Abstract
Paper track Queer(ing) Design Research/Practice, explores how Queer(ing) operates in design as a mode of inquiry, intervention, and worldmaking. Queer(ing) is positioned as a critical practice that challenges normativity, resists fixed categories, and generates alternative possibilities across intentions, processes, and outcomes. The track is organized into three interrelated clusters: Queer(ing) Method/ologies, Queer(ing) Experience, and Queer(ing) Complexity. Together, these clusters trace an expanding arc: from transforming how design is done, to examining what design generates, to engaging dynamic, entangled, complex phenomena. Across diverse contributions, authors use a range of approaches: activist, practice-based, experimental, and theoretical approaches to reimagine epistemologies, change experiential realities, and distribute agency. Collectively, the track demonstrates that Queer(ing) design is both practical and aspirational, offering new ways of knowing, making, and relating while opening design research/practice to bold, plural, unsettled, evolving futures.
Keywords
queer(ing) design, queer theory, dis/orientations, worldmaking
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.125
Citation
Westbrook, J.P., Meharry, J., Ferreri, V., and Cui, C. (2026) Queer(ing) Design Research/Practice, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.125
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Queer(ing) Design Research/Practice
Paper track Queer(ing) Design Research/Practice, explores how Queer(ing) operates in design as a mode of inquiry, intervention, and worldmaking. Queer(ing) is positioned as a critical practice that challenges normativity, resists fixed categories, and generates alternative possibilities across intentions, processes, and outcomes. The track is organized into three interrelated clusters: Queer(ing) Method/ologies, Queer(ing) Experience, and Queer(ing) Complexity. Together, these clusters trace an expanding arc: from transforming how design is done, to examining what design generates, to engaging dynamic, entangled, complex phenomena. Across diverse contributions, authors use a range of approaches: activist, practice-based, experimental, and theoretical approaches to reimagine epistemologies, change experiential realities, and distribute agency. Collectively, the track demonstrates that Queer(ing) design is both practical and aspirational, offering new ways of knowing, making, and relating while opening design research/practice to bold, plural, unsettled, evolving futures.