By way of an ending, and to bring the handbook full circle, the editors asked some of the founding members of the Participatory Design community to reflect on the role of contemporary Participa-tory Design, based on their long engagement in the field and their knowledge of the handbook. It became clear that, rather than projecting hopeful visions for the future, they felt the need to re-emphasise the foundations of Participatory Design in the service of enabling deeper local impact, based on mundane, everyday, and socio-material and political engagements. In the uneasy contemporary global condition, they struggled to position themselves or to set out a direction for the coming generation of researchers for how to address participation and technology design at global scales, in decolonial ways, with multiple species, and so forth. The sentiments they express at once draw attention to the nurturing of hopeful democratic design experiments (Björgvinsson et al., 2010) and Utopian future-making design practices (Ehn et al., 2014) that have been core to Participatory Design. Reaching far back to the early Utopia, we see this attendance to the mundane everyday acts of caring as a thoughtful reminder that even when facing the big issues and conditions at scale (Bødker and Kyng, 2018), the potentials of participation continue to emerge and unfold in the contemporary moment:

Malmö Living Labs (2007–2017) built on a Scandinavian Participatory Design approach and aimed to explore how processes of change in the City of Malmö could be further democratised. In this chapter, as a community of remembrance, Participatory Design researchers of different ages, roles and duration of involvement recall and revitalise memories of lab engagements not previously told. The main challenge addressed concerns how to navigate Participatory Design processes with an aim of open-endedness. The chapter is structured as follows. First, the main source of inspiration is introduced: Umberto Eco’s metaphor of the forest as a narrative place of potential transformation. Next, comes a brief introduction to the context of Malmö Living Labs including its core theoretical foundations and ideas of democratisation, infrastructuring and heterogeneity. Then, at the centre of the chapter, four reflective stories of lab engagements are shared in the form of “Wanderings”. The aim of the stories is not to give voice to all people who participated but rather to reflect upon influential moments that made big imprints on each researcher. The Wanderings encounter the aftermath of a women’s association; a decade of moving in the “academic jungle”; intensities around a game jam; and embodied gatherings around a king’s chair. Lastly, the aim of the chapter is to learn from the challenges and opportunities fronted in the Wanderings and to propose points of attention for future open-ended Participatory Design practices. In addition to arguing for the value of storytelling as an approach to collective remembrance and learning, the three main contributions, proposed are; (1) to acknowledge and work with different intensities and paces in infrastructuring (2) to recognise the complex boundaries in heterogeneous networks, and (3) largely inspired by a dissertation from 2022 by one of the authors, to be carefully aware of the sensitised labour of infrastructuring.

Collaborative Future-Making is a research platform at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University that is concerned with how to envision, elaborate and prototype multiple, inclusive, and sustainable futures. The platform gathers around 20 researchers that share a methodological interest in how critical perspectives from the humanities and social sciences can be combined with the constructive and collaborative aspects of making and prototyping in design research.

The research centers around two major themes:

• Critical imagination​, which focuses on how basic assumptions, norms and structures can be challenged to widen the perspectives on what can constitute socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable and resilient futures.
• Collaborative engagements​, which focuses on how we can set up more inclusive collaborations to prototype and discuss alternative futures, engaging not only professionals and policy makers but also citizens and civil society.

During 2019 the research group set out to make a shared glossary for collaborative future-making. The glossary is multiple in purpose and exists in several versions. Hopefully there will be more to come. At first, the making and articulation of the glossary was used within the research group as an exercise to share concepts that we found central to collaborative future-making, coming from different disciplines. This published version of the glossary was assembled to be used during a workshop called ​Imagining Collaborative Future-Making,​ which gathered a group of international researchers from different disciplines.

The collection of concepts reflects the heterogeneous and diverse character of the research group and a strong belief in that plurality regarding ontologies and epistemologies will be crucial to be able to handle the multiple uncertainties and complex challenges we have to face in the future. Some of the concepts are already well established within different research communities, but gain a specific meaning in relation to the research area. Others are more preliminary attempts to advance our understanding or probe into new potential practices within collaborative future-making. In that sense the concepts in the glossary are well situated and grounded in past and ongoing research within this research group, at the same time as they are meant to suggest, propose and point towards practices and approaches yet to come.

The concepts in this glossary are not only meant to be descriptive but also performative. In that sense, assembling and circulating this glossary is part of collaborative future-making. As pointed out by Michelle Westerlaken in her articulation of “Doing Concepts” (see page 15), “...without proposing, critiquing, or working towards a common or uncommon understanding of certain concepts, it becomes impossible to ‘make futures’ in any deliberate fashion.”

The author had the fortune to be a member of the participatory design community for almost half a century and the privilege to participate in what would call democratic design experiments in the small. The 1990s centered on being part of establishing an academic design-oriented community linked to the democratic visions of participatory design. Nygaard and colleagues had since 1970 worked together with the Norwegian Metal Workers Union (NJMF) on introduction of computers at the workplace. The Utopia project, a participatory design research project, was set up to explore the challenge and eventually to design skills-based technology for newspaper production. It was a collaboration between the graphic workers' unions in all the Nordic countries and an interdisciplinary group of researchers and designers. Winograd, Lave, and Suchman were all active in Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility in the Bay area and had a genuine interest in democratic design experiments as explored in Scandinavia.

For more than four decades, participatory design has provided exemplars and concepts for understanding the democratic potential of design participation. Despite important impacts on design methodology, participatory design has, however, been stuck in a marginal position as it has wrestled with what has been performed and accomplished in participatory practices. In this article, we discuss how participatory design may be reinvigorated as a design research programme for democratic design experiments in the light of the decentring of human-centredness and the foregrounding of collaborative representational practices offered by the ANT tradition in the tension between a parliament of things and a laboratory of circulating references.

The workshop will examine issues around emerging participation in (re-)designing technological and/or societal infrastructures. Contributions should provide cases and/or methodological reflections on connecting ongoing social or professional practices involving infrastructure usages with emerging and/or collaborative processes of changing/improving those infrastructures. Contributions may provide an analytical perspective or methods/tools to stimulate and support processes and activities of infrastructuring.

Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods. These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics.