This paper reflects on multidisciplinary, collaborative engagement projects conducted over the past five years, initiated in 2021 during the global COVID-19 lockdowns. These projects – primarily facilitated between our University’s School of Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) and Engagement Office – saw collaborations between Graphic Design students, Photography students, faculty members, Engagement Office staff, and community partners. These collaborative engagement projects provided unique challenges and opportunities, allowing for the emergence of meaningful lessons in response to the question “how are we designing for engagement through collaborative, dialogical, or multidisciplinary approaches to design education, practice, and community building?”

In this paper, we argue that a pluriversal approach to design education—rather than a traditional, universalist model—offers one response. A pluriversal approach challenges the traditional view of design as a transactional practice, instead focusing on relationality (Noel, Ruiz, van Amstel, Udoewa, Verma, Botchway, Lodaya and Agrawal 2023). This approach allows for the coexistence of diverse design practices rather than attempting to replace one with another. In 2021, The Future of Design Education Initiative formed a working group comprised of a diverse team of educators and professionals from around the world to make recommendations around various themes, with Pluriversal Design Education (PDE) being one. This paper draws on four of the 'Ten Big Ideas' the PDE working group proposed:

• Big Idea 1: Every community is capable of designing for itself, independent of expert knowledge.
• Big Idea 2: Relational approaches to design embrace connections across nature and culture, mind and body, and us and them.
• Big Idea 3: Design should be done with and by people, not for people.
• Big Idea 6: Design happens beyond the studio, within the community.

In this paper, each idea will be expanded upon, followed by case studies that demonstrate how they were embodied in praxis, along with the lessons learned through these experiences.

By critically reflecting on our experiences over the past five years, we engage with scholarship on engagement and PDE to draw insights that deepen our processes of designing for meaningful engagement. In response to the subtheme, we explore how collaborative, dialogical, and multidisciplinary approaches can foster sustainable and future-focused design practices, in a way that embodies “a coherent and mutually respectful relationship between the university and its communities” (Motala and Vally, 2022) and produce multiple, mutually-beneficial outcomes and transformative experiences for all collaborating participants.