Special Issue on Design for Living Together: Participatory Design for Peaceful and Plural Futures

Introduction:

The question on how design can support coexistence across differences and contribute to plural futures is an epistemological urgency. By fostering dialogue, infrastructuring collective action, addressing inequalities, and expanding participation beyond consensus-driven models, design might help create the conditions for peace in everyday life while being aware of conflicts at broader scales.

This issue moves from the assumption that peace is an act of will rather than a natural condition. Despite the conceptual starting point for defining peace has traditionally been war, leading to the understanding of peace as the “absence of war”, this issue aims to focus on the conditions that generate or maintain peace. 

The seminal work of the sociologist Johan Galtung speaks about Positive Peace (Galtung, 1969), referring to the presence of social justice and well-being as the conditions that enable people to live together in peace. He reframes peace in relation to violence, understood as any action or condition that causes a person's somatic and mental achievements to fall below their potential. Peace, accordingly, requires eliminating political oppression, inequalities, poverty, hunger, exploitation and limited access to basic rights, all of which can be subsumed under the concepts of direct violence (behaviors involving force intended to harm, damage or undermine a person's physical or emotional integrity), structural violence (social, political or economic conditions that produce systemic inequalities, preventing basic needs from being met) and cultural violence (societal norms and beliefs that legitimize or normalize direct and structural violence, often through discourses that fuel anger, fear, hatred and misunderstanding between groups).

Contemporary design discourse is increasingly attentive to these forms of violence and to contributing to coexistence across differences and power relations (Costanza-Chock, 2020). In fact, living together is not necessarily a state of harmony, but a practiced capacity to listen even beyond verbal communication, remain in relation amid disagreement and prevent, alleviate or heal conflicts. Participatory design, understood as a dialogic practice rather than a consensus-building tool, may offer one such infrastructure for coexistence encompassing other intelligences, sensibilities, forms of agency and ways of relating (Baek, Franqueira and Meroni, 2026).

This issue welcomes theoretical, empirical, and practice-based submissions on themes such as commoning, institutioning, conviviality, design justice, peacebuilding and coexistence. Rather than treating living together as a given, we approach it as a political and design accomplishment that requires care, negotiation, imagination, and capacity to build relations across conflict.

References

Baek, J. S., Franqueira, T., & Meroni, A. (2026). Designing for living together. In Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026 (Vol. 1: Full Papers, pp. 1–9). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796624.3796625

Corrêa Meyer, G. E., & DiSalvo, C. (2024). Designing with the challenges of the Anthropocene. In C. Gray, E. Ciliotta Chehade, P. Hekkert, L. Forlano, P. Ciuccarelli, & P. Lloyd (Eds.), DRS2024: Boston. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.286

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press.

Degortes, E. (2024). Interweaving theory and practice: The significance of Galtung's editorials. Revista de Cultura de Paz, 8, 214–238. https://doi.org/10.58508/cultpaz.v8.224

Franzato, C. (2024). Toward a convivial design. Design Issues, 40 (1), 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00742

Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301

Giaccardi, E., Redström, J., & Nicenboim, I. (2025). The making(s) of more-than-human design. Human–Computer Interaction, 40(1–4), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2024.2353357

Huybrechts, L., Benesch, H., & Geib, J. (2017). Institutioning: Participatory design, co-design and the public realm. CoDesign, 13(3), 148–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2017.1355006

Huybrechts, L., Teli, M., Saad-Sulonen, J., & Sciannamblo, M. (2025). Collectives and participatory design. In R. C. Smith, D. Loi, H. Winschiers-Theophilus, L. Huybrechts, & J. Simonsen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of contemporary participatory design. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-International-Handbook-of-Contemporary-Participatory-Design/Smith-Loi-Winschiers-Theophilus-Huybrechts-Simonsen/p/book/9781032368887

Koskinen, I., & Meroni, A. (2024). Convivial aesthetic in social innovation: A nested framework from three projects in Milano. CoDesign, 20 (3), 481–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2023.2260803

Langer, A. (2021). 10 points for the art of living together. Alexander Langer Foundation. https://www.alexanderlanger.org/pubblicazioni-e-risorse/dieci-punti-per-la-convivenza-edizione-plurilingue-2020/748/

Marttila, S., Botero, A., & Saad-Sulonen, J. (2014). Towards commons design in participatory design. In H. Winschiers-Theophilus, A. Botero, & O. S. Iversen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium Papers, and Keynote Abstracts (Vol. 2, pp. 9–12). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2662155.2662187

Teli, M., Foth, M., Sciannamblo, M., Anastasiu, I., & Lyle, P. (2020). Tales of institutioning and commoning: Participatory design processes with a strategic and tactical perspective. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020: Participation(s) Otherwise (Vol. 1, pp. 159–171). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3385010.3385020

Topics covered:

• Design, peacebuilding and reconciliation, e.g. participatory approaches to addressing social, environmental and political conflicts across different scales.
  How can design contribute to preventing conflict and transforming disputes into relations of coexistence? This topic invites contributions that examine how participatory design can actively contribute to peacebuilding and reconciliation across diverse social, environmental and political contexts (Degortes, 2024). We welcome papers grounded in practice, presenting design projects, interventions or action-research that demonstrate how design can move beyond analysis to become an agent of change. Contributions should reflect on how participatory processes enable dialogue, mediate conflict, foster trust, support collective action or strengthen relationships across difference (Langer, 2021). We encourage submissions that focus on design's transformative capacity, whether at the scale of local communities, institutions, territories or broader socio-political systems.

• Design and commoning, e.g. public imagination, collective action, policy, activism and negotiation for the creation of shared value in contested contexts and/or to voice dissensus.
  How do design enable people to become active participants in shaping and caring for what is held in common? This topic explores the role of design in fostering commoning practices that strengthen collective agency, public imagination and shared responsibility in contexts of social, environmental, and political complexity (Huybrechts et al., 2025). We invite contributions that examine how design can activate individuals and collectives to engage in the creation, stewardship and transformation of threaten shared spaces, resources, institutions and forms of public life (Marttila, Botero and Saad-Sulonen, 2014). We are interested in projects and practices that cultivate long-term commitment, collective care, negotiation and civic action. We welcome practice-based and project-led research on design supporting forms of collaboration, activism, policy innovation and democratic engagement, while embracing disagreement and plural perspectives as conditions for the common wealth.
• Design and institutioning, e.g. policy, crafting new institutions, transforming existing institutions, intermediation, risks of co-optation.
  How do design practices relate to existing and new institutions? This topic explores the relation between design and social institutions, and how design practices can support the crafting of new institutions, the transformation of existing ones, and the formation and implementation of new policies (Huybrechts, Benesch, and Geib, 2017). In particular, we invite contribution based on projects and practices, in which design research and practice has been able to intermediate between the needs of wider segment of the population and institutional forms (Teli et al., 2020), advancing peaceful and plural futures; or, in alternative, cases in which participation has been co-opted by institutional actions in a way that has consolidated institutions instead of innovating them toward peaceful and plural futures.
• Design and conviviality, e.g. participation across differences, fostering relationships, care and pluralistic social forms.
  How can design support meaningful relationships among equals and create dialogic environments that enable both personal autonomy and capability to participate? With the focus on conviviality, we solicit contributions focusing on participatory practices that allow for self-expression, agency and creativity in contested and polarized contexts, for control of the tools and technologies people use, and for care between community members (Koskinen and Meroni, 2024). We particularly seek contributions that show how design practices can counteract division, intentional exclusion, technocratic knowledge and question accumulation as the dominant success criteria, to privilege quality of relations, pluralism in social formations, and peaceful forms of living together (Franzato, 2024). 
• Design and coexistence, e.g. social, technological, ecological and multispecies coexistence in contexts of polarization and interdependence.
  How can design create the conditions for relationships based on mutual respect, mutual benefit, and interdependence among all beings? This topic explores how design can help negotiate coexistence within ecological and technological boundaries, and how it can frame our commitment to engaging in dialogue with polarized others and other-than-human actors (Englert Corrêa Meyer and DiSalvo, 2024; Giaccardi, Redström and Nicenboim, 2025). We invite submissions presenting projects and practices that question the cultural and moral frameworks regulating our relations, seeking approaches for coexisting by redistributing agency to marginalized actors, accepting disagreement, and constructively engaging with tensions.

Important deadlines:

• Open Call: 31 August 2026
• Deadline for Manuscript Submissions: 31 January 2027
• Authors Notification of Initial Decision: 15 May 2027
• Deadline for Revised Manuscript Submissions: 31 August 2027
• Final Decision Notification: 31 October 2027
• Deadline for Camera-Ready Manuscript Submissions: 15 November 2027
• Expected Publication Date: 31 December 2027

Submission instructions:

Interested authors should prepare their contributions based on She Ji's guide for authors, including She Ji's paper template and referencing principles. For further guidance on preparing your manuscripts please consult the guide for authors. When preparing your contribution, please note that She Ji has no limits on the number of illustrations you may use. Guest editors welcome figures, diagrams, and illustrations in full color or in black and white. Authors should submit their contribution via the She Ji's submission platform.

About She Ji

She Ji is a peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary design journal that provides a unique forum to create new knowledge at the intersection of different fields. The journal focuses on design, economics, and innovation in today's complex socio-technical environment, with a view to advancing design innovation in industries, businesses, non-profit organizations, and governments through economic and social value creation.

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The journal is open access under a Creative Commons license. Authors retain the copyright to their articles. Because Tongji University subsidizes the publication, there are no article fees to authors or readers. Nevertheless, your experience in the Elsevier website can be confusing: the platform requests authors to agree to pay the publication fees, but Tongji University will make the actual payment.

Guest editors:

• Anna Meroni, Professor, Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Email: anna.meroni@polimi.it
• Teresa Franqueira, Professor, Department of Communication and Art, University of Aveiro, Portugal. Email: teresa.franqueira@ua.pt
• Maurizio Teli, Associate Professor, Department of Sustainability and Planning, Aalborg University, Denmark. Email: maurizio@plan.aau.dk