Participation through Designing Relations with People, Materials, and Place

In times of growing disconnection, the Sensorial Design Residency offered a situated context for reimagining participation. Held in Tallinn, Estonia, and co-organized by the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) and Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCAD U), this two-week international residency brought together emerging artists and designers from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds to explore the theme Analogue+Digital=Sensorial. This paper reflects on the residency as a live pedagogical experiment that foregrounded care, improvisation, and shared presence over predefined outcomes. It positions participatory design as a practice of holding space: for plurality, for ambiguity, and for the unfinished work of living and learning together. Drawing on sensory ethnography, relational design theory, and post-humanist pedagogy, we examine how participation unfolded not as a step in a process, but as a collective condition of becoming shaped by space, friction, materiality, and difference. By foregrounding participant voices and material encounters, this paper shows how open-ended, sensorial practices enabled plural forms of knowing. These insights contribute to participatory design discourses seeking to center emergent voices by illustrating how open-ended, sensorial, and relational practices allowed participants to express themselves beyond outcome-driven frameworks. In the residency, participants negotiated meaning through materials, gestures, and shared presence creating space for diverse cultural, disciplinary, and affective ways of knowing. In doing so, the project reframes participation as a condition of mutual learning and cohabitation rather than a tool for consensus or control.

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Suggested Citation: Hamid, A., Nimkulrat, N., & Kuusk, K. (2026). Participation through Designing Relations with People, Materials, and Place. In Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026, Vol. 2: Exploratory Papers and Doctoral Colloquium (pp. 97–103). https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796426.