Design Without Goal
Listening, Silence, and Emergence in Practice
NordiCHI 2026, Vaasa, Finland, October 3, 2026
EOI Submission Deadline: Monday, August 10, AoE
Workshop Participation Notification Monday, August 17
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In a digital era that prioritises productivity and consumption, this full-day workshop invites participants to explore what lies beyond interaction through embodiment and cultivation practices for non-goal-oriented design. Drawing on a plurality of relational theories, we consider 'interactivity' as unfolding across people, technologies, environments and affect, expanding beyond interfaces. Participants will engage in a series of exercises intended to open and prepare the body and mind, creating conditions for emergence in practice. Following a process of initiation, grounding, embodiment and practice, participants will refine their capacities for listening and resonance. Through ko-ontological encounter, noticing, somatic attunement, Daoist reflection and practice, and silence, we intentionally position ourselves in the in-between, creating conditions for participatory sense-making from differentials. The workshop offers participants rich, pluriversal encounters with personal practices that explore energetic resonance and ways to integrate a foundation for, or deepen understandings of non-goal-oriented approaches in design and connection with a community of practice.
PARTICIPANT CALL
PARTICIPANT CALL
We invite participants to practice embodied listening without goal, attuning to energetic thresholds and what normative interaction design renders invisible. Through embodiment, we cultivate sensitivity to what hovers at the edges of perception: Qi as a relational field, the energetic costs of constant responsiveness, and the porosity between human and more-than-human worlds. Vaasa offers a fitting context for this exploration, with its proximity to nature and as a threshold itself across geological, cultural and temporal dimensions.
This workshop invites design researchers interested in or working with embodied methodologies for attunement, slow philosophy, or resting in uncertainty rather than rushing to resolution; exploring non-goal-oriented approaches beyond productivity paradigms; and pluralising reflection beyond East-West dichotomies.
The workshop will benefit researchers working in
more-than-human and relational design,
soma design and embodied interaction,
design for wellbeing and care,
participatory and community-centered design, and
sustainable futures,
will find resources for attending to energetic and affective dynamics that resist quantification yet shape human-technology-nature encounters.
TENTATIVE SCHEDULE
WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
Kristina Mah is an artist and lecturer at The University of Melbourne. Her research and creative practice integrate ancient wisdom traditions, somatic and martial arts lineages, and diasporic narratives through public art, interaction design and performance. focusing on wellbeing, resilience and transformation and planetary care. She works across academic, art and community contexts to shape engagement with relational intelligence and compassion to foster more attuned and adaptive futures.
Janghee Cho is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Industrial Design at the National University of Singapore. He researches and teaches in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Social Computing with a focus on futures of work, health, and reflection. He conducts design research and empirical studies to explore how technology can foster sustainable living in contemporary life.
Aaron Pengyu Zhu is a Design Researcher at National University of Singapore. His research employs participatory design and critical approaches exploring non-Western epistemologies to pluralize ways of knowing in HCI. He examines how interactive systems support rest, how meaning emerges through everyday mundane digital practices, and how non-human forms of agency foster relationality-making.
Wendy Qi Zhang is a PhD candidate at the Affective Interactions Lab at The University of Sydney, where she explores embodied, cultural and collective healing within human-computer interaction. Her research and artist practice engages with interactive technologies, and performance informed by cyber-feminist, Daoist, and Buddhist perspectives.
Tse Pei Ng is a design researcher and Master’s student at the Division of Industrial Design, National University of Singapore. Motivated by an interest in relationality in co-design and participatory design practices, her current research explores embodied reflection methods for designers’ reflexivity, informed by personal experiences in visual arts and somatic practices.
Angella Mackey is a design researcher with the Civic Interaction Design group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Her work explores embodied relationships to seemingly intangible, dynamic materials encountered in daily life, using techniques from research through design, first-person research, speculative design, and more-than-human design to materially engage them. Currently her research focuses on solar energy and the design of relational technologies that might support weather-guided ways of living in post-fossil worlds.
Claudia Núñez-Pacheco is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Media Technology at Malmö University in Sweden. Her research investigates how to design from self to others, including how bodily ways of knowing are utilised as materials for aesthetic experiences in design. She employs introspective and somatic practices to explore aesthetic and generative qualities in our interactions with technology.
Jonas Fritsch is an Associate Professor in Interaction Design at IT University of Copenhagen. His research integrates affect theory into Human-Computer Interaction, driving a care-oriented research agenda across environmental, social, and mental ecologies. He leads the Affective Interaction & Relations Lab, exploring how affective interactions reshape relationships with ourselves, others, and technology.
Yoko Akama is a design researcher and educator. Yoko’s upbringing, education and employment in Australia, UK, US and Japan have grounded a practice that is committed to enhance qualities of inter-relating, embrace differences and cultural sensitivity to deeply engage with complexities. Yoko’s Japanese heritage and collaboration in and around the Asia-Pacific shapes their research, teaching and participatory work to address various entrenched issues and explore shared human and more-than-human futures.
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