Design research is inherently both social and political. We are living and working in times of great unrest and upheaval, and we feel that our work must increasingly reflect this. We propose this workshop to engage with the material practices of protest. These range from long-held traditions of banners and badges to more emergent forms of zines, stickers, tattoos, and visible repairs.We propose a day of making and exchange to engage these practices. We will explore the materiality of the protest banner as a surface of collective expression, while also emphasizing care, repair, and feminist practices of collective knowledge-making in design research. Practically, we will be making banners, stickers, and temporary tattoos, using a speculative trade union as a unifying structure for discussions around care and justice in design.

Sample making and documentation are well established practices in digital craftsmanship. However, we rarely discuss how we return to these collections to look for starting points and new understandings. In this provocation, we propose diffraction as a way to describe how we revisit and reconsider samples in different times and contexts. In doing so, we can imagine what other knowledge might be present in them and interpret what else they might do. We use the example of the development of a filtering textile, based on a set of woven samples developed for other purposes and projects. Through this, we show how a relatively simple strategy can support us to investigate material samples and collections through a kind of makers’ science, in which both inspiration and proof may lie in the material samples themselves.