This essay reflects on possible complexities that embarking on co-supervising a doctoral candidate might entail. The hypothetical co-supervision case under consideration is one between different disciplines, organisations and countries, and it focuses on how differences in understanding the role of a PhD candidate might surface. Furthermore, the importance of reflecting on the nature of the project, whether it is an open brief or a specified project, is highlighted. This also necessitates consideration of the extent to which the supervisors connect ownership to the project idea, outcome, and process. Lastly, the importance of the role of the supervisor in supporting the PhD candidate towards becoming an independent researcher is raised. As a conclusion, attention is drawn to the need for potential co-supervisors to articulate and discuss their stances and expectations on the above questions prior to embarking on co-supervision; this is in order to prevent or lessen possible tensions at a later stage.

We have to be conscious about our own situatedness in the ecologies for and with which we design, but also invite for critical reviewing it. In order to do so, to become conscious and to critically review, I believe something needs to trigger and intervene. This paper is a personal account of sense-making and tool shaping, to support critical reflecting on my own positionality. I introduce my two tools: Graphical Peeling and Sensing/Zining, which rely both on ‘layouting’ to provide space for reflection. I am not a graphical designer, rather this way of working seems to help unbalance my very personal understandings, assumptions and experiences and provides a space where I can go in dialogue with myself and my experiences. By bringing together experiences, designs made and notes from research and reading, I am working through the material in different ways. I go deeper into the context with each layer I am adding, rethinking the situations that occurred and providing an opportunity to stop, think and be critical. Through this paper I do not necessarily aim for others to use those tools specifically, but rather emphasise the importance to allow for personal, creative, designerly journeys of sense-making, and decolonisation. 

Participatory Design (PD) has a focus on enabling communities to take charge of shaping their own future and as such is a relevant approach for ICT4development (ICT4D), which has been strongly rooted in Sarawak, Malaysia. Therefore, we are organising a three-day Malaysia PDC Place event to create awareness of PD practices and understanding among various sectors in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, not just academia and industry, but also government and the general public. We hope that increasing awareness, particularly among non-traditional "connoisseurs" of PD, such as the government, would aid in the development of more effective and efficient products and services that meet the needs of target groups. This engagement also contributes to the creation of opportunities for underserved communities, such as rural and indigenous communities.  

Decolonization is a situated effort as it relates to the relations of privilege, power, politics, and access (3P-A, in Albarrán González’s terms) between the people involved in design in relation to wider societies. This complexity creates certain challenges for how we can understand, learn about, and nurture decolonization in design towards pluriversality, since such decolonizing effort is based on the relationship between specific individuals and the collective. In this paper, we present and discuss the ‘River project’, a participatory space for decolonizing design, created for designers and practitioners to reflect on their own 3P-A as a way to create awareness of their own oppressive potential in design work. These joint reflections challenged ideas of participation and shaped learning processes between the participants, bringing to the foreground the importance of seeing and allowing for a plurality of life and work worlds to be brought together. We build on the learnings from this project to propose the notions of pluriversal participation, pluriversal presence, and pluriversal directionality, which can help nurture decolonizing designs towards pluriversality. We conclude by arguing that, for nurturing pluriversality through Participatory Design, participation, presence, and direction must be equally pluriversal.

A microgrid's self-consumption rate reflects its ability to retain its own energy and decrease its reliance on the synchronous grid. This paper investigates the empirical case of a microgrid equipped with photovoltaic (PV) panels and identifies challenges in engaging the microgrid's users to increase their self-consumption. Accordingly, we explored both the physical and social dimensions of the microgrid. The former involved mapping the electricity consumption and production through an exploratory data analysis, and evaluating the associated price signals, while the latter involved the use of design interventions to explore users' perceptions of the system. We highlight the problem of price signal impedance, the need for cost reflective pricing and the challenge in designing and extending internal price models in settings with various actors. We address the limitations of price signals, alongside alternative unidimensional signals, and emphasize the need for an integrated approach to a user engagement strategy as well as the challenges that this approach entails. Our results shed light on the complexity of energy communities such as microgrids, and why their implementation can introduce multidimensional challenges that demand cross-disciplinary approaches.