Designing for Co-Presence: Polyphony, Opacity, and Graphic Storytelling in Illustrating Change

This article examines Illustrating Change , a graphic storytelling and anti-racist pedagogy project co-created in Ireland (funded by Research Ireland New Foundations) involving displaced people, early school leavers, trainee teachers and creativity consultants. It argues that the ethical value of the project did not lie primarily in producing empathy, testimony or a polished public output but rather in designing conditions for co-presence without compulsory disclosure. Drawing on moral and sensory anthropology, participatory design and scholarship on graphic narratives, this research develops polyphony as an ethical condition rather than a celebratory metaphor for the engagement of many voices. In this sense, polyphony names an uneven terrain of relation in which speech, silence, hesitation, image, withdrawal and partial participation are differently authorised and differently exposed to risk. The article demonstrates how graphic storytelling can hold fragments, gaps and unfinished scenes without forcing them into a single narrative about forced displacement. It also attends to the institutional pressures that shape applied research, including ethics protocols, funding deliverables, safeguarding responsibilities and pedagogical expectations. Against a backdrop that treats participation as an unqualified good, this article proposes a more modest but demanding orientation: to design for attentiveness, restraint, uncertainty, reversibility and the right not to be fully known.