Abstract
Despite an apparent period of geopolitical stability following the establishment of the UN in 1945, questions of war and peace remain as perennial concerns. . This paper presents an attempt to scope a design approach for peace building. It grounds its approach on Johan Galtung’s notion of positive peace as justice and John Paul Lederach’s middle-ground theory of peace building but underlines the importance of an empathic dialogue that brings parties in conflict together to find common ali ties and develop skills useful in post-conflict societies. The paper scopes an approach through a piece of speculative fiction about a design curator who builds an exhibition to foster dialogue. Three pieces from her fictional exhibition are discussed as potential sources of peace building: the first explores craft clubs; another peace games, a third—resource hubs. The paper builds its observations from these fictions and then identifies a few general observations about requirements for a design-based peace process. We conclude with a discussion on the pros and cons of speculative fiction as a method.
Keywords
Design; Peace; Design fiction; Peacebuilding
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.546
Citation
Ilpo, K., Ely, P.,and Wernli, M.(2025) Peacebuilding: scoping an empathic design approach through speculative fiction, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.546
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 5 - Design Thinking
Peacebuilding: scoping an empathic design approach through speculative fiction
Despite an apparent period of geopolitical stability following the establishment of the UN in 1945, questions of war and peace remain as perennial concerns. . This paper presents an attempt to scope a design approach for peace building. It grounds its approach on Johan Galtung’s notion of positive peace as justice and John Paul Lederach’s middle-ground theory of peace building but underlines the importance of an empathic dialogue that brings parties in conflict together to find common ali ties and develop skills useful in post-conflict societies. The paper scopes an approach through a piece of speculative fiction about a design curator who builds an exhibition to foster dialogue. Three pieces from her fictional exhibition are discussed as potential sources of peace building: the first explores craft clubs; another peace games, a third—resource hubs. The paper builds its observations from these fictions and then identifies a few general observations about requirements for a design-based peace process. We conclude with a discussion on the pros and cons of speculative fiction as a method.