Abstract
This paper theorizes meandering as a dispositional heuristic in design research, foregrounding how researchers can encounter complexity through nuanced, situated journeying. Drawing on the case of SoilTrust nutrient-cycling praxis in Hong Kong, the study identifies four key dispositions – nimble resistance, contextual reasoning, temporal suppleness, and deliberate ambiguity – that enable practitioners to respond to structural challenges with humility, curiosity, and strategic indirection. Rather than pursuing fixed goals, meandering researchers cultivate relational awareness, embrace uncertainty, and reconfigure material and social systems through iterative, practice-led inquiry. Anchored in agential realism and indirect action, meanderability reframes design as a life-embedded mode of inquiry that honors entanglement, resistance, and unpredictability. Meanderability as a situated heuristic is the practitioner’s capacity to meander and be meandered simultaneously: as we shape our milieu – organismically, materially, socially, customarily, and deliberatively – the milieu reshapes our relational constitution, movement, habit, and potentiality.
Keywords
practitioner disposition, agential realism, soil practices, Hong Kong
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.811
Citation
Wernli, M., Chan, K., Yu, J., and Wolper, J. (2026) The meandering practitioner: When research emerges in relational resistance and intentional ambiguity, 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.2026.811
Creative Commons License
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Included in
The meandering practitioner: When research emerges in relational resistance and intentional ambiguity
This paper theorizes meandering as a dispositional heuristic in design research, foregrounding how researchers can encounter complexity through nuanced, situated journeying. Drawing on the case of SoilTrust nutrient-cycling praxis in Hong Kong, the study identifies four key dispositions – nimble resistance, contextual reasoning, temporal suppleness, and deliberate ambiguity – that enable practitioners to respond to structural challenges with humility, curiosity, and strategic indirection. Rather than pursuing fixed goals, meandering researchers cultivate relational awareness, embrace uncertainty, and reconfigure material and social systems through iterative, practice-led inquiry. Anchored in agential realism and indirect action, meanderability reframes design as a life-embedded mode of inquiry that honors entanglement, resistance, and unpredictability. Meanderability as a situated heuristic is the practitioner’s capacity to meander and be meandered simultaneously: as we shape our milieu – organismically, materially, socially, customarily, and deliberatively – the milieu reshapes our relational constitution, movement, habit, and potentiality.