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.

Media och forskare har under de senaste åren rapporterat om de pågående klimatförändringarna och att om nödvändigheten av att ställa om samhället till att bli mer hållbart. Politikens gensvar har varit att fatta beslut som bidrar till att samhället ska vara fossilfritt senast 2045. Med de nödvändiga omställningar av samhället som klimatförändringar kräver av oss alla, riskerar vi att förlora både unika miljöer, växter, djur och tillgången till olika produkter och tjänster, livsomställningen som klimatforskare menar måste till för att undvika en klimatkatastrof väcker hos människor känslor av frustration, vrede och sorg. Skriften är en sammanfattning av hur svåra frågor får utrymme att diskuteras och hur sorg kan bli produktiv och leda mot nya mer hållbara strategier.

In response to a modernist optimistic path that has typically colonised narratives of addressing climate change, this paper ex- plores and proposes a prototypical pedagogy that aims to unlearn privileges and restore a sense of commitment and involvement in the unfolding future among the public. In our articulations of this prototypical pedagogy, we trace and reappropriate pedagogies of collective learning within participatory design in combination with contemporary discourses around the affective dimensions of climate change. The prototypical pedagogy is explored through a design- erly study circle in future orienteering that was designed to situate the transition to post-carbon futures within specific locations, en- vironments, and lived experiences. To support reorientations and explorations of alternatives to the familiar modernist path, a guid- ing principle was to foreground objects, values, and imaginaries that are often overlooked in current accounts of climate change and to activate grief and hope as both practical and conceptual orienteering devices.

Propelled by steel, charcoal and steam the railway once carried the story of progress and the rise of the developed modern society. While the orient express nurtured a vivid, mythical aura during more than a hundred years, it seems like future stories about the railway mainly gravitate around hyperloops and increased speed. How come the narratives around railways have become so futile? How come imaginaries about progress have got stuck? With the help of critical imagination and the method of design fiction, this article will set out on an imaginary journey to re-storying the future railway and discuss how this could help us rethink progress. Alternative paths will be explored that allow room for stories depicting train rides in slower paces and complex rhythms and materials, a rich melting pot for diverse and vivid sub-cultures, bottom up grassroot services, experimental sharing cultures, touring theater companies, maker movements, and new citizen-driven cooperatives.PDF

In the project Grief and Hope in Transition, our approach to transition has been one of reorientation, a departure from the belief in new technologies as the solution to all kinds of problems, an attempt at deviation from modernity’s familiar territories and road maps. Together with people living in different rural areas in Sweden’s southern most landscape Scania, we formed a study group in future orienteering.

This book is an outcome of the collaborative work done to explore how to transition into becoming fossil-free and how to let go of optimism that places agency elsewhere (such as in others' roadmaps and tech-fixes). It describes how we through designerly ways have addressed the challenge of how to restore a sense of attachments and commitment to the unfolding of the future.

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.

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.

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.

Mutual learning and infrastructuring are two core concepts in Participatory Design (PD), but the relation between them has yet to be explored. In this article, we foreground learning in infrastructuring processes aimed at change in the public sector. Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) framework for first, second, and third level issues is applied as a fruitful way to stage and analyze learning in such processes. The argument is developed through the insights that arose from a 4-year-long infrastructuring process about future library practices. Framed as Co-Labs this process was organized by researchers and officers from the local regional office. This led to adjusted roles for both PD researchers and civil servants working with materials at the operational and strategic levels. The case shows how learning led to profound changes in the regional public sector in the form of less bureaucratic and more participatory experimental and learning-focused worldviews and practices.