciplinary research on scaling social systems change. Through deep listening, intergroup dialogue, equity-centered design thinking practices, and scaling assessment metrics, participants will get the chance to frame, explore, generate, and prototype participatory design strategies that have been shown to transform practices and policies, shift resource flows, reshape unjust structures, build relationships, and shift mental models. Attendees will have the chance to 1) collectively explore hidden histories and counterstories of relational, place-based design collaborations that have rebuilt conditions for peace and dialogue in communities; 2) examine core strategies emerging from these stories; 3) assess the potential of equity-centered collective impact for inclusively assessing their design projects; and 4) consider and reframe diverse scaling strategies for supporting plural pathways towards peace; and 5) adapt and apply strategies and assessment metrics to their own relational design contexts.

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Organisers: Chiara Del Gaudio, Griselda Flesler, Rachel Charlotte Smith.

Building on urgent calls for a Participatory Design (PD) practice to promote dialogue, care and solidarity towards peaceful coexistence, the workshop centers on often overlooked but constitutive elements of dialogue, co-creation, and living together. It invites PD researchers to look at the tensions and conflicts that characterize the politics of PD research and practice and how these are communicated and crafted through different narrative styles and modes. Through hands-on and reflective activities, participants will explore what conflicts reveal about the nature of PD research, what can be learnt and understood from addressing them, and how they can be narrated to share their learnings. Overall, the workshop aims to foster awareness of the relevance of attending to the emotional dimensions of politically engaged research practice and the value of communicating these aspects, and to support researchers in identifying ways to write about them.

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Organisers: Raffaella Lebano, Andrea Banfi, Niccolò Ferrari, Valentina Stucchi.

In a time marked by growing polarization, systemic crises, and increasing social fragmentation, organizations are called to rethink their role within society. This workshop explores how companies can act as agents of Positive Peace by generating tangible impact from their internal organizational environment to local communities and the broader global context. Through a participatory design approach, participants will examine how everyday business decisions influence social cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and community well-being. The workshop aims to generate six actionable design tools that organizations can implement to embed Positive Peace principles into their strategies and operations.

Please note that participants need to bring their own laptop or tablet.

This workshop is already full.

Organisers: Arthur Braga, Gonçalo João Ribeiro Gomes.

This workshop offers a practical immersion into Participatory Design understood as a regenerative, ecological, and political practice. In contexts marked by complexity, uncertainty, and socioenvironmental tension, the workshop reframes design as a relational system capable of restoring connections between communities, territories, and more-than-human actors. Using a simulated coastal territory as a living case study, participants collaboratively map social and ecological dynamics, engage in speculative prototyping, and co-construct principles for territorial coexistence. Rather than positioning designers as solution providers, the workshop emphasizes their role as mediators of pluriversal ecosystems, fostering ethical reflection, collective intelligence, and regenerative action.

This workshop is already full.

Organisers: Miguel Angel Bello Vargas, Daniela Montenegro Gómez, Iván Ernesto Peñaranda Trillos.

This workshop offers a radical participatory space to rethink the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as colonial artifacts and to co-create principles for post-development that weave perspectives from the Global North and South. Starting from a recognition of damage, as the harm that modernity and development have caused to territories, species, and ways of living, we invite participants to map what has been lost or silenced in the pursuit of progress and to imagine tentacular futures: futures grounded in interdependence, care, and coexistence. Rather than producing new measurable goals, participants will cocreate vital commitments: principles, manifestos, and modes of coexistence, rooted in epistemologies of the South, Buen Vivir, pluriversal thinking, and more-than-human relations.

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Organisers: Daniela Salgado Cofré, Álvaro Mercado Jara, Leonardo Aravena Yañez, Pablo Mansilla-Quiñones.

The accelerating implementation of the so-called “green” or “sustainable” energy transition is reshaping the landscapes and social fabrics of extractive territories worldwide. While framed as an ecological solution, this transition often perpetuates colonial forms of resource exploitation, displacing communities and altering ecosystems in ways that exacerbate rather than mitigate the climate crisis. Pluriversal Mapping proposes to explore these contradictions through participatory and speculative design practices that reimagine coexistence among human and more-than-human entities in territories affected by extractivism. Drawing from interdisciplinary research across geography, psychology, architecture, and art, the workshop engages participants in co-creating speculative cartographies that reveal the affective, ontological, and material relations entangled in the energy transition. The goal is to foster situated reflections and experimental mappings that make visible invisible agencies—waters, winds, minerals, animals, infrastructures, and emotions—thus opening a dialogical space for peaceful coexistence and ecological reparation. By bringing together designers, researchers, and community practitioners, Pluriversal Mapping invites participants to collectively recompose fractured territories, imagining alternative futures where conflict is transformed into dialogue, and where mapping becomes a tool of reconciliation rather than control.

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Organisers: Mike de Kreek , Ferry van de Mosselaer, Katrina Newell.

Creative and agonistic tensions lie at the heart of democratic participatory design, yet conventional frameworks often smooth out conflict or treat it as a failure. In this workshop, “Creative Dialogical Spaces for Agonism,” we invite researchers and practitioners to explore how artefact-based methods can cultivate more generative, pluralistic dialogues that move beyond superficial consensus or entrenched antagonism. Through three contrasting stations (LEGO modelling in personal transformation dialogues; low-tech remix walls in post-conflict community contexts; and SiPRuS mapping of shared governance), participants will enact, compare, and reflect on how material artefacts mediate power, voice, conflict, and imagination over time. The rotating structure encourages dialogue not only across participants, but between artefacts, contexts, and interpretive frames. Outcomes include a collective meta-map linking methods, contexts, and dialogical modalities; practice insights and heuristics to bring back to participants’ own work; and seeds for a collaborative publication or toolkit. By foregrounding temporality, situatedness, and the messy affordances of material dialogue, the workshop aims to strengthen the theoretical and practical foothold for agonistic participatory design.

This workshop is already full.