From Lived Experience to Shared Worlds: Rethinking Disability-Inclusive Design Knowledge Through New Materialism

This paper critically examines disability-inclusive design theory and practice through the lens of new materialism, tracing a shift from designing for users to designing with and ultimately from disability. It reveals a key paradox: while participatory and disability-led approaches foreground lived experience and plural voices, design outcomes must still function across shared, pluriversal contexts. Individual accounts of disability generate situated, partial knowledge that cannot be straightforwardly generalised, creating persistent tensions between singular experiences and collective design needs. By introducing a relational ontology, the paper reframes design knowledge as emergent from dynamic interactions between people, materials and contexts, destabilising binaries such as designer/user and disabled/non-disabled. The proposed praxeology advances disability leadership, positionality and embedded participation as core to design practice. These insights prompt new research questions around how plural, situated knowledges can inform scalable design decisions, how conflicting lived experiences can be ethically negotiated, and how relational, material perspectives can reshape methodologies for inclusive and socially just design.