Paper | Creative Dialogical Spaces for Agonism
Academic Output
Creative Dialogical Spaces for Agonism – Embodied Making and Material Dialogue in Contexts of Conflict and Transformation
Authors:
Mike de Kreek, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Ferry van de Mosselaer, Fontys University of Applied Sciences
Katrina Newell, Belfast School of Art
Keywords: agnostic participatory design, artefact-based methods, dialogical spaces, temporal dynamics, material mediation
Abstract
Creative and agonistic tensions lie at the heart of democratic participatory design, yet conventional frameworks often smooth out conflict or treat it as a failure. In this workshop, “Creative Dialogical Spaces for Agonism,” we invite researchers and practitioners to explore how artefact-based methods can cultivate more generative, pluralistic dialogues that move beyond superficial consensus or entrenched antagonism.
Through three contrasting stations (LEGO modelling in personal transformation dialogues; low-tech remix walls in post-conflict community contexts; and SiPRuS mapping of shared governance), participants will enact, compare, and reflect on how material artefacts mediate power, voice, conflict, and imagination over time. The rotating structure encourages dialogue not only across participants, but between artefacts, contexts, and interpretive frames.
Outcomes include a collective meta-map linking methods, contexts, and dialogical modalities; practice insights and heuristics to bring back to participants’ own work; and seeds for a collaborative publication or toolkit. By foregrounding temporality, situatedness, and the messy affordances of material dialogue, the workshop aims to strengthen the theoretical and practical foothold for agonistic participatory design.