This work invites a re-examination of conceptions of home, design, and sustainability, emphasizing the interconnected relationships between the body, place, and Earth, and seeking to inspire relational approaches to design and homemaking. Its key contribution lies in the practice of relationality, informed by the Andean cosmology of Buen Vivir and exploring diverse, situated opportunities for its understanding and application at home. This perspective offers valuable insights for design researchers seeking to decolonize their processes and practices while engaging with Indigenous wisdom. While this work primarily focuses on Buen Vivir, it underscores the importance of recognizing and valuing Indigenous ways of being in, knowing, and relating to the world. Buen Vivir embodies the idea of living in harmony with all beings and nature through principles such as relationality, complementarity, and reciprocity. Rooted in the cosmovision (worldview) of Indigenous communities in the Andean territories of South America, it positions humans as stewards rather than owners of the living territory and the Earth (Gudynas, 2011). Buen Vivir encompasses diverse ways of being, relating, and knowing the world, all practised in deep connection to territories and their species. Through its principles and diverse adaptations, it offers alternative narratives, practices, and imaginaries that can shift priorities and help to redefine approaches to design and homemaking. Influenced by decolonial and feminist perspectives, this PhD research advocates for relational, intuitive, and care-full participatory design practices to address socioecological challenges. Drawing on the experiences of homemakers in various locations, particularly in Vaxjo, Sweden, and Medellin, Colombia, the research illustrates how relationality is already practised or can be meaningfully integrated into everyday home life, extending its relevance beyond the Andes. The research positions the scale of everyday home life as an inspirational starting point for fostering relational and sustainable change, offering valuable insights for design researchers in participatory and decolonial design aiming to contribute to planetary health while transforming their own practices. This work reimagines the programmatic research approach by emphasizing the relationship with one’s body and recognizing diverse ways of knowing. Additionally, it proposes a series of companion practices as practical methods for engaging in relationality with the body, within places, and for the Earth.

Collaborative Future-Making is a research platform at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University that is concerned with how to envision, elaborate and prototype multiple, inclusive, and sustainable futures. The platform gathers around 20 researchers that share a methodological interest in how critical perspectives from the humanities and social sciences can be combined with the constructive and collaborative aspects of making and prototyping in design research.

The research centers around two major themes:

• Critical imagination​, which focuses on how basic assumptions, norms and structures can be challenged to widen the perspectives on what can constitute socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable and resilient futures.
• Collaborative engagements​, which focuses on how we can set up more inclusive collaborations to prototype and discuss alternative futures, engaging not only professionals and policy makers but also citizens and civil society.

During 2019 the research group set out to make a shared glossary for collaborative future-making. The glossary is multiple in purpose and exists in several versions. Hopefully there will be more to come. At first, the making and articulation of the glossary was used within the research group as an exercise to share concepts that we found central to collaborative future-making, coming from different disciplines. This published version of the glossary was assembled to be used during a workshop called ​Imagining Collaborative Future-Making,​ which gathered a group of international researchers from different disciplines.

The collection of concepts reflects the heterogeneous and diverse character of the research group and a strong belief in that plurality regarding ontologies and epistemologies will be crucial to be able to handle the multiple uncertainties and complex challenges we have to face in the future. Some of the concepts are already well established within different research communities, but gain a specific meaning in relation to the research area. Others are more preliminary attempts to advance our understanding or probe into new potential practices within collaborative future-making. In that sense the concepts in the glossary are well situated and grounded in past and ongoing research within this research group, at the same time as they are meant to suggest, propose and point towards practices and approaches yet to come.

The concepts in this glossary are not only meant to be descriptive but also performative. In that sense, assembling and circulating this glossary is part of collaborative future-making. As pointed out by Michelle Westerlaken in her articulation of “Doing Concepts” (see page 15), “...without proposing, critiquing, or working towards a common or uncommon understanding of certain concepts, it becomes impossible to ‘make futures’ in any deliberate fashion.”