Designing for living together

This essay introduces the main themes of PDC2026 (Peace Dialogue Coexistence. Designing for Living Together) and aims to build a bridge between Design, Participatory Design (PD) and the foci of the conference. In a time marked by escalating conflicts and polarisation, we question whether we have lost our ability to live together and what role PD might play in this. Acknowledging design's historical complicity in structural inequalities and environmental degradation, we nonetheless argue that PD holds potential as a dialogic and infrastructural practice capable of supporting peaceful coexistence. Drawing on key conceptual strands, we frame PD as a bridge-building practice that nurture empathy, redistributes agency and enables collective imagination. Through engagement with theories of positive peace, environmental peacebuilding, dialogic exchange and post-anthropocentric design, we define design contribution for living together as a relational infrastructure that enables plural publics, including more-than-human actors, to negotiate coexistence. We eventually introduce and comment the main insights from the papers submitted to PDC2026.