Codesigning with public partners: Controversies and agonism

This workshop invites participatory design (PD) researchers and practitioners to consider and exchange experiences of controversies and agonism in codesign projects with citizens and various public partners. Many public actors like departments and other units in county and city councils, municipalities, hospitals etc. are entering codesign projects as a way of engaging citizens or patients in social, urban or medical innovation projects. Often private actors are also part of these partnerships forming the so-called quadruple helix partnerships. While codesign approaches do indeed present new possibilities for the development of interesting and sustainable design innovations we have often experienced controversies and agonism caused by for instance different political agendas, beliefs and values among the participants. This workshop will focus on sharing of and reflection on challenges of navigating between diverging opinions, political agendas and values of citizens and professional public actors in codesign projects. We will discuss how to navigate in such quadruple helix partnerships while doing PD projects as democratic processes. The outcome of the workshop is a large poster visualizing a landscape with specific examples of controversies and agonism, including identification of the roles of essential socio-material collectives of humans and non-humans and reflections on tactics and strategies for how to handle specific situations.