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.

Longstanding practices of participatory co-design have sought to engage communities in the development of shared resources, services, and technologies. However, approaches such as citizen-centered design and digital civics bring these design methods to bear on the development of digital technologies in support of civic and third sector organizations in particularly complex and rapidly changing socio-technical landscapes. Such endeavors frequently need to engage marginalized, under-served and hard to reach communities. In these design spaces, the ‘Digital Citizen’ becomes a contested concept, deserving of deeper exploration. In this one-day workshop we seek to bring together the DIS community, industry practitioners and third sector representatives to mutually explore the concept of the digital citizen, its boundaries, and opportunities, and in response to a rapidly changing environment of smart digital services, the ways in which design methods might be evolved to better support designing for and with these digital citizens.

Public sector organizations have been increasingly turning to design in their pursuit to innovate and address pressing challenges that seem intractable through their existing ways of working. Design’s presence in the public sector is still a relatively recent phenomenon ridden with many challenges. Through a study of three municipalities in Sweden, we present tensions designers face as they work their way to build design capacity. We argue that making a place for design in organizational systems and their ways of working requires skillfully navigating these tensions. We describe each tension in terms of their contradictions embedded in dualities and discuss designers’ ways of managing them. Practical applications for design and public administration are also discussed.

Municipalities around the world have become increasingly reliant upon digital technologies in their everyday operations. In pursuit of a faster, cheaper, and more efficient local government, service platforms and applications that mediate citizen-government inter- actions, smart city infrastructures, and automated decision-making systems have proliferated. More recently, digital technologies are also sought to address socially complex issues and foster civic en- gagement. These ambitions, motivated by both rational and demo- cratic perspectives, however, confront many challenges such as de- signing with wide heterogeneous groups, navigating organizational structures, and dealing with the political agendas and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholders. Designing digital technolo- gies for municipalities, therefore, requires an ability to address the technical, social, institutional, and political challenges critically, practically, and holistically. This hybrid workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to (1) explore how this could be achieved and (2) map the existing and emerging challenges and opportunities for designing public digital services and technologies.

The success of neural networks builds to a large extent on their ability to create internal knowledge representations from real-world high-dimensional data, such as images, sound, or text. Approaches to extract and present these representations, in order to explain the neural network's decisions, is an active and multifaceted research field. To gain a deeper understanding of a central aspect of this field, we have performed a targeted review focusing on research that aims to associate internal representations with human understandable concepts. In doing this, we added a perspective on the existing research by using primarily deductive nomological explanations as a proposed taxonomy. We find this taxonomy and theories of causality, useful for understanding what can be expected, and not expected, from neural network explanations. The analysis additionally uncovers an ambiguity in the reviewed literature related to the goal of model explainability; is it understanding the ML model or, is it actionable explanations useful in the deployment domain? 

Public libraries are more and more recognized to become partners in co-design and technology education, also aiming to bridge the digital divide. We see it as a great opportunity to expand the roles of public libraries even further, engaging citizens in co-design processes, improving existing public e-services and co-designing new services. That shift requires new roles taken by librarians, but also new processes, as well as new methods of development of e-services in the public sector. In PDC Place Nordic we explore this new role of libraries in participatory future making, engaging librarians, academics, practitioners, and different local communities. Events will take place in Copenhagen, Malmö, and Helsinki/Espoo.  

Contemporary Machine Learning (ML) often focuseson large existing and labeled datasets and metrics aroundaccuracy and performance. In pervasive online systems, conditionschange constantly and there is a need for systems thatcan adapt. In Machine Teaching (MT) a human domain expertis responsible for the knowledge transfer and can thus addressthis. In my work, I focus on domain experts and the importanceof, for the ML system, available features and the space they span.This space confines the, to the ML systems, observable fragmentof the physical world. My investigation of the feature space isgrounded in a conducted study and related theories. The resultof this work is applicable when designing systems where domainexperts have a key role as teachers.

Machine learning research today is dominated by atechnocentric perspective and in many cases disconnected fromthe users of the technology. The machine teaching paradigm insteadshifts the focus from machine learning experts towards thedomain experts and users of machine learning technology. Thisshift opens up for new perspectives on the current use of machinelearning as well as new usage areas to explore. In this study,we apply and map existing machine teaching principles ontoa contextual machine teaching implementation in a commutingsetting. The aim is to highlight areas in machine teaching theorythat requires more attention. The main contribution of this workis an increased focus on available features, the features space andthe potential to transfer some of the domain expert’s explanatorypowers to the machine learning system.

Building interpretable machine learning agents is a challenge that needs to be addressed to make the agents trustworthy and align the usage of the technology with human values. In this work, we focus on how to evaluate interpretability in a machine teaching setting, a settingthat involves a human domain expert as a teacher in relation to a machine learning agent. By using a prototype in a study, we discuss theinterpretability denition and show how interpretability can be evaluatedon a functional-, human- and application level. We end the paperby discussing open questions and suggestions on how our results can be transferable to other domains.

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.”