Abstract
This article examines the epistemological, political, and practical challenges of transdisciplinarity in a participatory design project with agroforestry family farmers in São Paulo, Brazil, within the Design for Biodiversity initiative. By bringing together designers, scientists, and farmers, the project demonstrates how participatory design operates as a negotiation between institutional knowledge and vernacular expertise. Farmers’ experiential knowledge informed design decisions and interpretations of socioecological dynamics. Findings reveal tensions not only in interactions with farmers, requiring communication adapted to accessible language and local realities, but also within the academic team, due to differing worldviews and validation standards. Through a design-led action research approach, the study argues that such frictions are productive mechanisms that foster regenerative futures. Embracing conflict and co-construction reposition design as an agent of territorial autonomy, community resilience, and socio-ecological regeneration, expanding its role beyond sustainability toward ecological restoration and recognizing non-academic knowledge as central to situated design outcomes.
Keywords
Transdisciplinary Design, Participatory Design Methodologies, Agroforestry Systems, Regenerative Futures
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1316
Citation
Dantas, D., Álvares, S.M., Marques da Silva, L., Araujo, N., de Queiroga, J.L., and Ramos Filho, L.O. (2026) Transdisciplinarity in practice: Challenges and transformative potentials of Participatory Design in Sociobiodiversity contexts, 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.2026.1316
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Transdisciplinarity in practice: Challenges and transformative potentials of Participatory Design in Sociobiodiversity contexts
This article examines the epistemological, political, and practical challenges of transdisciplinarity in a participatory design project with agroforestry family farmers in São Paulo, Brazil, within the Design for Biodiversity initiative. By bringing together designers, scientists, and farmers, the project demonstrates how participatory design operates as a negotiation between institutional knowledge and vernacular expertise. Farmers’ experiential knowledge informed design decisions and interpretations of socioecological dynamics. Findings reveal tensions not only in interactions with farmers, requiring communication adapted to accessible language and local realities, but also within the academic team, due to differing worldviews and validation standards. Through a design-led action research approach, the study argues that such frictions are productive mechanisms that foster regenerative futures. Embracing conflict and co-construction reposition design as an agent of territorial autonomy, community resilience, and socio-ecological regeneration, expanding its role beyond sustainability toward ecological restoration and recognizing non-academic knowledge as central to situated design outcomes.