The Perform Codesign Experiment – on what people actually do and the relation between program and experiment in research through design

Design experiments are powerful inquiries, working from the ambiguous and tentative to more firm programmatic statements. In participatory design and codesign, learning and knowing is closely tied to participation − the engagement with and manipulation of shared representations, as participants expose how they become knowledgeable in what they collaboratively make. However, working with codesign as an integral part of knowledge production poses challenges to how we conceive of such inquiries in the practices of research through design. This paper reports from collaborative research where fellow researchers and PhD students carry out a codesign experiment (in the Xlab meta-project). The intention of the paper is twofold but intertwined: to get closer at what it is that people actually do in a codesign experiment situation; and to further investigate the relationship between program and experiments. We will give examples of the considerations and crises faced by the participants and how they try to solve them. In addition, we suggest using the notion of ‘sub-program’ as a way of describing the framing of a specific experiment thus adding to the program-experiment dialectics in the designing and doing of experiments.