In this introductory article to the special issue ‘Co-Design and the public realm’, we discuss a common interest in how meso- and macro-political institutional contexts frame and are informed by Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design processes. We argue that a unilateral focus within PD and Co-Design on the micro-political scale of fieldwork obscures interactivity with institutional framing processes, undermining their potential as sites of critique and political change. Our argument is drawn from a study of literature on the role of institutions in relation to PD and the public realm and our experience as participants in an EU-funded research project. The case study descriptions unpack how various institutional frames inform PD processes and how, conversely, PD processes inform various institutional frames: metacultural frames, institutional action frames and policy frames. To highlight the move to engaging with and creating new institutions, we introduce the notion of institutioning.

In this paper we draw upon the articles included in this special issue to question how to re-politicise co-design and participatory design (PD). Many authors in these fields have recently made a plea to re-engage with ‘big issues’ as a way to address this concern. At the same time, there is an increased attention into the micro-politics of the relations that are built-in co-design and PD. These two approaches are sometimes presented as working against each other with a de-politicising dynamic as a result. The editorial hypothesis of this issue is that designing visions can turn the tension between addressing the big issues and close attention to the particularity of relations into a motor for re-politicising design. Through engaging with literature, the articles presented in this issue, and two fieldwork cases that explore this dynamic, we discovered that paying careful attention to the activity of designing visions can support re-politicisation. While visions enable us to develop relations with close attention to their politics, building relations supports a more political approach to designing visions on issues. We argue that vision-making can particularly support re-politicisation when it enables the articulation of the political by relating its situated reality to how it unfolds in space and time.

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of key themes and agendas in contemporary Participatory Design across diverse disciplines, continents, communities, and practices. Building on Participatory Design’s core values of empowerment and democracy, the handbook explores how the field is developing and diversifying to address contemporary societal challenges in a global community. Participatory Design actively engages peoples, groups and other actors in collaborative design processes to explore and co-create their everyday technologies, practices, and environments. In doing so, Participatory Design aims to address social justice and agency by including diverse actors in the collective shaping of alternative futures. Participatory Design embraces a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, environments, organisations and institutions more responsive to human and planetary needs. In this volume, a multidisciplinary and international group of highly experienced and recognised experts present an authoritative review of the contemporary field and discuss the diverse opportunities and challenges that arise from pivotal issues in Participatory Design, including scaling, collectives, sustainability and more-than-human, decolonisation, emerging technologies and AI, new approaches, methods and engagement beyond academia. The handbook advances contemporary research, theory and practice and highlights case studies that demonstrate how Participatory Design can bring about game-changing shifts in diverse contexts. The volume is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, scholars, and professionals who seek to utilise Participatory Design research and practice to enrich, support and transform complex contemporary conditions towards inclusive, sustainable and transitional futures. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->

In this paper, we will be discussing how visualisations can facilitate participatory processes by way of conveying issues of public concern as ‘things’. In the line of Latour’s plea to ‘make things public’, visualisations can be purposefully designed to trigger and encourage public debates concerning a wide range of issues. For this, we explore how a visualisation can be both transparent (i.e. visualising the complex entanglement of backstories of an issue) and readable. Specifically, we clarify the aspect of designing a readable visualisation of ‘things’. First, drawing from different fields of literature (i.e. Information Visualisation, Science and Technology Studies and Human-Computer-Interaction) we will articulate three main aspects of readability: engaging people to interact with a visualisation of complex issues, supporting sense making and encouraging reflection. Then, based on three empirical case studies, we indicate different design considerations in terms of engaging people to interact with a visualisation: contextualising a visualisation (via its location or medium), staging interaction and allowing people to provide their own perspective on the issue displayed. As a conclusion we propose a scenario that allows the visualisation to gradually become more transparent in support of its readability.

In participatory design (PD) processes driven by institutions, designers struggle in reaching out to silent and/or silenced human and more-than-human voices within local communities. This can in a long run contribute to polarisation in the design process. This paper explores how to reimagine designing with communities beyond polarisation, by rethinking the PD practice of ‘infrastructuring’ (i.e. ‘commoning’ and ‘institutioning’) from within the perspective of the ontological turn. This process of ‘ontologising’ infrastructuring aims to enable designers to design with and for radical interdependence and reach out to (ontologically) diverse actors who might in first instance seem unrelated if not antagonistic. We situate and evaluate this process in a concrete case study in urban planning in the Low Countries where we used mappings and platforms to map and engage with radical interdependencies. Rather than crystallising ‘ontologising’ as a PD practice, in this paper we aim to foreground it as a set of capabilities that designers may use to steer and evaluate their PD process with close attention to its politics.