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.

Software is often described according to a front-end and back-end dichotomy, with interaction happening in the former and the latter being the domain of development and maintenance. My in-depth research on and through the supposedly obsolete and highly detested programming language COBOL, goes beyond this dichotomy and reveals a back-back-end of software, as a site that makes dichotomies such as front-end and back-end possible in the first place. The persistence of COBOL as a legacy system within the digital services of the Global North is shown to be widespread, all the while these systems are maintained by workforces located in the Global South. With a focus on India, the article discusses the paradoxical situation of supposedly developed countries being dependent on labour in emerging and developing countries, in order for infrastructures to keep seeming developed. This involves processes of outsourcing and software wrapping that are described in the article along with the educational structures that are set in place for the maintenance to take place. What Manuel Castells’ once famously dubbed the space of flows of the global network society, is here discussed as having produced a ‘space of flaws’ in which a hidden workforce makes sure that the global flows keep flowing. Beyond the context of software development, I have engaged with COBOL intersectionally, through fieldwork and practice-based art and design methodologies, mapping the extent of which this language, rather than being obsolete, occupies an ‘undead’ position within planetary information networks. The article suggests that the existence of such undead legacy systems goes against ideas of linear technological development as a natural force as well as linear socio-economic development on a whole. The temporal and spatial regimes that work to hide asymmetries of development are discussed and ultimately, I suggest that, contrary to this obfuscation, we need analytical and practical approaches that actively engage these asymmetries.        

The Future of Design Education working group on doctoral education included doctoral supervisors from nine programs around the world and addressed the indeterminacy of standards for the PhD in Design. Internationally, “contributions to knowledge” under the PhD degree title range from evidence-based investigations documented in a dissertation to personal reflections on making artifacts. In some programs, quantitative and qualitative research methods are taught; in others, there is no instruction in methods. The working group suggested that reflection on one’s own creative production is the role of the professional master’s degree and recommended standards for two doctoral programs—the PhD and the Doctor of Design (DDes). The group defined the PhD as addressing unresolved problems with the goal of generalizable knowledge or theory for the field. It described the DDes as a professional practice degree in which research is done in a practice setting to frame a specific opportunity space, guide in-process design decisions, or evaluate outcomes. DDes findings do not claim generalizability and result in “cases.” The working group discussed methods, sampling, standards of evidence and claims, ethics, research writing, and program management.

Debates continue about the positioning of design within research-driven universities. While the idea of autonomy has had a strong appeal, it is the bridging across established academic cultures that has proved especially effective for legitimizing design research and research education. Revisiting a conception of design as a ‘Third Space’ and drawing on a case – the Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education (2008–2015) – we discuss what ‘thirdness’ can entail in context. Our account of this case reveals the unsettled dynamics of navigating in, between and across academic cultures. Design research education, we argue, has prospects to cultivate a critical space within academia, in which its ‘thirdness’ entails sensitization and agitation of the territorial conditions of knowledge. There is a need for a reconsideration of design – and academia more generally – not as a static disciplinary order but as a contested archipelago that opens for alternative orientations.

This article is a reflection piece on the use of the futures cone and an expanded futures cone (which draws on queer theory) as a tool for dialogue and planning between the supervisor and the doctoral student. I do so by situating the use of this tool in relation to three supervision typologies: the product-orientated,process-orientatedand doctoral student-orientated approaches. I claim that it is an underused and highly versatile tool for doctoral supervision.

Urban labs are arenas for fostering urban sustainable transitions, where different actors experiment and learn together how to create inclusive and sustainable cities. A key aspect of these processes is social learning, which is the collaborative learning process through which new understandings and practices emerge from the activities of urban labs. Social learning also includes the process through which these understandings and practices are further anchored and can transform the organizations participating in urban labs. Social learning is seen as key to tackling polarization and creating transformational capacity at different levels. This article explores how social learning can strengthen urban labs’ democratic ambitions. Building on the insights emerging from a collaborative learning process with civil servants within an urban lab, it highlights the need for ensuring plurality and challenging privilege in social learning. It also emphasizes the importance of nurturing a listening capacity within urban labs and municipal organizations.

In this paper, we reflect upon the development process of three videogame ‘promotypes’, prototypes designed to promote the game production pipeline service in development at Aalto University. In the process of developing example games for potential internal clients of the university, we aimed to set out realistic project goals for given resources to better communicate the scope and potential level of the delivered outcomes. Our lessons in this project were, at large, general lessons in game development, including how motivation and proficiency with production tools, alongside the anticipated expectations of clients and players for polished games, affected the game development processes. In addition, we explore how the pursuit for academic accuracy and the model of a non-intensive process of academic game development posits additional challenges in the development of a realistically balanced production pipeline.

This article proposes un/making as a designerly response to urgent environmental issues. By focusing on the simultaneous constructive and destructive aspects of design, this effort attempts to challenge design's dominant focus on making new things. The implications and potentialities of un/making are explored through a designerly inquiry into ongoing and emerging attempts to ban the plastic straw. Based on this inquiry, the article proposes an approach to un/making that is driven by speculative, what if questions, informed by the history of the plastic straw: from coming into being to becoming preferable and now emerging as a matter of concern. Through a series of speculative design artifacts, the authors articulate matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw. They also show how these matters are a stake in the un/making of disposability as part of a preferable future. Rather than proposing one preferable future, the article highlights the frictions that emerge in un/making.

Hæfte nummer 4, 5 og 6 i serien behandler på forskellige vis præmisser for de politiske virkeligheder, som både mennesket og kunsten i dag eksisterer i. Det er tekster, der er optagede af at afdække dybereliggende funktionsmåder i den digitale teknologi, som infrastrukturelt understøtter den verdensorden, som vi og dagens kunstinstitutioner er indskrevet i. Og det er tekster, der søger at motivere rammerne og algoritmerne for sande og engagerede fællesskaber. I sit mediekunstneriske bidrag, Crisis Computing, graver Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter med både humor og kritisk brod et spadestik dybere i de digitale infrastrukturer, som understøtter vores teknologiserede virkelighed. Gennem Ritasdatters optrævling af et forkætret programmeringssprog, får vi syn for det daglige digitale oprydningsarbejde, som finder sted i såkaldte udviklingslande. Her muliggøres den glatte oplevelse, vi i den såkaldt ’udviklede verden’, forbinder med digitale platforme. Således afsløres digitaliseringen som et nyt coverup af en velkendt kolonialistisk verdensorden. Her er teknologiens brugerflader designede til at skjule udbytning og monotont arbejde fra vores ´vestlige´ hverdag, så vi bedre kan trives i vores frie og kreative arbejdsfællesskaber.

Kunsten som Forum på tryk fokuserer på fællesskabet i en tid, hvor opbrud, isolation og krig er med til at nedbryde velkendte alliancer, og hvor digitalisering for alvor – og på godt og ondt – er med til at omforme vores muligheder for at mødes på ny. Serien udkommer i et let lille lommeformat, der passer ned i enhver taske, til enhver tur ud i forårssolen og til enhver, der ønsker at få et dybere indblik i dagens kulturvidenskabelige landskab.

The process of identifying, interpreting, and implementing societal values in university education is an essential part of responsible innovation and designing for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable societies. While there is now a well-defined and growing body of research on the theory and application of designing for values (or ‘value sensitive design’), at present the pedagogical dimension remains underexplored. Teaching Design for Values: A Companion is a resource for teachers of design-based disciplines who wish to foreground values more explicitly in their classes. With fourteen chapters written by both TU Delft educators and international contributors, the book aims to examine the concepts, methods and experiences of teaching design for values within a variety of fields, including urbanism, engineering, architecture, artificial intelligence and industrial design. Through its multi-disciplinarity, Teaching Design for Values proposes an expanded definition of ‘design’ to encompass a broad range of disciplines and processes that deal generally with ‘future-imagining’ and ‘futurebuilding’, including process management. In doing so it explores the ways that values may be expressed and analysed in a variety of different pedagogical contexts.

Decolonization is a situated effort as it relates to the relations of privilege, power, politics, and access (3P-A, in Albarrán González’s terms) between the people involved in design in relation to wider societies. This complexity creates certain challenges for how we can understand, learn about, and nurture decolonization in design towards pluriversality, since such decolonizing effort is based on the relationship between specific individuals and the collective. In this paper, we present and discuss the ‘River project’, a participatory space for decolonizing design, created for designers and practitioners to reflect on their own 3P-A as a way to create awareness of their own oppressive potential in design work. These joint reflections challenged ideas of participation and shaped learning processes between the participants, bringing to the foreground the importance of seeing and allowing for a plurality of life and work worlds to be brought together. We build on the learnings from this project to propose the notions of pluriversal participation, pluriversal presence, and pluriversal directionality, which can help nurture decolonizing designs towards pluriversality. We conclude by arguing that, for nurturing pluriversality through Participatory Design, participation, presence, and direction must be equally pluriversal.

A designer is somebody who points, who designates, and gives directions. Design thereby has a direction into the future. What directions are designers pointing out if design is coupled with posthumanism? Posthumanism has come into being in a landscape of both ideas and design. That which has previously been designed and produced is coming back and it can help us point out harmful inequalities if we sharpen our observational tools and concepts.

“An Emerging Posthumanist Design Landscape” is an overflowing designated area for examples and thinking on compositions of design and critical posthumanism. It is a landscape in the making, yet scarred by previous design cultures and histories. As design researchers operating out of Scandinavian academia, we invite readers/travelers to meander through an emerging hybrid landscape and to make a few selected stops at the sites of our own recent design interventions. We articulate concepts, frictions, and opportunities sprouted in a sprawling and increasingly populated landscape of design and posthumanism. Posthumanist thinking questions and recharges fundamental design concepts and methods/approaches, e.g.: Who are the actors of posthumanist design? Where does it take place? What do we design? What materials do we use? How do we work? When does design take place? Why are compositions of design and critical posthumanism important undertakings? The responses to these questions sketch trajectories for further travels and the co-creation of an emerging posthumanist design landscape.

What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fall-out in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for dynamic and provisional engagements. Such concerns raise age-old issues of inequality and colonialist destruction. Our designs carry the imprint of this current politics, wittingly or unwittingly, into worlds to come. This conversa- tion asked how might we respond fluidly to coming uncertainties, questioning our own practices to sow the seeds of more radical transformation, while recognizing the structural forces that can limit or temper opportunities for design activism. It was or- ganized in three quadrant exercises, which we also reflect upon.

We have to be conscious about our own situatedness in the ecologies for and with which we design, but also invite for critical reviewing it. In order to do so, to become conscious and to critically review, I believe something needs to trigger and intervene. This paper is a personal account of sense-making and tool shaping, to support critical reflecting on my own positionality. I introduce my two tools: Graphical Peeling and Sensing/Zining, which rely both on ‘layouting’ to provide space for reflection. I am not a graphical designer, rather this way of working seems to help unbalance my very personal understandings, assumptions and experiences and provides a space where I can go in dialogue with myself and my experiences. By bringing together experiences, designs made and notes from research and reading, I am working through the material in different ways. I go deeper into the context with each layer I am adding, rethinking the situations that occurred and providing an opportunity to stop, think and be critical. Through this paper I do not necessarily aim for others to use those tools specifically, but rather emphasise the importance to allow for personal, creative, designerly journeys of sense-making, and decolonisation. 

The embodiment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in everyday use products is raising challenges and opportunities for HCI and design research, such as human understandings of AI’s functions and states, passing back and forth of control, AI ethics, and user experi-ence, among others. There has been progress in those areas, such as works on explainable AI (XAI); fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAccT); human-centered AI; and the development of guidelines for Human-AI interaction design. Similarly, the in-terest in studying interaction modalities and their contributions to understandable and transparent AI has been also growing. How-ever, the tangible and embodied modality of interaction and more broadly studies of the forms of such everyday use products are relatively underexplored. This paper builds upon a larger project on designing graspable AI and it introduces a series of concept cards that aim to aid design researchers’ creative exploration of tangible and understandable AI. We conducted a user study in two parts of online sessions and semi-structured interviews and found out that to envision physicality and tangible interaction with AI felt challenging and “too abstract”. Even so, the act of creative exploration of that space not only supported our participants to gain new design perspectives of AI, but also supported them to go beyond anthropomorphic forms of AI.

Rising societal polarisations around health and climate crises have brought more attention to the close relations between social and environmental challenges. These polarisations triggered an interest in the participatory design (PD) field in developing approaches that enhance connections between diverse actors operating across societal and environmental sectors. However, the capabilities needed for these approaches have not been sufficiently articulated in PD research and education. To fill in this gap, we define ‘reworlding’ as an operation of self-critique within PD that engages with capabilities needed to reveal and articulate radical interdependencies between humans and more-than-humans, across social and environmental worlds, and within situated contexts. We propose both the redefinition of the design capabilities needed for (re)connecting these worlds (retracing, reconnecting, reimagining and reinstitutioning), as well as a reconsideration of learning environments where these capabilities can be tested and enhanced.  

This workshop explores learning in Participatory Design (PD). We invite the PD community to reflect on the multiple ways learning can strengthen and expand how we frame and drive participatory design to reflect on how we can expand learning in PD to gain an understanding for the complex system we are all part of, for the interdependence of social, ecological and economic systems. Through this workshop, we will invite participants to address questions such as: What theories and concepts can be used to understand learning in PD? What kind of approaches are used to foster learning in PD? How is learning evaluated in PD? The workshop will bring together members of the PD community interested in these questions, and serve as the basis for developing ongoing and new collaborations around the topic of learning in PD.    

Participatory Design (PD) has a focus on enabling communities to take charge of shaping their own future and as such is a relevant approach for ICT4development (ICT4D), which has been strongly rooted in Sarawak, Malaysia. Therefore, we are organising a three-day Malaysia PDC Place event to create awareness of PD practices and understanding among various sectors in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, not just academia and industry, but also government and the general public. We hope that increasing awareness, particularly among non-traditional "connoisseurs" of PD, such as the government, would aid in the development of more effective and efficient products and services that meet the needs of target groups. This engagement also contributes to the creation of opportunities for underserved communities, such as rural and indigenous communities.  

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.  

The capabilities of humans and AI systems to be creative and perform alongside one another have given rise to new practices of ‘artificial creativity’. In this article, I argue that artificial creativity demonstrates the potential to empower individuals to interface and critically dialogue with computational systems. Reframed as artificial ‘everyday’ creativity, I focus on the curious, joyful and adjacent modes of everyday creativity by including hybrid materials that embrace alternative pedagogies of code and computation. Through the interdisciplinary design approach of ‘critical making’, I craft two unconventionally-coded artefacts that dialogue with AI systems, namely CryptoCrochet-Key and Internet of Towels. Both artefacts are analysed using a four-pronged creativity framework to understand the material translation processes in the artificial everyday creativity practice. With rising concerns about AI's role in misinformation, bias and discrimination, the discussion explores the generative value and limitations of artificial everyday creativity towards the broader goals of civic data literacy and user empowerment.

Collaborating with public or private sector organizations in project-based courses equips design students with key skills to future-proof their careers, but this gives only one side of the story as the key feature of these partnerships is that they are mutualistic collaborations. However, the benefits to organizations of collaborating are not fully explored. This paper presents a case study of partnerships with four different public organizations in a service design course over a five-year period. It argues that collaborating in project-based courses serves as risk-free experimentation and paves the way for organizational learning. The paper first reviews the existing research on collaboration in design education and organizational learning. Then, three types of learning that emerged from the data are analyzed. Next, the steps to successful collaboration are discussed, noting the ups and downs of managing the project partnerships. Finally, the challenges of teaching a collaborative project-based design course are discussed.

Every organisation, cooperation, project or social movement is quintessentially a cluster of alignments between people, places and things. Through these alignments, networks are made, and through these networks action can be made possible or be constricted. These socio-material alignments, clusters and/or networks are understood within this thesis as infrastructures, and this thesis is an inquiry into how to mobilise infrastructures. Mobilising socio-material infrastructures over time is what I refer to as infrastructuring.

Situated within the discipline of participatory design and the theoretical traditions of science and technology studies and feminist technoscience, this thesis investigates the issue of agency within the infrastructuring processes. The thesis departs from the notion that all agency is relational and made through relations. These relations may be material, power or affective. This concept poses a political imperative to those infrastructuring practitioners—the individuals who labour to create new alignments and move the infrastructure forward—to consider the marginalised voices within the infrastructure. The labour performed to do this is not, the thesis argues, a prestigious, artisan work but rather a slow, caring and repetitive maintenance labour. Informed by the theories of Hannah Arendt, this thesis differentiates between this kind of labour and work. Arendt showed work, labour and action as three interictally intertwined yet distinct notions that define ways of being in the world—ways of acting politically. The th- ree notions reinforce and complement each other; however, this thesis places particular emphasis on labour. Labour is often made invisible, feminised and undervalued, and this thesis investigates labour within the infrastructuring processes and suggests methods to illuminate and support it.

The thesis draws upon three case studies located in Malmö and Lund, Sweden. All three projects were situated within public se- ctor work and within projects that emphasised citizen engagement and dialogue. The case studies have the commonality of infrastructuring: they are present both as a subject of study and as a method for both participants and researchers. Methodologically, the Ph.D. project has been conducted through practice-based, participatory, programmatic design research, which draws together the case studies into an enquiry. Finally, this thesis proposes three ‘programmatic answers’ that address the issue of agency within the infrastructuring processes.

The first programmatic answer, feral infrastructures, re-formulates the initial worldview of the programme and articulates infra- structures as messy and unyielding to the organisers’ attempts to cate- gorise them. The boundaries of the infrastructures stretch way beyond the socio-material borders of a defined project or organisation. The thesis argues that this poses an imperative to the infrastructuring prac- titioner to become sensitised to her terrain and to develop a reflexive praxis to interact with it.

The second programmatic answer, affective infrastructuring, recognises affect as a matter of concern within the infrastructuring labour. Emotional labour and affective economies are raised here as factors that can make or break collaborative doings. This is discussed in an argument for ethics-of-care.

The third and final programmatic answer, collaborative anecdotalization, is a proposed method for interacting with the messy, af- fective terrain of infrastructures. Anecdotalization is presented here as a reciprocal practice beyond mere descriptions: holding within it the ability of defining social realities, re-telling and challenging them and furthering and re-aligning them. The notion of collaborative anecdo- talization suggests that no one actor can hold a complete overview of an infrastructure, and without collaborative descriptions, it is impos- sible to identify, understand and create those alignments that infra- structuring practitioners seek. This thesis uses anecdotes as situated, embodied accounts of empirical data. The stories re-told in this book have been selected to invite the reader into the practical work, which underpins the concepts presented above, and, in congruence with the project’s methodology, calls into consideration that any event or interaction can be viewed from multiple perspectives and tell multiple tales.

The Swedish government has decided that Sweden will become carbon neutral by 2045. What are the implications for us as citizens in such a transition? What formats allow us to favour careful transformation over progress through radical innovation? In this paper, we attempt to understand grief and hope in the context of this transition. We describe a designerly format of re-production and translation aimed at collectively working through potential future changes, uncertainties and loss. Influenced by plaster moulding techniques used at a closed-down pottery, we invite participants to reproduce and translate original animal and plant motifs into present circumstances. These practical hands-on engagements allow us to notice and articulate change in relation to the past and orient ourselves towards uncertain futures. Hope can be found in the ruins of industries, in locally produced alternative energies and in small-scale attempts to undo biodiversity loss.

Purpose The purpose is to firstly, provide an example of how voices of people with various disabilities (motor, visual, hearing, and neuropsychiatric impairments) can be listened to and involved in the initial phases of a co-design process (Discover, Define). Secondly, to present the outcome of the joint explorations as design opportunities pointing out directions for future development of crisis communication technologies supporting people with disabilities in building crisis preparedness. The study was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach The study assumes a design research approach including a literature review, focus group interviews, a national online survey and collaborative (co-)design workshops involving crisis communicators and representatives of disability organisations in Sweden. The research- and design process was organised in line with the Double Diamond design process model consisting of the four phases: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver, whereof the two first phases are addressed in this paper. Findings The analysis of the survey data resulted in a series of challenges, which were presented to and evaluated by crisis communicators and representatives from the disability organisations at the workshops. Seven crisis communication challenges were identified, for example, the lack of understanding and knowledge of needs, conditions and what it means to build crisis preparedness for people with disabilities, the lack of and/or inability to develop digital competencies and the lack of social crisis preparedness. The challenges were translated into design opportunities to be used in the next step of the co-design process (Develop, Deliver). Originality/value This research paper offers both a conceptual approach and empirical perspectives of design opportunities in crisis communication. To translate identified challenges into design opportunities starting with a "How Might We", creates conditions for both researchers, designers and people with disabilities to jointly turn something complex, such as a crisis communication challenge, into something concrete to act upon. That is, their joint explorations do not stop by "knowing", but also enable them to in the next step take action by developing potential solutions for crisis communication technologies for facing these challenges.

In this pictorial, we present Kolam, a visual artform originating in Tamilnadu, South India, as an ecofeminist computational art practice. We provide a visual documentation of Kolam's Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) through eight characteristics based on existing research and authors’ personal experiences as Kolam practitioners. We begin by framing Kolam as an ecofeminist practice, highlighting cultural and ecological characteristics of Kolam as a Tamil tradition. We then illustrate evolving hybrid multimedia and contemporary technological practices that characterize Kolam as computational art. Our aim is to present a cohesive and compelling visual narrative using the artwork of authors and four contemporary Kolam practitioners to inspire creativity and highlight challenges for relational knowledge production in design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research.

In this pictorial paper, we present a series of drawing conversations held between two humans, mediated by computational GAN models. We consider how this creative collaboration is affected by the hybrid inclusion of more-than-human participants in the form of watercolour and artificial intelligence. Our drawing experiments were an extension of our search for new ways of seeing and telling, which includes a reflection of the extent to which more-than-human elements took part in our creative process. We discuss our tendencies to form strange interpretations and assign meaning to the unpredictable and ambiguous spaces we created with them. We further speculate on the characteristic material agencies they revealed in our interactions with them. Finally, we contend how such collaborations are already and always embedded and embodied in our ways of seeing and knowing in design and creativity research.

This one-day workshop invites designers, researchers and practitioners whose work might involve design, to collectively speculate about designed artefacts and technologies through the creation of drawing conversations: visual dialogues resulting from the merging of drawings created by different people. The workshop aims to use drawing as an activity for collaborative engagement with ambiguity, interpretation and mutual learning. Through drawing activities, we aim to join in Venice's rich creative traditions, and develop speculative visualisations in order to find common grounds between the diverse research interests of our organisers and participants.

Design is conventionally considered to be about making and creating new things. But what about the converse of that process – unmaking that which already exists? Researchers and designers have recently started to explore the concept of “unmaking” to actively think about important design issues like reuse, repair, and unintended socio-ecological impacts. They have also observed the importance of unmaking as a ubiquitous process in the world, and its relation to making in an ongoing dialectic that continually recreates our material and technological realms. Despite the increasing attention to unmaking, it remains largely under-investigated and under-theorized in HCI. The objectives of this workshop are therefore to (a) bring together a community of researchers and practitioners who are interested in exploring or showcasing the affordances of unmaking, (b) articulate the material and epistemological scopes of unmaking within HCI, and (c) reflect on frameworks, research approaches, and technical infrastructure for unmaking in HCI that can support its wider application in the field.

It has been highlighted how design engagement with the public sector risks being either irrelevant or instrumental to technocratic agendas due to a lack of understanding of the public sector’s nature. Based on the idea of public sector innovation as a matter of learning and adaptation for continuous improvement, this article looks at how participatory design approaches can be used to drive co-learning processes within the public sector, namely, collaborative learning processes about institutional aspects. It reflects on the authors’ engagement within a Swedish public organisation that relied on traditional design processes and co-learning processes. By analysing these processes, the article highlights how design as problem framing, by supporting collaborative reflexivity, can be a fruitful way to engage with institutional aspect.

Explainable AI (XAI) seeks to disclose how an AI system arrives at its outcomes. But the nature of the disclosure depends in part on who needs to understand the AI and the available explanation modalities (e.g., verbal and visual). Users’ preferences regarding explanation modalities might differ, as some might prefer spoken explanations compared to visual ones. However, we argue for broadening the explanation modalities, to consider also tangible and physical forms. In traditional product design, physical forms have mediated people’s interactions with objects; more recently interacting with physical forms has become prominent with IoT and smart devices, such as smart lighting and robotic vacuum cleaners. But how tangible interaction can support AI explanations is not yet well understood.

In this second studio proposal on Graspable AI (GAI) we seek to explore design qualities of physical forms as an explanation modality for XAI. We anticipate that the design qualities of physical forms and their tangible interactivity can not only contribute to the explainability of AI through facilitating dialogue, relationships and human empowerment, but they can also contribute to critical and reflective discourses on AI. Therefore, this proposal contributes to design agendas that expand explainable AI into tangible modalities, supporting a more diverse range of users in their understanding of how a given AI works and the meanings of its outcomes.

Computational systems are becoming increasingly smart and automated. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems perceive things in the world, produce content, make decisions for and about us, and serve as emotional companions. From music recommendations to higher-stakes scenarios such as policy decisions, drone-based warfare, and automated driving directions, automated systems affect us all.

But researchers and other experts are asking, How well do we understand this alien intelligence? If even AI developers don’t fully understand how their own neural networks make decisions, what chance does the public have to understand AI outcomes? For example, AI systems decide whether a person should get a loan; so what should—what can—that person understand about how the decision was made? And if we can’t understand it, how can any of us trust AI?

The emerging area of explainable AI (XAI) addresses these issues by helping to disclose how an AI system arrives at its outcomes. But the nature of the disclosure depends in part on the audience, or who needs to understand the AI. A car, for example, can send warnings to consumers (“Tire Pressure Low”) and also send highly technical diagnostic codes that only trained mechanics can understand. Explanation modality is also important to consider. Some people might prefer spoken explanations compared to visual ones. Physical forms afford natural interaction with some smart systems, like vehicles and vacuums, but whether tangible interaction can support AI explanation has not yet been explored.

In the summer of 2020, a group of multidisciplinary researchers collaborated on a studio proposal for the 2021 ACM Tangible Embodied and Embedded (TEI) conference. The basic idea was to link conversations about tangible and embodied interaction and product semantics to XAI. Here, we first describe the background and motivation for the workshop and then report on its outcomes and offer some discussion points.

In the EU a program for implementing a circular approach to the Lifestyle and Fashion Industry dealing with the resource challenges of the massive textile-production has been launched (EU 2020). Consequently, national and international legislation is expected to become reality over the coming 5-10 years. Thus, the industry faces a need for circular and closed-loop approaches and will be challenged in developing and recruiting internal competencies for making the transition from linear to circular production possible. Many lifestyle companies face the transition as a challenging process in which the elements are both interdependent, interconnected and influence simultaneously economic, environmental and social concerns. This affects the companies at a wide variety of organizational levels. The companies often struggle to handle the challenges in conjunction, even as this generates tensions, paradoxes and contradictions in the organization – again challenging the roles of i.e. the designer. (Hahn et al., 2014, Berger et al. 2007). Even so, the tensions and paradoxes have received relatively little attention in the literature, and much of the present research on organizational replies to issues related to sustainable development, are often framed around an instrumental logic, - i.e., what benefits the companies in managerial or economical concerns. (Hahn et al., 2014). Performing circular design approaches require the development and use of both personal but also sustainable and systemic-competencies as they have to implode a new level of complexity in the design- and production process, and this puts the designers in often challenging positions and roles in the companies. Research demonstrates how fashion designers can support the transition towards a circular economy (CE) in the fashion industry (EMF, 2018) but as another study investigated the roles of the fashion designers working in medium and large international fashion companies and summarized a model – Organisational Roles of Fashion Designers for Circular Economy (ORFDCE model) suggesting that designers can take up three central roles in the transition process, it provided the designers can expand their sustainability-related knowledge and are supported by four central systemic organizational changes. (Dan & Østergaard, 2020). This paper explores the challenges of the motivational why and also investigates how the designers can implode change in the organizations in the transition from a linear to a circular Lifestyle industry and what obstructions they encounter. This is done by using a 15 semistructured interviews with designers and managers reflecting on both the ORFDCE model, the organizational theory from ‘Tensions in Corporate Sustainability’ and ‘Sustainable-Wellbeing’ using a Quadrant Model Analyzis, (Nygaard, 2019, Hahn et al. 2014, Nygaard & Tønnesbæk, 2013) The paper finally suggests how to use the research when developing design-Educations for Sustainable Development (ESD’s).

In the EU a program for implementing a circular approach to the Lifestyle and Fashion Industry dealing with the resource challenges of the massive textile-production has been launched (EU 2020). Consequently, national and international legislation is expected to become reality over the coming 5-10 years. Thus, the industry faces a need for circular and closed-loop approaches and will be challenged in developing and recruiting internal competencies for making the transition from linear to circular production possible. Many lifestyle companies face the transition as a challenging process in which the elements are both interdependent, interconnected and influence simultaneously economic, environmental and social concerns. This affects the companies at a wide variety of organizational levels. The companies often struggle to handle the challenges in conjunction, even as this generates tensions, paradoxes and contradictions in the organization – again challenging the roles of i.e. the designer. (Hahn et al., 2014, Berger et al. 2007). Even so, the tensions and paradoxes have received relatively little attention in the literature, and much of the present research on organizational replies to issues related to sustainable development, are often framed around an instrumental logic, - i.e., what benefits the companies in managerial or economical concerns. (Hahn et al., 2014). Performing circular design approaches require the development and use of both personal but also sustainable and systemic-competencies as they have to implode a new level of complexity in the design- and production process, and this puts the designers in often challenging positions and roles in the companies. Research demonstrates how fashion designers can support the transition towards a circular economy (CE) in the fashion industry (EMF, 2018) but as another study investigated the roles of the fashion designers working in medium and large international fashion companies and summarized a model – Organisational Roles of Fashion Designers for Circular Economy (ORFDCE model) suggesting that designers can take up three central roles in the transition process, it provided the designers can expand their sustainability-related knowledge and are supported by four central systemic organizational changes. (Dan & Østergaard, 2020). This paper explores the challenges of the motivational why and also investigates how the designers can implode change in the organizations in the transition from a linear to a circular Lifestyle industry and what obstructions they encounter. This is done by using a 15 semistructured interviews with designers and managers reflecting on both the ORFDCE model, the organizational theory from ‘Tensions in Corporate Sustainability’ and ‘Sustainable-Wellbeing’ using a Quadrant Model Analyzis, (Nygaard, 2019, Hahn et al. 2014, Nygaard & Tønnesbæk, 2013) The paper finally suggests how to use the research when developing design-Educations for Sustainable Development (ESD’s).

In light of current environmental challenges, it often seems that optimism is a required emotional state for addressing our future. This can be seen in how different technological fixes are assumed to sort our futures out at the same time as requiring minimal change in our daily lives. Moving beyond our existing high-carbon and material lives requires not only that we deal with the optimistic end of the spectrum but also that we envision fragile and uncertain futures. In response, this article proposes a designerly format for supporting public anticipation that attends to and cares for tensions between hope and grief, with the aim of nurturing grounds for living with uncertain futures. In contrast to abstract and decontextualized visions and images of the future that can be hard to relate to, the format situates anticipation in lived futures, that are ongoing, emerging and situated in specific locations, environments and experiences. By tending to anticipated losses related to the transition to a post-carbon future, the workshop format created space for confronting shared difficulties and vulnerabilities. Despite the lack of easy solution, the format also opened up for articulating alternatives and less tech-oriented hopeful engagements and practices.

This chapter will outline what we label ‘collaborative future-making’ (CFM), which can be understood as an interplay between critical imagination and collaborative engagements in future-making processes. Using critical imagination to break out of (imagined) political and scholarly deadlocks is an important theme within collaborative future-making. Imagining should not be confused, however, with an abstract practice. Instead, critical imagination links directly to forms of participation and engagement. Collaborative engagement concerns how we can work together. At the centre is an ethos of democratizing processes of change, that is, to acknowledge people’s skills and rights to influence their everyday environments. This approach should be understood as a shift from engaging with the future through forecasting to a concern with how critical imagination can challenge basic assumptions, norms and structures to widen the perspectives on what constitutes socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable futures, engaging not only professionals and policymakers, but also citizens and civil society. This chapter presents opportunities in what we call ‘collaborative future-making’, as well as highlighting the potential problems and challenges in collaborating. This critical perspective is illustrated through a series of empirical examples that combines critical perspectives with constructive and collaborative aspects.

Working or WERKing on a wearable technology project in a transdisciplinary group can be an effective way of learning new skills and collaboration techniques. This paper describes a case study of running a wearable technology group project within an undergraduate course entitled Wearable Technology and Society. The computational media students in the class collaborated with outside performance artists (drag queens and a street dancer) to create interactive performance garments. Design methods such as the use of boundary objects aided in communication of ideas and cooperation across disciplines and cultural barriers. The requirement that the interactive garment function appropriately in a real performance lent urgency and gravity to the experience, motivating cohesive and expedited problem solving in the transdisciplinary group. The use of these methods on a project with real world outcomes and consequences facilitated an authentic learning experience for the students involved.

Public organizations are increasing their engagement with innovation as they respond to the imminent environmental social and economic challenges. These responses are often achieved by replicating ideas and processes from the private sector without adapting them to the unique specificities and characteristics of the public sector. 

In our work we observed how this translation (private to public sector innovation) is not easy to accomplish however, it is important in terms of creating a grounded understanding of innovation that can be shared among public organizations as well as with external actors, politicians and citizens.

In this short booklet, we provide some suggestions for how to reflect on public sector innovation. We mostly highligh the differences with private sector innovation and touch upon the role of innovation labs and leadership for public sector innovation. 

The aim of this booklet is to provide inspiration and starting points for discussions rather than definitive answers. 

We ourselves are also on this journey to better understand this question and welcome any comments and/or suggestions on this material. Please feel free to reach out to us!

How do people become conversant with futures-in-the-making? This paper explores speculative design from the position that futures have agency in the present and therefore forms of speculation - as well as futures - need to be inclusive. Regarding this as a democratic right throws attention on engagement processes, noting that speculation is often centred on the designer's interests rather than seeding appropriation by publics. I argue that situating speculation in a way that is accessible for negotiation requires careful attention to the hybrid process + objectartifacts that result from designing both a provocation and a process for encountering it. My central case study describes one such hybrid artifact, a counterfactual workshop for considering futures by exploring different imagined pasts and making a journey towards alternative presents. This play of temporalities - and the accompanying methods for opening and narrowing the creative work of taking these journeys - suggest a means that speculative design might be situated with participants, thereby simultaneously reflecting on and mitigating the anticipatory nature of the materials. I deconstruct this instance of curating speculative artifacts to reveal not only its mechanisms, but the many points where engagement processes reflect political choices.

This paper engages with biodiversity loss. In particular, it focuses on observations and scientific facts: the decline of pollinators and what that entails for the co-living of humans and more-than-humans. This kind of work often reaches the publics as thin stories of limited futures.

The article explores how to situate the issue of out-of-sync plant–pollinator relationships into thick, ongoing presents rather than as a distant future that is out of one’s own hands. This is done through a collaborative design project that experiments with various formats for staging more material, embodied and experiential ways to sensitise and invite humans to experience the issue of pollination. We therefore explore and give an account of how we have situated the issues in a thick, ongoing present as an anticipatory practice. We thus suggest a practice that becomes both sticky and sweaty; in addition, the practice moves some pollination facts into not only matters of concern but also matters of care.

In doing so, we forward the role that design researchers can play in environmental and collaborative anticipation by engaging with emerging approaches to both biodiversity loss and collaborative future-making that are simultaneously conflicting and harsh as well as hopeful.

Participatory design is a future-oriented discipline, but there is an imbalance in agency between those who produce future imaginations, and those who consume them. This paper argues that we, as designers and producers of future-oriented design interventions, hold responsibilities towards third party “spectators”. The paper departs from an incident that took place two years after a Future Workshop had taken place between public sector workers and citizens in Malmö, Sweden, when a concerned third party mistook the workshop’s potential and preferred imaginations of the future for truths. In the light of Hannah Arendt’s writings on imagination the paper separates actors from spectators, marking a difference in agency but also a difference in temporality. For the actors’ imagination is directed towards the future, while it for the spectators is directed towards the past, or present at best.

After decades of the existence of algorithms in everyday use technologies, users have developed an algorithmic awareness, but they still lack the confidence to grasp them. This study explores how understandability as a principle drawn from sociology, design, and computing can enhance the algorithmic experience in music recommendation systems. The preliminary results of this Research-Through-Design showed that users had limited mental models so far but had a curiosity to learn. Further, it confirmed that explanations as a dialogue could improve the algorithmic experience in music recommendation systems. Users could comprehend recommendations the best when they were easy to access and understand, directly related to user behavior, and when they allowed the user to correct the algorithm. To conclude, our study reconfirms that designing experiences that help users to understand the algorithmic workings will make authentic recommendations from intelligent systems more applicable in the long run.

To tackle global sustainability challenges of the Fashion Industry and ensure long-term viability, companies have slowly started integrating circular approaches. This paper explores if and how fashion designers can aid the transition towards a circular economy. For this purpose, 15 interviews with ten fashion designers working in medium and large international fashion companies and five key expert informants were conducted. The results are summarized in the ORFDCE model (Organizational Roles of Fashion Designers for Circular Economy) and suggests designers can take up three central roles in the transition process, if they expand their sustainability-related knowledge and are supported by four central systemic organizational changes. The model enables companies to identify their specific standing in the transition process and develop designer training and support measures aimed at realizing their designers' full potential. The article also issues several recommendations for further research, to enable the transition from linear to circular fashion.

Public Innovation Labs are rapidly spreading with the aim of improving public sector responses to societal issues. However, labs are often struggling to embed their outcomes in ordinary activities. The article builds on the notions of organizational learning and translation and on the case of an innovation lab at the municipal level to articulate some of the challenges and limits of labs in relating to public organizations institutional dimension. It also describes possible formats and approaches to meaningfully engage with ordinary activities, structures and power dynamics within the public sector.

Innovative designs for learning have implications for the teaching practices and the system in which they are created, often with conflicting motives and tensions on systemic levels. Co-design processes with teachers and researchers require tools and concepts to grasp this complexity and to create durable changes. In the case studied in this article, activity theory and change laboratory methodologies were used in a participatory design process with a small group of teachers. Five key characteristics of the epistemological principles behind the change laboratory methodology were identified and analysed. The theoretical framework enabled tools for a collective analysis of the origin and development of systemic contradictions as well as a model to envision future practices and concrete learning designs. Findings suggest that the combination of participatory design and change laboratory methodologies can serve as a vehicle for expansive learning and new innovative learning designs in educational settings.