This paper presents Ambassador Trees, a biodesign research project that explores how plant sensing, environmental monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be reconfigured to support new forms of human-nature communication. Rather than treating plants and ecosystems as passive objects of measurement or optimization, the project reframes trees as localized ecological representatives whose physiological and environmental signals can be translated into interpretable, dialogic forms. Drawing on recent advances in plant sensors, environmental sensing networks, and Artificial Intelligence, this paper synthesizes existing technical research through a non-human-centered and speculative design lens. The work grounds this framework in a series of exploratory physical prototypes, Treeborgs, that embody ideas of interspecies interaction, distributed sensing, and AI-mediated interpretation. Together, these contributions demonstrate how sensing and AI might function not as extractive instruments, but as interpretive media that foster attentiveness, empathy, and ecological responsibility, offering a pathway toward more relational technological engagements with the living world.

Although design research is a relatively recent academic field, it has developed several influential typologies over the past decades. This study conducts a systematic review to evaluate how design research approaches relate to the design process, with a specific focus on two overlooked dimensions: the point of research integration in design and the research attitude guiding the inquiry. Drawing on foundational models by Frayling, Cross and Buchanan, the paper proposes a conceptual framework that cross-analyzes research typologies with these two dimensions. Seventy peer-reviewed studies in architecture and related disciplines were identified and analyzed through PRISMA guidelines and Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) checklist. The findings reveal four distinct clusters: (1) research about design – basic research – design epistemology, (2) research through design – applied research – design praxeology, (3) research for design – clinical research – design phenomenology and (4) a fourth category, research through design (II) – applied research – design epistemology. Moreover, five research attitudes were identified across the studies: practitioner, practitioner with user, practitioner with AI, researcher and user. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of how design knowledge is produced in architectural research.

This article outlines a human-centered approach to developing digital patient stories, for sharing their experiences in health care, while preserving patient and others’ privacy. Employing a research-through-design approach, the study proposes a design solution using visualization and digital storytelling to document patients’ and families’ experiences and emotions, as well as their interactions with healthcare professionals in the postnatal unit. By transforming selected observational data into animated stories, this approach has the potential to elicit empathy, stimulate stakeholder engagement, and serve as a practical training tool for clinicians. This work was conducted as part of a broader study that aims to contribute to the existing knowledge base by advancing our understanding of stakeholder needs in birthing facilities and through postpartum discharge. This study primarily focuses on strategies for the development of digital stories and summarizes the factors that contributed to the production of digital stories within the context of sensitive data. It may serve as a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners interested in utilizing digital stories to encourage discussions, education and ultimately to enhance systems of health care for respect, equity and support.

Research Through Design (RTD) needs to reconsider the meaning of “designing” in the research process of “through design.” We propose Research Through Co-design (RTC) as a new application of Control System Theory (CST) that includes a research problem assigned to a co-design process in RTD. It embeds the participatory paradigm through collaborative design practice and makes the research a collaborative process for learning from all the participants. To sustain the RTC theory, we present a cognitive model of RTC. It is a “model for” – rather than a “model of” – describing how the co-design, as a neural network process, works through its nodes’ collaboration to find co-designed solutions and the research answer. Diversity increases as non-experts and non-designers with different backgrounds participate. This is valuable for the RTC learning system. The discussions highlight the possibility of considering (i) the RTC model as useful for describing a robust RTD process through CST; (ii) RTC as a cognitive model for explaining the value of co-design in research processes; and (iii) RTC as a strategy for applying the participative paradigm in formal research. Finally, new insights and implications are highlighted, including using RTC as a predictive tool through artificial intelligence.

In this paper we explore the influence of the physical and social environment (the design space) son the formation of shared understanding in multidisciplinary design teams. We concentrate on the creative design meeting as a microenvironment for studying processes of design communication. Our applied research context entails the design of mixed physical–digital interactive systems supporting design meetings. Informed by theories of embodiment that have recently gained interest in cognitive science, we focus on the role of interactive “traces,” representational artifacts both created and used by participants as scaffolds for creating shared understanding. Our research through design approach resulted in two prototypes that form two concrete proposals of how the environment may scaffold shared understanding in design meetings. In several user studies we observed users working with our systems in natural contexts. Our analysis reveals how an ensemble of ongoing social as well as physical interactions, scaffolded by the interactive environment, grounds the formation of shared understanding in teams. We discuss implications for designing collaborative tools and for design communication theory in general.