One of the partners in the Mobility Makers project, Kolding School of Design, has made two thought-provoking contributions to the academic discourse on design and mobility. Presented at the Nordes 2025 Conference held at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway, on August 6-8, 2025, both papers draw on experiences from our shared project and explore new ways of understanding design practice — not as something imposed on the world, but as something that emerges with it.
Designing with Rural Mobilities
The first paper, “Designing with Rural Mobilities: Attempts at Relational Design”, by Sofie Holst, Morten Krogh Petersen, Mathias Poulsen, Alexandra Lindek, and Maximilian Schmidauer, is an ’exploratory paper’ that examines how relational design can serve as both a method and an attitude in working with mobility challenges in rural contexts.
Rather than seeing design as a linear process that moves from research to solution, the authors explore how design happens in relation — between people, places, and mobilities that both connect and divide rural life. Drawing from their experiences in our project, they look at the ways mobility initiatives shape relationships among communities, institutions, and environments, and how these relations can be both enabling and constraining.
The paper shows that designing relationally means designing with the world rather than for it. This involves paying attention to how interventions affect existing networks of people, resources, and movement — and how these, in turn, reshape the design process itself. By reflecting on moments where relational design “unfolds – or fails to unfold,” the authors highlight both the potential and the pitfalls of this emerging methodology.
Their conclusion calls for further inquiry into what they describe as the “goods and bads” of relational design: when does it truly foster meaningful change, and when does it risk reproducing the very dynamics it seeks to challenge?
Designing for Relay-tional Co-becoming
The second paper, “Designing for Relay-tional Co-becoming”, by Alexandra Harder Lindek and Mathias Poulsen, is a ’research paper’ that continues this exploration but shifts focus to how design processes can nurture mutual becoming — a continuous process of transformation among designers, communities, and environments.
Central to their work is the concept of the “relay conversation” approach, a way of structuring design engagements as ongoing exchanges rather than fixed workshops or consultations. In this framework, dialogue becomes a relay — ideas and insights are passed, adapted, and reinterpreted over time, allowing design to grow in sync with the people and places it serves.
The paper draws on autoethnographic reflections from fieldwork in rural communities, exploring how designers navigate uncertainty and emergence together with local actors. Instead of positioning themselves as problem-solvers, the authors suggest that designers act as participants in a shared becoming, responding to the subtle shifts and rhythms of each place.
This idea of co-becoming expands traditional participatory design by focusing less on inclusion (who gets to speak) and more on entanglement (how we change together). It invites a slower, more situated form of collaboration — one that acknowledges interdependence, sensitivity, and the evolving nature of rural futures.
Connecting Research and Practice
Both papers share a commitment to understanding design as a relational practice — one that works through connections rather than imposing solutions onto them. Their insights directly contribute to our project’s broader aim of rethinking sustainable mobility not just as an infrastructural challenge, but as a lived, social, and ecological practice.
By grounding their research in real-life project experiences, Kolding Design School bridges the gap between theory and practice. Their work enriches our shared understanding of what it means to design responsibly — with sensitivity, openness, and care for the evolving relations that shape our communities and environments.
The partnership congratulates the Kolding team on these inspiring academic contributions and thank them for bringing the accomplishments made within the Mobility Makers project into the international design research arena.