Many municipalities are actively working with climate and sustainability issues, while at the same time struggling to create long-term and equitable forms of collaboration with citizens and civil society. Climate work is often organised through projects, which risks producing fragmented efforts without clear continuity. 

This policy brief explores how a municipality can advance climate transition through collaboration with citizens and civil society actors. The analysis is based on the researchers’ long-term engagement with the work of the Environmental Department in the City of Malmö, participation in collaborative activities, as well as literature studies and experience from participatory design research.

The interrelation between digital transformation (DT) and sustainability

is increasingly important for societal development, as achieving sustainable

development goals depends on aligning technologies, resources, organizations,

and institutions with these goals. DT encompasses structural changes at

individual, organizational, and business ecosystem levels that enable value creation

for stakeholders. While existing organizational research has largely focused

on firms and technology adoption, there is growing interest in integrated multilevel

perspectives that examine interdependencies across individual, organizational,

and business ecosystem levels, as well as among actors, processes, determinants,

and results, particularly in complex, fragmented sectors. This study

addresses these gaps by applying the Integrated Multi-Level and Multi-

Dimensional (IMM) model of DT in the built environment – a sector characterized

by highly fragmented actor networks and significant economic, social, and

environmental impact. Using an exploratory qualitative research design, we examine

how DT unfolds across individual, organizational, and business ecosystem

levels, and how interdependencies shape sustainability-oriented results. The

study contributes to multilevel DT theory and practice by providing theoryinformed

insights that pinpoint tensions and paradoxes in multilevel DT processes.

Findings highlight how these dynamics manifest across analytical dimensions

and levels, offering guidance for navigating sustainability-oriented

DT.

Local urban governments struggle to approach environmental goals in the global climate crisis. An understanding on the necessitiy to increase fair citizen engagement in governmental sustainability initiatives has become fundamental, the challenge emerge on how processes can become resilient beyond specific project initiatives. The concept of infrastructruring, here understood as a situated effort to hold together socio-material constellations that enable certain ways of acting, provides a foundation for long-term interaction between the public sector and citizens. But as the participatory design community is strong on providing "points of entry" for citizen participation it remains less clear how one cares for nursing relations after projects end. Analyzing an ongoing case of a municipality's efforts to engage citizens in sustainable co-creation towards climate transition. We introduce "points of exit" as an analytical concept and how the concept of "aligning actants" is relevant for participatory design, policy development and governance models.

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.

HCI researchers have a responsibility to design infrastructures and technologies that affect the participation of different members of society, especially vulnerable and marginalised communities. However, participation has been relegated to sporadic activities and workshops, rather than institutionalised structures that facilitate participation in tackling big, ’wicked’ problems. In this hands-on workshop we will examine existing structures for participation of residents in a municipal setting, drawing examples from our work with migrants. Together, we will imagine future participatory infrastructures and long-term technological impacts in order to foster durable, resilient communities. We use speculative design as a method to discuss current issues with HCI research and policy in tackling larger, societal issues. Through this workshop, we hope to  1) re-invigorate the field of participatory design and HCI in designing emancipatory technology, and 2) create a community of researchers and practitioners that share and publish an HCI agenda that enables more equitable participatory technologies.

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?