This article explores existing and emerging frames of writing history involving a push for new modes of telling and writing history/histories. This, from the point of view of a recent movement, in short named Women Making History, launched in Malmö, Sweden in 2013 aiming to cover a 100-year period, from when immigration began until the present day. The movement - engaged in activism and archival work and research around the lives and work of women immigrants in the city - took off in 2013 with support from authors engaged in a Living Archives research project, and formally ended, though some activity continues, with a book publication in 2016. With the initiator of the movement Feminist Dialogue Malmö University researchers (mainly the two authors and students) have been documenting activities and workshops over hree years, revealing the voicing of ambivalent identities that wish to maintain a plurality and openness of identifications and directions. These voices do not want to be framed as ‘outsiders’, ‘homogenized others’ or ‘victimised strangers’, and struggle with a feeling of being amended to a more homogenous national history – an ambiguous predicament which is investigated in this article through diverse ways of trying to understand how belonging is developed in the notions of multidirectionality, multilogues, amendments and re/framing.

In 2013, Parvin Ardalan, a former journalist and civil-rights activist from Iran, launched a project in Malmö, Sweden called 100 Years of Immigrant Women’s Life and Work – or, Women Making History for short. Ardalan was Malmö’s first ‘safe-haven writer in residence’ from 2010 to 2012. In 2007, she was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for her work campaigning for the equal rights of men and women in Iran. At the time of the project launch, we, the authors, were involved in the Living Archives research project at Malmö University, which was rethinking the archive as a social resource. We were invited by Parvin and fellow activists to be partners in the work of documentating activity for Women Making History, alongside a few other Malmö-based organisations. This article recounts the movement’s engagement in rewriting Malmö’s history – a rewriting that focused on the lives and work of immigrant women over the last 100 years from a feminist and activist perspective.

City Symphony Malmö was a collaborative documentary that engaged citizens of Malmö in recording short film sequences. The Symphony’ video material was also performed at the art and performance centre Inkonst where electronic musicians improvised to VJ’s digital and analogue live mixing of the material. A remediation of the performance was streamed live on the Internet with live footage from the performance. All clips were released under the creative commons licence and made available for remixing through The Pirate Bay. This article explores what it can imply to hand over the means of film production to citizens. The discussion concentrates on participatory and spatially distributed filmmaking and screening of non-institutional memories, produced in the symphony. The analysis merges influence from silent cinema and Soviet Montage, theories of public memory and place. It describes the complexities of creating non-institutional memory and archiving practices and argues that such citizen-driven and non-institutional memories may challenge official history and societal memory production, yet also reproduce typical and iconic images which reveal spatio-material hierarchies. Such complexities demonstrate the value of an analysis of participation and spatio-material dimensions of public memory as unfolded in the article.

Live classical music is facing considerable challenges. How can philharmonic orchestras, organizations that are heavily rooted in the past, become more democratic and better connected to the societies they are situated in? Through collaboration across institutional borders and knowledge domains, the Designing Classical Music Experiences project had the ambition to develop new spatial and mediated audience experiences, and to reach new audiences in the Øresund Region. The vision was nothing less than to democratize classical music. One of the premises of the project was to involve musicians, designers, researchers, students, audience members – and many others – in the design- and development processes. Another premise was to enhance and extend the concert experience through visualizations and other types of visual arts. A number of conclusions related to ‘organizational challenges’, ‘audience engagement’, and ‘media and technologies’ are presented and further developed in this book. The first section of the book accounts for two perspectives on how to work with live classical music and audiences from a designer’s point of view. The second section of the book give detailed accounts of the most high-profiled case studies the project has worked with.

Participatory design (PD) has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work-oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and ‘innovation’. What ‘democratic innovation’ entails is often currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratised through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative ‘innovation’ practice more in line with the original visions of PD based on our experience of running Malmö Living Labs – an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom–up long-term collaborations among diverse stakeholders. Three cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts ‘agonistic public spaces’ (as opposed to consensual decision-making), ‘thinging’ and ‘infrastructuring’ (as opposed to projects) are explored in relation to democracy, innovation and other future-making practices.

Design thinking has become a central issue in contemporary design discourse and rhetoric, and for good reason. With the design thinking practice of world leading design and innovation firm IDEO, and with the application of these principles to successful design education at prestigious d. school, the Institute of Design at Stanford University, and not least with the publication of Change by Design, in which IDEO chief executive Tim Brown elaborates on the firm's ideas about design thinking, ...

Prototyping Futures gives you a glimpse of what collaborating with academia might look like. Medea and its co-partners share their stories about activities happening at the research centre – projects, methods, tools, and approaches – what challenges lie ahead, and how these can be tackled. Examples of highlighted topics include: What is a living lab and how does it work? What are the visions behind the Connectivity Lab at Medea? And, how can prototyping-methods be used when sketching scenarios for sustainable futures? Other topics are: What is the role of the body when designing technology? What is collaborative media and how can this concept help us understand contemporary media practices? Prototyping Futures also discusses the open-hardware platform Arduino, and the concepts of open data and the Internet of Things, raising questions on how digital media and connected devices can contribute to more sustainable lifestyles, and a better world.