Brogan Ogilvie
This paper argues that the relational and affective labour upon which participatory and regenerative design depends is enabled by an underlying orientation that the Western academic tradition has yet to articulate—love. Drawing on Maturana’s (1996) conceptualisation of love as the domain of behaviours through which the other arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself, and Hooks’ (1999) definition of love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing another’s growth, the paper proposes love-as-practice as the integrating logic beneath the relational competencies—trust, reflexivity, relational sensitivity, humility—that the participatory and regenerative design literatures have been cataloguing separately.
The inquiry is pursued through four autoethnographic vignettes drawn from a six-week knowledge exchange placement with a community regeneration NGO in Arusha, Tanzania, between December 2025 and January 2026. The vignettes trace the arc of a cross-cultural design engagement—from entering a community and building trust, through navigating political complexity and protected status, to recalibrating what it means to contribute—rendering visible the texture of what love-as-practice looks like when brought imperfectly and in real time to bear within a context where the usual coordinates of the designer’s life no longer apply.
What the vignettes reveal is that love-as-practice is not a uniform quality applied equally across relationships but a capacity that must be continually recalibrated in response to who the other is, what they carry, and what the structural conditions of the relationship permit. It includes restraint, partiality, and the honest recognition of its own limits. It is this inclusion of difficulty—the capacity to hold back, to accept failure, to remain present to discomfort without resolving it prematurely—that positions love as a competency rather than a sentiment.
The paper situates this argument within the onto-epistemic condition of neoliberal modernity, proposing love-as-practice as the deliberate reconstitution of relational capacity within a world that structurally erodes it, and identifies the cultivation of relational orientations across different practitioners and contexts as a direction the field has not yet pursued.
Keywords: love-as-practice, affective labour, participatory design, social design, relationality, autoethnography