“Design has to be understood not just as an object of historical study and contemporary cultural and economic practice, but also as an object of current cultural politics inside and outside education.”

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—Tony Fry (1981)

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Overview
This week explores the Design lens of the D4L Unclock Framework, examining design as the intentional shaping of possibilities. Design is more than creating products or services; it is a process of understanding human needs, imagining alternative futures, and translating insights into meaningful interventions across products, services, systems, and cities.

What futures become possible when design is participatory rather than prescriptive? Instead of designing for people, how might we design with them? What happens when residents co-design housing with architects, patients shape their care with clinicians, older adults co-create community programs with local organizations, or neighborhoods collaboratively develop mobility services that reflect local needs and aspirations. Participatory design recognizes people not simply as end users, but as experts in their own lived experiences and active partners in shaping more inclusive and sustainable futures

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Reading Material

• Zhuang, K., & Du, M. (2026). Age-Ready Suburbia: Designing Distributed care and housing Transitions for Longevity. In Proceedings of DRS. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.885

• Borghi, C., Ferrarini, B., Leonardi, V., Butcher, C., Cosheril, A., Corner, L., & Palmarini, N. (2026). Participatory design for intergenerational dialogue: How the Voice® model can foster a longevity society in the Italian context. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2026, Vol. 1: Full Papers (PDC 2026 Vol. 1) (pp. 158–173). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796624.3796653

• Carlsson, S., Mallalieu, A., Almefelt, L., & Malmqvist, J. (2021). Design for longevity: A framework to support the designing of a product's optimal lifetime. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED21) (pp. 1003–1012). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.100

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