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Design in general, including participatory design, has been and is still closely entangled with an idea of progress molded by modernism, technological development, rationality and economic growth. Today, when trying to shift towards other motivations and meanings in designing, we as designers find ourselves being haunted by this legacy. In this workshop we invite participants to make present and carefully untie designs' entanglements with progress and to craft concrete imaginaries of a more socio-ecological just design after progress. Through this workshop we hope to start building a community around present-ing design histories and making a repertoire of narratives of how to be better haunted in participatory design.

The workshop will take the form of a séance that is based on stories and images from the participants' ongoing work that speaks to where they have sensed a haunting by the ghosts of progress embedded in design. This could for example be in a design method that you are using, a learning objective in your design curricula, an evaluation criterion, a design outcome that you have been involved with as a professional design practitioner, design educator or design researcher.

It is imperative that the participants are in agreement with the workshop organisers that the séance is in itself an experimental attempt to explore a non-linear way of searching for the barely present or not easily discernible ideals or mechanisms of progress in participatory design. It is not to be confused with calling for supernatural spirits or deceased kins.

How can we prepare to adequately respond through design to planetary uncertainties and challenges in the aftermath of previous makings? This session focuses emerging design practices: how might these be entangled or disentangled with different pasts and future educations?

This fika-seminar inquires into the slipperyness of an emerging critical posthumanist design landscape (Laurien et al 2022). We bring scaffolding materials from fika-seminars conducted during 2023 and 2024 in the artistic research environment “Design after Progress: Reimagining Design Histories and Futures” (DaP). At the artistic research symposium we explore a public version of the fika-seminar methodology, inviting the audience to engage with DaP and the Slovenian design collective Krater.

Krater works through public engagements with and in a feral urban space, exploring designers’ noticing and making through urgent pedagogies from posthumanist perspectives. This spans working with invasive species to typologies for urban planning.

Könnte mehr Wissen über neue Technologien Gewerkschaften mehr Einfluss auf die Arbeitsbedingungen verschaffen und die Demokratie am Arbeitsplatz stärken? Könnten scheinbar restriktive Technologien gestaltet werden, indem Menschen aus mehre Bereichen am Designprozess beteiligt werden? Diese Fragen standen im Zentrum des Forschungsprojekts UTOPIA, bei dem sich Forschende in den 1980er-Jahren, als Computer in die Zeitungsproduktion eingeführt wurden, gemeinsam mit der Gewerkschaft der nordischen Arbeiter*innen in der Druckindustrie die Frage stellten, wie die digitale Transformation in der Druckindustrie aktiv beeinflusst werden könnte.

Could more knowledge about emerging technologies give trade unions more influence on working conditions and enhance workplace democracy? Could seemingly restrictive technologies be designed through engaging a broader variety of people in the design process? These questions were central in the 1980s research project UTOPIA, in which the Nordic Graphic Workers’ Union together with researchers focused on how to actively influence the digital transformation of graphic work as computers were introduced in newspaper production.

The attention to methods is central in design practice. In the context of IASDR 2023 this panel could thus have been suggested within any of the conference tracks. However, we are more specifically addressing the query highlighted in the Changing Communities track: “How can we innovate collaborative processes and codesign knowledge, methods, and tools while considering current socio-technological transformations?”

The panel focuses on the evolution and making of new methods, investigating the relationships between theory and practice through the entry point of methods. We see the need for building an agenda for researching how designing not only makes methods, but is itself shaped by its methods, and how methods carry ideas about what designing could be. In emerging participatory and collaborative design practices, developing methods for community engagement (Wahlin & Blomkamp, 2022), for making publics (Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013; Lindström & Ståhl, 2014) and creating commons (Bruyns & Kousoulas, 2022) aims to address issues of the roles and agencies of design in reimagining and reformulating world views, norms, and behaviours. Developing design methods through experimentation and critical reflection seems essential to design, whether in commercial, public, pedagogical, or research contexts. Despite this, research conversations that explicitly take a starting point from design methods are fairly infrequent nowadays. With this panel, we wish to revisit and reopen conversations on design methods in discussing emerging design practices from points of view that highlight how designing is shaped by methods, and how methods carry ideas about what design and designing could be.

Design has been and is still closely entangled with an idea of progress molded by modernism, technological development, rationality and economic growth. The very notion of progress, of moving towards a future ‘better’ than the present, is at the core of design as a discipline. While design has undoubtedly been instrumental in making situations and lives better from human-centered perspectives, it has also played a pivotal role in the planetary crisis and in futhering structural global inequalities.  Today, when trying to shift towards other motivations and meanings in designing, we as designers find ourselves being haunted by this legacy. While seldom explicitly articulated, these ideas and practices of ‘progress' take on a ghostly presence in design, haunting us as we try to find ways of doing and thinking design otherwise. Looking for ways of designing that can support shifts towards 

 We invite you to join us in searching for examples of how and where the ghosts of progress in the everyday appear to haunt us, whether they show themselves clearly or whether we only can catch the faintest glimpse. We are also hunting for other ghosts, that we wish to invite to better haunt us in design: the people and practices that have gone before us. In particular, we search for practices, places, and people that have rarely been considered or given little or no attention in mainstream north European everyday narratives.

 During this session, we will frame the perspectives of ‘hauntology’ in relation to expanding understandings of possible futures through calling forth aspects of the past in the present of design and everyday experiences. Mughda Patil and Maria Göransdotter will give an introductory talk, after which we will move into collaborative explorations and conversations.

What a designer does, for and with whom, and how design is done, has changed over time – and will continue to change also in the future. While history as a discipline inherently has its focus on what has been, the focus of the discipline of design is that of what could become. Although we in recent years have seen examples and proposals of different ways of writing design histories, it is still not easy to find accounts of how different design practices came about. One difficulty in writing a history of designing, is that there are very few sources that give insights into how design was actually done at different points in time. Structures and time frames of design processes, methods used from concept to final solution, and persons involved in design processes are seldom described as such in any written format by the people actually doing design. In a best case, archives and publications will contain sketches, perhaps prototypes in some cases, and we can often access final results as physical manifestations or images thereof – but only very seldom do we find documentation of the processes and methods beyond the 2- and 3-dimensional material.

In this paper, I discuss examples of how the introduction of prototypes, and prototyping, as methods for developing design practices aiming to expand understandings of what design could be. Prototypes in design history can tend to be used to discuss or highlight an individual designer’s artistic abilities and developments, in terms of formal and material qualities. The prototype is seen as the artistic expression, the hand made original, that antedates the type – the industrially or commercially produced final design. By comparison, prototypes in current user-centered design practices are described to be used with the intention and aim to explore ideas or interactions, test and discuss concepts, in settings where different people – not only an individual designer – make use of the prototype in order to learn new things together, and to work together towards understanding, improving or conceptualizing something.

With a focus on collaborative design processes, that were important for the emergence of Scandinavian user-centered design practices the Nordic countries, I will discuss how design histories that take a starting point in designing could contribute to emerging design practices today.  Prototyping  in designing was, and still is, used as a way to open up arenas for collaborative learning, aiming to produce possible new designs not only of physical everyday objects, but also of social and societal practices. With these examples of design histories of changing design practices, I will also argue for how design histories such as these could themselves be seen and used as prototypes in contemporary design situations. 

This chapter focuses on the emergence of user-centred and participatory Scandinavian design ideas and practices in 1970s Sweden. Many of the concepts and methods still highly present – supported as well as contested – in contemporary design stem from the turn towards collaborative designing through the late 1960s and early 1990s. However, in Nordic design history, these radical changes in design practice have been more or less invisible. This chapter argues that a shift in perspective is needed in design history in order to address this design historical gap, while also highlighting the historicity embedded in contemporary practices of design. Shifting the design historical outlook from products to practices calls other Scandinavian design histories than the usual to the fore, suggesting narratives attentive to how and why designing itself has been re-designed. The two examples of transitional design histories given here aim to open up conceptual spaces necessary for re-thinking what design’s histories could be, also in relation to what designing may be becoming. The first example highlights how ergonomic user-centred design methods expanded the role of designers and designing in relation to ideas of use and users, linked to Swedish disability legislation and research funding. The second example discusses how participatory design was called into being as challenges of designers’ and users’ co-development of computer-based work tools expanded ideas of what design was, how and with whom designing took place, and with what kinds of materials. These transitional design histories aim to expand the views of what is discerned as relevant histories of design, while simultaneously calling attention to the historicity embedded in contemporary and emerging design methods and ideas. Following the traces and trajectories of changing design practices, histories of designing contribute to unpacking concepts central to expanding understandings of what design has been, as well as of what it could become.

Design has formed as a professional field, over time, in relation to social, political, cultural, and industrial transformations. In this process, the ways that designing itself is carried out have responded to these changes as well. There is not one singular way of doing design. The varieties of tools, methods, materials, and situations that design now engages with spans from practices that are well-established since more than a century, to emerging and experimental endeavours that contribute with new approaches and methods. However, attention to the historical origins of design methods is seldom present in contemporary design practice. Instead, methods and tools seem almost timeless, if not neutral. Design’s ways of working are generally not framed in relation to the diverse historical contexts, constellations, and cultures in which they once were formed and introduced. Embedded in the methods applied in design today, however, we can still find traces of the historical situations, concerns, and ideas that they once were made to respond to. An awareness of these embedded historical aspects of designing can bring forth perspectives that support developing what we do in design, and how we relate to the methods that we use. The point of attempting to map a certain design method in relation to its history, therefore, is here not intended as simply a matter of tracing a linear historical genealogy of from where and how this method has come to enter design practice. Through an attention to the historicity of designing, we wish to point to a complex cartography of multi-level relationships between different design practices, diverse conceptual understandings of design, and various trajectories that designing could take towards the future.

In this chapter we revisit a specific method used within design projects that deal with integrating spatial and service design solutions, the desktop walkthrough. Through exploring its possible connections to and relationships with previous experiential ways of mapping spatial and environmental interactions, we wish to move beyond discussing what such a method instrumentally “does” and highlight some of the embedded historical and conceptual understandings it brings into designing.