Abstract
Diversity is a fundamental resource in co-design processes; however, centering wide-ranging participants around a design rather than individual, disciplinary, or other forms of expertise can be challenging. Expanding the scope of design to include the entanglements of temporality and community amplifies these challenges. Addressing these challenges requires a reconfiguration of the fundamental relationships between designers, researchers, research participants, collaborators, and the land and place where research and design outcomes occur, including a deeper form of engagement with communities. Despite the substantial groundwork existing approaches have developed, emerging efforts challenge us to conceptualize an ethical approach for recognizing, working with, and caring for Indigenous communities and more-than-human actors (e.g., land) through a process of worldbuilding. In order to tackle the challenge of organizing projects that re-distribute and share power among all participants, while simultaneously recognizing the expertise and contributions of diverse participants and stakeholders, we report a conceptual model of worldbuilding anchored in care that utilizes the principles of solidarity-driven co-design. By mobilizing the speculative nature of worldbuilding, combined with grounding our processes in community-driven design research, our model incorporates diverse ontological and epistemological structures, with particular emphasis on Indigenous ways of knowing and being. We present our methodological and conceptual approach, to help articulate how to craft a worldbuilding methodology to help guide a care-driven, ethical process of collaborative world design. This framework is designed around the aim of honoring and centering indigenous sovereignty.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.189
Citation
Cechanowicz, L., Zuiker, S., Jordan, M., Finn, E.,and Wylie, R.(2025) Framework for Ethical Worldbuilding with Solidarity-Driven Co-Design, in Clemente, V., Gomes, G., Reis, M., Félix, S., Ala, S., Jones, D. (eds.), Learn X Design 2025, 22-24 September 2025, Aveiro, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.189
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Full Paper
Framework for Ethical Worldbuilding with Solidarity-Driven Co-Design
Diversity is a fundamental resource in co-design processes; however, centering wide-ranging participants around a design rather than individual, disciplinary, or other forms of expertise can be challenging. Expanding the scope of design to include the entanglements of temporality and community amplifies these challenges. Addressing these challenges requires a reconfiguration of the fundamental relationships between designers, researchers, research participants, collaborators, and the land and place where research and design outcomes occur, including a deeper form of engagement with communities. Despite the substantial groundwork existing approaches have developed, emerging efforts challenge us to conceptualize an ethical approach for recognizing, working with, and caring for Indigenous communities and more-than-human actors (e.g., land) through a process of worldbuilding. In order to tackle the challenge of organizing projects that re-distribute and share power among all participants, while simultaneously recognizing the expertise and contributions of diverse participants and stakeholders, we report a conceptual model of worldbuilding anchored in care that utilizes the principles of solidarity-driven co-design. By mobilizing the speculative nature of worldbuilding, combined with grounding our processes in community-driven design research, our model incorporates diverse ontological and epistemological structures, with particular emphasis on Indigenous ways of knowing and being. We present our methodological and conceptual approach, to help articulate how to craft a worldbuilding methodology to help guide a care-driven, ethical process of collaborative world design. This framework is designed around the aim of honoring and centering indigenous sovereignty.