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Rural communities in Europe that defend land-based practices and livelihoods face pressures to modernize in ways that reproduce a nature‒culture dualism. Design methods informed by Latin American ontologies seek to help communities identify and resist capitalist enclosure, make visible and legitimize local ways of knowing and traditions, and foster learning processes toward autonomy. Here, we report on our experiences in land-oriented, community-led participatory design, making material, communal artifacts in Italy and Spain. The artifacts range from animal stables to bee apiaries. We examine the artifacts and their makings through a lens of territorio (territory) to demonstrate a different land-based reality that resists colonial oppression. In these realities, communities are not mere observers of the changes around them, but they make their own present through the making of artifacts. These relational design methods supporting planetary co-habitability require care-full community-led engagement with the land.

Las comunidades rurales de Europa que defienden prácticas y medios de vida basados en la tierra enfrentan presiones para modernizarse de maneras que no hacen más que reproducir el dualismo naturaleza‒cultura. Los métodos de diseño informados por ontologías latinoamericanas buscan ayudar a las comunidades a identificar y resistir el cercamiento capitalista, visibilizar y legitimar los saberes y las tradiciones locales, y fomentar procesos de aprendizaje orientados a la autonomía. Aquí damos cuenta de nuestras experiencias de diseño participativo orientado a la tierra y liderado por la comunidad, mediante la elaboración de artefactos materiales comunitarios en Italia y España. Los artefactos abarcan desde establos para animales hasta colmenas. Examinamos estos artefactos y su proceso de elaboración a través de la categoría de territorio para mostrar una realidad distinta, basada en la tierra, que resiste la opresión colonial. En estas realidades, las comunidades no son meras observadoras de los cambios que las rodean, sino que construyen su propio presente a través de la elaboración de artefactos. Estos métodos de diseño relacional que apoyan la cohabitabilidad planetaria requieren una vinculación cuidadosa con la tierra, liderada por la comunidad.

Chapter 3 expands our journey beyond the enactment of design participation. The last three decades have witnessed suites of design approaches, both in research and practice that are premised on continuing collaborative design after implementation, resulting in design-in-use approaches such as co-realization, meta-design, and aging together. The rise of hacking and making has, in turn, led to open design initiatives, designing with and for maker communities, peer-content creation, and crowdsourced design and innovation strategies. Furthermore, further design has been being carried out by people using the products and services. The minimum-viable-product development strategies have underscored the benefits and gained versatility of extending the design into the use time. The constraints of and possibilities opened up by situated use are simply difficult to anticipate during concept design. In all these research and practice approaches, the key underlying questions are what and how are people capable of engaging with designs during use time and how is their design engagement supported and built upon. In this chapter, we first go through what different disciplines have established about users’ design engagements during use time. We then present a taxonomy of active use that reveals the impressive range in which active-use phenomena happens. Use as is, active use, locally new designs, and globally new innovations mark different intensities of engagement. These can concern the material form of design, new uses, new meanings, and adjustment to local settings. Equally, there are collective forms of active use that shape communities and organizations, ideologies and imaginaries, and global platforms that facilitate active use. All these aspects and gradations of user engagement can be found in hotspots such as digital-physical making activities, but many also in other digital and physical settings. The chapter then proceeds to elaborate on how the design spaces can be temporally extended using the users’ active design engagement through aging together design guideposts. The aging together methodology is illustrated with a case study of building an information infrastructure for a communal housing initiative with the Active Seniors association, a case that outlines how designs can evolve and blend with infrastructuring and maintenance of community resources.

FAB25 Czechia is the 2025 edition of the FABx event – the flagship gathering for FabLabs, makers, innovators, researchers, educators, and artists. This year, the event is united under the theme “Bridge the Gap.”

The Fab 25 research papers stream includes original scholarly writing from researchers studying the Fab Lab movement, its ambitions and its impact from a wide range of disciplines, including computer science, engineering, science and technology studies, business and management, education, urban studies, media and design, and many more.

Intensifying social and environmental challenges demands restructuring sustainable design frameworks in which communities’ resilience and empowerment are at the forefront. This research draws insights into that by engaging with textile-making communities located across Northern Ireland and Umeå/Sweden to examine their role in creating and networking resistance. It contributes to recognizing social and collective dimensions of sustainability by exploring how textile-making practices foster agency and solidarity. To examine the textile communities’ making practices, the intersection of three key concepts is used: craftivism by Greer (2008), third places theorized by Oldenburg (1989), and communities of practice drawing on Wenger’s (1998) framework. These concepts create a unique lens to examine textile communities’ contributions to reframing sustainability that reflects on cultural and collective aspects. Discussions and empirical data gathered show that involvement in collective textile-making can heal the broken connections between production and consumption as well as increase the well-being of individuals and communities. The paper concludes by providing suggestions to reshape design practice that accommodates collectives as crucial actors of fashion production networks. By understanding the adaptiveness of the textile communities to uncertainties and complexities, design practice can embrace “dancing with complexity” and co-create alternative structures and relations.

Maker Utopias explores how technology subcultures create Actually Existing Utopias, using speculative critical making as a method. We create miniature dioramas of shared community technology workshops to examine DIY maker and hacker cultures in a new way – their histories, presents and futures. Makers and hackers present alternatives to existing consumerism and global mass production in their visions and practices, by experimenting with local open source solutions and ways of organizing that are espoused as more sustainable and democratizing. Yet realizing such tiny utopias in today’s capitalist structures is not always so simple. 

This poster presents an artistic research project called Maker Utopias and interim findings from an ongoing study. We explore the material, aesthetic, technical and conceptual dimensions of maker culture futures, through the creation of miniature dioramas. Makers and hackers are technology subcultures who encourage others to actively participate in locally relevant and socially good design and production, often termed grassroots innovation. Their narratives envision replacing empty consumerism with more empowering, creative, circular, democratic and community-based production in shared workshops (fab labs and makerspaces), according to local needs, materials and resources. We ask, what does it take to build tiny sustainable solar societies in the interstices of unsustainable macro structures, in the face of hypercapitalism and the polycrisis? What do sustainability transformations and industrial transitions really look like at the grassroots? Perhaps we as a society can only create such utopias in miniature form. 

This artistic research project investigates how digital fabrication reconfigures the values, functions, and processes of sloyd. Using insect hotels with facades inspired by international architecture as case studies, the project examines what is preserved, transformed, or lost when craft traditions are translated into digital form and relocated into new cultural contexts. The study shows how such translations reveal both the limitations of digital tools and the potential for new interpretations of cultural heritage within craft.

The concept that technology should be designed iteratively is a well-established tenet in participatory design. However, iteration has received insufficient attention regarding how and why we should also evolve tools that support participatory processes. Based on empirical material from five participatory renewable energy projects conducted in different school communities, this paper documents how a seemingly mundane participatory design tool, a paper template, evolves through iteration to better scaffold collaborative design work. We show how iteration has implications for the overall direction of the project towards sustainability by surfacing future issues. The templates allowed a collective move from designing a renewable energy generator towards making a school collective for sustainable use, management, and adjustment of the generator they built. The iterations illustrate how participatory design tools can collect mundane things relevant for design decisions and how such things can be translated at higher levels.