Co-designing with people with dementia (PwD) can uncover their needs and preferences, which have been often overlooked. It is difficult for PwD to understand designers and express themselves in a conventional co-design session. This study aims to evaluate the effects of involving PwD in design research on both PwD and the design process; to identify the trends of involving PwD in design research; to extract tools, recommendations, and limitations of involving PwD from reviewed studies to update the recommendations on how to co-design with PwD. A scoping review was carried out within the electronic databases PubMed and Scopus, and eight research questions were proposed, in order to gain specific knowledge on the involvement of PwD in design research. Twenty-six studies met the inclusion criteria, and 32 sessions were evaluated. Beneficial effects on both PwD and the design process were reported. The number of studies involving PwD in the moderate and severe stages of dementia has increased. Based on the review, an update of the existing tools and recommendations for co-designing with PwD is provided and a list of limitations of involving PwD is presented. The review shows that involving PwD in design research is beneficial for both the PwD and the design process, and there is a shift towards involving people who are in the moderate and severe stages of dementia. The authors propose that multidisciplinary meetings and case studies should be carried out to evaluate and refine the list of tools and recommendations as well as the list of limitations generated in this review.

Bottom-up initiatives of active citizens are increasingly demonstrating sustainable practices within local ecosystems. Local urban farming, sustainable agri-food systems, circular supply chains, and community fablabs are exemplary ways of tackling global challenges on a local level. Although promising in accelerating towards future-proof systems, these hyper-localized, bottom-up initiatives often struggle to take root in new contexts due to embedded socio-cultural challenges. With the premise that transformative capacity can be co-created to overcome such scaling challenges, the current work addresses the identified gap in scaling bottom-up initiatives into locally embedded ecosystems. While how to diffuse such practices across contexts is not straightforward, we introduce a three-phased approach enabling knowledge exchange and easing collaboration across cultures and ecosystems. The results allowed us to define common scalability criteria and to unfold scaling as a multi-step learning process to bridge identified cognitive and context gaps. The current article contributes to a broader activation of impact-driven scaling strategies and value creation processes that are transferable across contexts and deemed relevant for local ecosystems that are willing to co-create resilient socio-economic systems.