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.

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.

This paper examines the evolving nature of participatory design as it shifts from co-located, real-time engagements to asynchronous, delegated participation—a transformation conceptualized here as homework. Through two case studies—a toolkit for activist self-organization and a workbook-based remote design process—the paper explores how participation, when structured as homework, redistributes agency, responsibility, and knowledge production across time and space. The analysis of this paper highlights how Participatory Design, when mediated through artifacts such as toolkits and workbooks, can both enable and constrain engagement, shaping power dynamics and the ethics of care in distributed collaboration. The discussion critically examines how delegation impacts environmental justice, counter-narratives, and infrastructuring, raising questions about the unseen labour of participation, the risks of reinforcing existing knowledge hierarchies, and the potential for new relationalities in asynchronous collaboration. 

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.

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.

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 notion of anecdotalization (Michael, 2012) suggest that anecdotes can be performative. They are not merely curious vessels of information or observations, but through the act of telling of them they can also do. Using examples from a city planning project in Malmö, Sweden, where methods for citizen engagement have been developed and tested I will discuss how anecdotalization can be collaborative (and how this potentially can lead to multiple understandings/worlds).

The project saw a meeting between the participant’s practices, worldviews, and priorities - which did not always align. Finding ways of cultivating a mutual understanding between the various actors has been imperative, while at the same time disagreements and ruptures into the work were welcomed as a natural part of any democratic process. But welcoming agonism is not the same as being able to handle it, or knowing how to move forward. Anecdotalization, a chain of re-tellings of an anecdote, afforded the group to collaboratively build an understanding of a rupture that encapsulated more than one perspective. Collaborative anecdotalization is a shared, relational practice of performing many-world worlds (Law, 2015). 

Cities are ever-changing constellations comprised of built infrastructure, people, things, memories and ideas. They spring from deliberate actions and initiatives undertaken just as much as they are shaped by accidents, the soil on which they stand, and the weather that bends and moulds them. In return, the cities we live in shape our lives, and may grant us opportunities or restrict us. Given the reciprocal relationship between a city and its citizens, the question of who holds the agency to mould the city is socially, politically and environmentally imperative. This text draws upon a project from 2019, based in Malmö Sweden, where anecdotes were used as a citizen-led method of inquiry, sense making and research communication. The text will introduce the notion of anecdotalisation (Michael, 2012a) as an iterative process of telling and retelling stories based on empirical observations. The text argues that the inherent relational quality of anecdotalisation can support mutual learning between researchers and research participants, or between citizens and public sector workers. The collaborative anecdotalisation process functions as a collaborative sense-making process, and as such does more than merely define existing social realities: It creates new knowledge.