Abstract
Conventional participatory planning and design practice imply linear accumulation of data, facts, and representations, predicting meaningful futures through consensus-driven strategies. Transformation is framed as the transparent management of knowable information towards a providential destiny. By reducing participatory reasoning to factual transfer and discursive negotiation, reductionist approaches fail to address the systemic complexity and contingent character of socio-ecological challenges. They overlook disruptive shocks (financial crises, pandemics) that reorder systems. We propose disruption as a co-design method: a deliberately staged technique that exposes boundaries, surfaces dependencies, and fosters collective sense-making under uncertainty. Drawing on 4E cognition and relational design theory, we propose an operative epistemology where knowledge emerges through recursive sense–model–act loops, boundaries and constraints function as enabling conditions for creativity. Methodologically, disruption is operationalized through event–constraint–speculation sequences in a game-based co-design toolkit, empirically demonstrated in the Rurban-Lab case. This is a proposal for ecologizing co-design.
Keywords
ecologies, disruption, co-design, 4E cognition
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1472
Citation
Yilmaz, A., Rolfes, D., and Robbers, L. (2026) Disruption as an ecologizing co-design method, 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.2026.1472
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Disruption as an ecologizing co-design method
Conventional participatory planning and design practice imply linear accumulation of data, facts, and representations, predicting meaningful futures through consensus-driven strategies. Transformation is framed as the transparent management of knowable information towards a providential destiny. By reducing participatory reasoning to factual transfer and discursive negotiation, reductionist approaches fail to address the systemic complexity and contingent character of socio-ecological challenges. They overlook disruptive shocks (financial crises, pandemics) that reorder systems. We propose disruption as a co-design method: a deliberately staged technique that exposes boundaries, surfaces dependencies, and fosters collective sense-making under uncertainty. Drawing on 4E cognition and relational design theory, we propose an operative epistemology where knowledge emerges through recursive sense–model–act loops, boundaries and constraints function as enabling conditions for creativity. Methodologically, disruption is operationalized through event–constraint–speculation sequences in a game-based co-design toolkit, empirically demonstrated in the Rurban-Lab case. This is a proposal for ecologizing co-design.