Grammars of Kinship: Designing Relational Coexistence through Language
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In the face of ecological collapse and material overproduction, design must grapple not only with its material choices but also with the ontological frameworks that structure its engagement with the world. Central to any meaningful shift in design is the act of recognition - acknowledging the existence, agency and voice of those entities, both human and more-than-human, that have long been rendered invisible or inert within dominant paradigms of participation. Participation presupposes recognition, yet the very terms of recognition are often shaped by linguistic, cultural and epistemic regimes that exclude certain ways of being. This paper turns to Sanskrit as a linguistic-material framework that challenges extractivist ontologies. In Sanskrit, animacy is embedded within grammar, where rivers, trees, animals and cosmological elements are not passive resources but agential subjects imbued with affective and spiritual significance. Through its grammatical structure and cosmological lexicon Sanskrit offers a worldview that resists the instrumental logics of colonial modernity and instead builds a sense of kinship with matter. Drawing on Barad's concept of intra-action and Morton's notion of ecological entanglements, the paper argues for a pluriversal approach to design that foregrounds the ontological insights embedded in non-Western languages and practices. This approach makes possible a more expansive view of participation, in which rivers, waste, flora and even designed artifacts are recognized not as external to human concerns but as co-constitutive elements in a shared world. This exploratory paper proposes grammatical worlding as a framework for rethinking participation through the relational and material insights embedded in language. The theoretical provocation is: how might design itself be re-grammatized to reflect the entangled agencies it engages? By treating language as a site of material participation, this paper calls for a participatory design practice grounded in recognition, reciprocity, and relational coexistence across species, systems, and scales.
Source: Participatory Design Conference
Author: Dhriti Dhaundiyal
Institution: Doon University
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7163322706