DRS 2026 Conference, Edinburgh
From June 8 to 12, the EPFL+ECAL Lab’s team is taking part in the 2026 Design Research Society Conference in Edinburgh to present its latest publication Designing for food system transformation: Navigating cultural complexity in cross-regional platform design.
This paper explores the design of a digital platform supporting sustainable food transformation across six European regional Hubs. The research was led by the EPFL+ECAL Lab, as part of the SWITCH project, through a multi-phase participatory evaluation comprising a contextual survey in culturally diverse environments, responsive redesign, and formal usability testing.
The team has articulated emergent design principles including minimising barriers while maintaining community identity, prioritising integration over substitution, and facilitating knowledge circulation rather than data collection. The findings suggest that meaningful transformation requires reconceptualising platforms as distributed infrastructures that enable local adaptation while maintaining cross-regional knowledge exchange.