Design Factory Manchester leads design research centred on peace
Design Factory Manchester researchers, Dr Philip Ely (Reader in Design) and Professor Ilpo Koskinen, have developed a new design research initiative bringing together some of Europe’s top Design Schools in an attempt to improve international and intercultural relations. Dr Ely and Professor Koskinen—along with Dr Markus Wernli—have already presented work at the International Association of Design Research Societies (IASDR) Conference in Taiwan in November 2025. Now their work is about to appear at the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) in Milan in June 2026.
Under the umbrella term ‘Design for Peace’, Dr Ely and Professor Koskinen have been exploring ways that designers can both develop better understanding of living under the conditions of conflict (violent or otherwise) and imagine ways to broker peace, develop resilience and security—by design. Applying their expertise in empathic design and a methodological exploration of the field of design fiction, they have been engaged in experimental research at the intersection of participatory design, peacebuilding studies and design.
Through their development of an international network of designers and design researchers in Europe, they’ve developed an international research-led educational project called, appropriately, Design Fiction for Peace. Bringing together researchers, PhD and Masters students across Belfast School of Art (Northern Ireland), Aalto University (Finland), Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania), V.N Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine), Politechnico di Milano (Italy) and Manchester School of Art (England), the researchers will be exploring how empathic understanding of everyday life in conflict (drawing on published literary narrative fiction and everyday lived experiences) can create deeper and authentic understanding(s) of both friends and adversaries, with the intention of inspiring subsequent designs for peace, dialogue and co-existence—the theme of this year’s Participatory Design Conference.
Both researcher and student cohorts will be building on the work of leading design fiction practitioner and scholar, Julian Bleecker PhD of the Near Future Laboratory in Los Angeles and Cynthia E. Smith of the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York. Dr Smith was the curator of the highly-acclaimed exhibition in New York, Designing Peace. The Design Fiction for Peace project involves: (1) the writing of authentic narrative fictions of life in a conflict zone; followed by (2) the use of design fiction approaches to ‘imagining otherwise’ to develop responses or counter-measures to an impending or current conflict. Julian Bleecker and Cynthia E. Smith will be joining the international briefing on 5 March 2025 and final pan-European presentations of design concepts will be presented on the 9 April 2026.
Ely & Koskinen have so far developed design concepts for war veterans, children and mothers in dealing with the aftermath of violence; this latest initiative opens the research to a global network of design thinkers and do-ers, keen to develop new forms of governance, services, products or communication in radical new ways. The work builds heavily on the field of science fiction, utopian literature, politics, peace studies and their own expertise in sociology and design, meaning that the research has a people-centred and action-oriented foundation.
The Design Fiction for Peace project culminates in an exhibition of selected works at the Participatory Design Conference in the School of Design at Politechnico di Milano as part of a new ‘non-traditional’ research output format ‘Places’ which invites researchers to submit research-led workshops and cultural events in the lead up to—and during—academic conferences.
If you are a designer or design researcher, you too can join the emerging Design for Peace network here, as Dr Ely and Professor Koskinen build future design research programmes centred on peace, security and resilience.
