Design participation (-s)–a creative commons for ongoing change

We present Design participation(-s)–a creative commons for ongoing change as the second set of the double special issue contributions that began in CoDesign 4 (1), March 2008. In the first volume, Liz Sanders and Jan Stappers, Yanki Lee, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Christina Brodersen, Christian Dindler and Ole Sejer Iversen, and Eva Brandt, Jörn Messeter and Thomas Binder collectively painted a picture of today's dynamic landscape of experimentation with forms of joint inquiry for collaborative idea generation sparked by an openness towards what can be designed and adaptive deployment of participatory tactics. In the lively currents of participation in design and design research, the contributors offer new perspectives on how researchers are exploring core themes of making design practices a creative commons for on-going change.

The three contributions in this volume from Erling Bjarki Björgvinsson, Margot Brereton and Jacob Buur, and Thomas Binder and Eva Brandt take us into new territory for co-creation between designers and diverse ‘users’ and stakeholders. With historical inspirations as starting points, each article takes up the intricate challenges of realising ‘the ethos of participatory design’ (Brereton and Buur, this issue) in contexts where the boundaries of the participatory design projects are blurred, the distinctions between designer and user are no longer self-evident, and participation is as much about reflexivity as about pursuing predefined goals. In the first article, Björgvinsson proposes open-ended collaborative design for emerging social practices in which participatory design is seen as prototypical practice. In the second article, Brereton and Buur argue that participation is essential in the era of ubiquitous computing and that participatory design in some sense must become ubiquitous as well. In the final article, Binder and Brandt put forward the Design:Lab as a platform for collaborative inquiry and co-design experiments, where participation is deliberately staged as a junction of multiple stakeholders.

We point to three recursive issues that are raised rather than resolved by the contributions to the Participation(-s) double special issues. These questions posed by these themes confront the design community at large.

The troublesome notions of ‘users’ and ‘stakeholders’ in changing relations in design.

The significance of reflection and reflected practice in design research and practice.

The co-design turn: what is gained and what is lost?