Theme Tracks

The Design Research Society 2026 Conference is a global forum for advancing design knowledge and practice. We welcome paper submissions that explore diverse perspectives and emerging directions in design research. You can submit your paper to one of the tracks below. These are theme tracks proposed in an open call by groups of researchers interested in bringing together scholars and practitioners working on specific areas, along with tracks organised by the DRS' Special Interest Groups and Research Studios. For DRS2026, the theme tracks are organised into fourteen meta-themes. The track descriptions and further information about the tracks will be published in the coming days.

1. Design Philosophies

This theme focuses on the past, present and possible futures of design’s theoretical articulations. It addresses the ways in which discourses, paradigms, as well as philosophical perspectives established themselves in connection to design conceptualisations, processes, practices, and materialisations. Design ontologies, design epistemologies and design axiologies are going to be discussed from the perspective of their modes of existing.

1.1 Discourses in Design Research: Historical, Critical, and Speculative Perspectives

1.2 Design Philosophy: Amplifying the Unheard

1.3 Making Theory with Textiles: Theories of Designing and Designing Theory

1.4 Experiences as Knowledge Contributions

1.5 Restaging Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design

2. Design, Politics and Social Aspects

Design engages the existing political and social structures in many possible ways. Designing might exhibit a conscious or unconscious, deliberate or non-deliberate approach to and impact on the existing political and social structures. This theme aims to address design’s possible forms of political and social engagement and their impact.

2.1 Designing for and with Taboo

2.2 Queer(ing) Design Research/Practice

2.3 Design and the Public Sector: Contemporary Methods and Practices

2.4 Design for and with Values in Designing for Social Change

2.5 Design for Equitable Health: Public Policies and Participatory Practices

2.6 The Transformative Nature of Food – Adaptation, Connectivity and Identity

3. Design, Management and Economy

This theme explores how design drives and shapes economic and organizational transformations, while also being influenced by economic, managerial, and organizational factors. It examines the role of design in creating value, fostering innovation, and guiding strategic change across industries and markets. The focus is on design’s capacity to act as both a managerial and cultural force, enabling businesses and other organizations to adapt, thrive, and anticipate resilient futures.

3.1 Opening Up Design Impact Assessment: From Singular Metrics to Plural Understandings

3.2 Designing Strategic Change: Approaches, Methods, and Theories of Strategic Design in Business Organizations

3.3 Responsible Retail and Branded Environments

3.4 Design for Business in the Wild

4. Design and Systems

This theme explores how design increasingly engages with complex, interconnected challenges, understanding the world as a network of relationships and structures that make the act of designing inherently systemic. It recognises the consolidation of systemic design (the intersection of systems thinking and design) while seeking to expand beyond it, embracing plural ways of engaging with this intersection. Scholars whose work reflects this paradigmatic shift — across diverse design outcomes (e.g., products, services, communication, organisations, and policy) — will find in this theme a space to share, debate, and develop their contributions.

4.1 Critical Reflections on Systemic Design Participation: Ethics, Care and Justice

4.2 Reframing Practice: Architectural Design Research and the Expanding Role of the Architect in Multidisciplinary Collaboration

4.3 Navigating Pluralism in Systemic Design: Global Perspectives and Diverse Vocabularies

5. Design and More-than-Human

After a momentum in which centered-human-design was one of the core topics of the design research field, the “more-then-human” perspectives started to articulate more clearly in the recent years. This theme engages the ways in which designing processes beyond human reach are perceived and integrated in human existence, as well as the way in which human design impacts the world we are living in.

5.1 Temporalities of More-than-Human Design

5.2 More-than-Human Design in the Real World: Resistance, Regeneration, and Radical Solidarity

5.3 More-than-human Data Practices: Mattering and Interfacing with More-than-human Worlds

5.4 Designing more-than-human climate futures: Between expertise, aesthetics and affect

6. Design Mediations

Design research is a field that analyzes the paths taken by the constructivist and generative approaches. The articulation of the acquired knowledge, its transmission and mediation is not neutral and requires in itself a careful investigation. This theme looks into the issues raised by design research mediation, its modalities, purposes and tools.

6.1 Innovating Scientific Publishing of Design Research. Promoting Plurality and Equity

6.2 Futuring Digital Cultural Heritage

7. Design Technologies

Technical innovation has always been central to design research, serving as a bridge between fundamental inquiry and applied practice. This track engages with both emerging and established technologies, examining their technical requirements and limitations, societal relevance, successes, and shortcomings. It invites contributions that interrogate the processes through which desired and implemented changes unfold, and explores how technology-driven interventions, their scaling up processes can be enhanced through rigorous testing, critical investigation and user feedback.

7.1 Designing Preventive Health Technologies and Practices

7.2 Toward LongevityTech Cities: Designing Age-Inclusive Urban Futures

7.3 Design Research During and After Artificial Intelligence

8. Design Education

Design education has been a foundational concern of the field since its inception. Questions around what should be learned, what can be taught, and how design education should be structured have followed diverse trajectories. These discourses have evolved in response to shifting socio-technical contexts and emerging pedagogical paradigms. This theme addresses the current challenges facing design education, inviting reflection on its future directions and design education’s formative potential.

8.1 Public Design Education: Plural Practices and Situated Teaching and Learning

9. Design Materials

Design practices cannot be detached from materials and practices used to address human needs and build our environment. This theme addresses aspects related to design materials and looks into the changing nature of the concept of materials over the past 50 years, as well as materials’ actualisations, highlighting diverse forms of material expressions and emerging material ecologies.

9.1 Bodies in Design: Rethinking Norms, Materials, Technologies, and Methods

9.2 Transitional Materialities

9.3 Analysing Language Use in Designing: Practices and Performance

9.4 Play Design Materials: Entangled Matter and Making

10. Design and Sustainability

This theme addresses the evolving relationship between design and sustainability, recognizing design as both a driver of change and a field shaped by ecological, social, and economic challenges. It explores how design practices can foster systemic transitions, support regenerative models, and enable more equitable futures.

10.1 What is Regenerative Design, Anyway? Foundations, Lexicons, and Interdisciplinary Intersections

10.2 Troubling Transitions: Growing Pains in Designing and Researching for Transformation

11. Design Principles

This theme explores how design engages with and responds to aspects of wellbeing, inclusion, and care across diverse contexts. It examines how design shapes experiences that support human dignity, equity, and quality of life, while addressing the needs of diverse bodies, abilities, and cultures. The theme also encourages critical reflection on the ethical and social responsibilities of design and how we need to engage in inter/transdiciplinary practices to tackle some of these challenges.

11.1 InclusiveSIG: New Agenda for Inclusive Design

11.2 Relationality as Reconciliation – Designing for Equiponderance

11.3 Central but Decentered: Repositioning the Practitioner in Design Research Involving Practice

11.4 Design with Care: Theories, Practices, Methods, and Politics

11.5 Design for Wellbeing and Happiness

12. Design Aesthetics

As a discipline that forms, gives shape and engages human constructive contingencies, design engages not only with materials, tools and methods that enable transformation, but also with the modalities, perceptions and sensitivities engaged by the resulting objects, experiences, services and design expressions. This theme explores the nuanced and multimodal forms of design interventions, their reception, and the critical reflections they provoke.

12.1 Sketching Futures: Cultural Dimensions, Pedagogies, and Digital Transitions

12.2 Mediating Sonic Worlds: Critical Approaches to Boundary Objects in Sound-Driven Design

13. Situated Track

This track welcomes contributions that examine design research that is situated in the local - in the context of DRS2026, the local being Edinburgh and Scotland. We seek contributions from cases and projects that showcase how design research, and by extension design practice, are informed by the context in which they are conducted. These cases will help to illuminate the situated nature of design research more generally, and how it can be adapted and adjusted to address local contexts and communities. More specifically, it provides a showcase of local work to the DRS community as they are themselves situated during the attendance at DRS2026 in Edinburgh.

14. Open Track

This track welcomes contributions that do not fit neatly into the defined macrothemes but enrich the field of design research. It provides space for emerging topics, experimental approaches, and boundary-crossing inquiries that challenge established perspectives and open new directions for the community.

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