Call for Papers

This track focuses on how design can contribute to healthier, more caring, and more enabling futures for individuals and communities. It invites work that moves beyond a narrow understanding of healthcare as hospitals, medical devices, or clinical systems, and instead opens up the broader terrain of care, wellbeing, prevention, support, inclusion, dignity, and human growth across life stages. The scope may include future health ecosystems, preventive and community-based care, ageing, disability and assistive design, mental wellbeing, therapeutic environments, developmental design, care-centered services, and socially embedded systems of support.

This track addresses the urgent need for design to engage deeply with ecological realities and climate transitions. It invites submissions that explore how design can respond to environmental challenges through regenerative thinking, ecological sensitivity, systems awareness, and responsible imagination. Themes may include ecological futures, climate-responsive design, regenerative systems, circular practices, material experimentation, resilient infrastructures, low-impact production, nature-informed design, repair cultures, and more-than-human perspectives.

This track explores the future of habitats as lived, social, and spatial conditions rather than merely as buildings or physical settings. It recognises that habitats are shaped not only by architecture and built form, but also by collective life, institutions, cultural practices, community relations, and evolving social systems. The track welcomes design research and projects that examine domestic futures, housing, public space, spatial behavior, neighbourhood systems, community infrastructure, urban and rural transitions, and the design of spaces that influence belonging, dignity, inclusion, and social interaction.

This track focuses on the design of future movement across people, goods, services, and systems. It invites work on mobility not only as transportation, but as access, inclusion, connectivity, freedom, and participation in social and economic life. The track may include future vehicles, public mobility systems, multimodal transport, inclusive access, last-mile systems, mobility services, connected travel ecosystems, logistics, autonomous movement, and the design of experiences and infrastructures that enable equitable and meaningful movement. The track is particularly interested in how mobility futures may be rethought in relation to climate, accessibility, behavior, technology, and changing urban and rural conditions.

This track examines how future experiences are being shaped through emerging interactions, responsive technologies, and intelligent systems. It welcomes design work that addresses interfaces, experiential futures, human-machine relations, immersive environments, AI-mediated interactions, responsive products, service experiences, gesture-based systems, mixed realities, ambient intelligence, and new forms of engagement across digital, physical, and hybrid contexts. The track recognises that design is not only about controls, interfaces, or usability, but about perception, meaning, trust, behavior, emotion, participation, and the quality of human engagement with systems.

This track serves as the conceptual and scholarly spine of the conference. It invites contributions that reflect on how futures are imagined, studied, structured, critiqued, and designed. Includes work on future-oriented design methods, speculative design, foresight, scenario building, weak signals, horizon scanning, design fiction, anticipatory frameworks, future-facing pedagogies, and new approaches to design research. It also welcomes philosophical and theoretical discourse on design for future, including questions of ethics, temporality, responsibility, imagination, agency, uncertainty, and the role of design in shaping possible worlds. This is the most appropriate track for submissions that are primarily methodological, conceptual, or framework-building.