Engaging in Peace, Dialogue, and Coexistence

This paper offers an introductory reflection on the workshop track of the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) 2026, outlining the key questions and perspectives that emerge from it. Participatory Design (PD) is a growing international academic and practice-based field, with an extensive body of work addressing a wide range of questions surrounding the idea of designing together [14]. Across these developments, one practice consistently sits at the core of PD: the workshop. Workshops constitute intentional moments of engagement with others within research and professional projects. This paper introduces the workshop track of the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) 2026, framed by the theme Peace, Dialogue, Coexistence. Building on the historical role of workshops within PD, we approach creating a workshop track for the conference as temporary democratic infrastructures where participation is staged, negotiated, and critically examined. Twelve workshops were selected within four thematic clusters: (a) Living Together Beyond the Human; (b) Place, Spatiality, and Situated Participation foregrounds; (c) Conflict, Dialogue, and Peacebuilding; and (d) Narratives, Emotions, and the Politics of Participation. Across these trajectories, workshops are understood as designed situations that distribute agency, structure tension, and materialise future conditions for coexistence. Significally, the workshop track at PDC 2026 reveals a constellation of experimental practices concerned with how participation can infrastructurally support plural forms of living together.