Exploring the Spatial Context of Householders’ Interactions with a Virtual Assistant

The Sciences of the Democracies proposes a groundbreaking means for holistic study, drawing on five sources of knowledge that will provide better understanding of democracy, or rather, of ‘the democracies’. These are: individual people, groups of people, non-textual media, texts, and non-humans.

This book details how the inclusion of these five sources across temporal, spatial, cultural, linguistic, and species contexts leads to the discovery of democratic practices and institutions hitherto unknown or unfamiliar to the conventional ‘Western’ perception. It promises to generate a new class of democratic theorist – the ‘Fourth Theorist’, who theorizes from thousands of multimedial democracy concepts – and it has the potential for generating better-founded, less arbitrary, more inclusive democratic theories. In doing so, the book considers the philosophical, institutional, educational, and methodological difficulties of the scientific understandings and undertakings it proposes. The book is a choral work of many collaborating authors. Their ambition is to offer a touchstone text for government and public officials, citizens, residents and visitors, researchers, practitioners, and philanthropists (big and small) participating in what is a vibrant global discussion on how to study and practice democracy equitably.

This paper explores Relational Design as a choreography of practices that cultivate the skills necessary to navigate differences and build community within design processes. It promotes a design practice that sees relationship-building as a core function of creating long-term stewardship in participatory worldmaking. The relational practices presented here emerge from outside traditional design disciplines, drawing primarily from community organizing, with an understanding that change occurs through networks of interdependent relationships. The paper outlines a trans-experiential set of practices: honoring place as kin, revealing and redistributing power, cultivating a culture of accountability, facilitating dialogue, and hosting belonging and celebration. These practices strengthen multimodal design literacies that focus on care, repair, and regeneration. Ultimately, the paper positions Relational Design as a movement for fostering pluralist, coalition-based approaches to systemic regeneration.