Conference Agenda

Public participation plays a central role in sustainability transitions and addressing complex environmental challenges. However, governments face multiple challenges in enabling meaningful public participation and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Such processes tend to be constrained by legal frameworks, institutional rigidity, fragmented infrastructures, and limited capacity to facilitate multi-stakeholder dynamics. Drawing on insights from literature on transition governance and public participation, this article explores how public participation systems and infrastructures can be shifted towards what is needed in the context of transitions. The concept of infrastructuring is proposed as an analytical and design-orienting tool. Infrastructuring, here understood as an ongoing process of building social practice, could help identify the invisible elements, capacities, tools, and dynamics needed within the process of construction, maintenance, and adaptation of participatory systems. It can support the development of strategic design interventions to improve multi-stakeholder collaboration for navigating sustainability transitions.

Citizen Innovation Labs (LabICs) have emerged as experimental infrastructures for collective design and civic transformation. Operating in close partnership with public institutions, these laboratories create collaborative spaces where urban publics co-design responses to issues of shared concern. Yet, little is known about how these laboratories operate as long-term supports for community-driven initiatives beyond their initial phases of experimentation or incubation. This paper investigates how LabICs mobilise processes of infrastructuring to support broader cycles of social transformation by analysing the case of Conectando Cozinhas, a citizen-led initiative developed within LabIC Novale (Brazil). Using a retrospective qualitative case study, the research reconstructs the initiative’s trajectory across five stages. Findings suggest that LabIC Novale acted as an enabling infrastructure that fostered public formation, collective ownership, and translation of grassroots initiatives into institutional contexts. Yet sustaining participation beyond the incubation phase remained a challenge.

While design has gained significant interest in the public sector in recent years, it has yet to gain real traction. Even in countries seen as frontrunners, design has not become mainstream practice and its potential to meaningfully address public issues remains largely unrealized. One of the main reasons for this is that designers find it difficult to legitimize design. In this study, we conducted eight interviews with designers to explore how they attempt to gain legitimacy for the outcomes of their work. We adopted an argumentation lens to identify the various legitimation strategies employed. Rather than individual strategies, we present their underlying mechanisms. Nine mechanisms emerged, grouped into three categories: conceptual, relational, and situational. Interestingly, designers often draw on their designerly capabilities in legitimizing their work. Hence, although design is often said to struggle with matters of power, this study highlights that design holds its own form of power.

Design’s expanding presence in policy has generated multiple expressions of its value and impact, yet few address the political and strategic dimensions of policymaking. This paper examines how co-design operates within these dynamics by navigating frame conflicts during policy problem-setting and policy options modelling. Drawing on Schön and Rein’s theory of Frame Reflection, we analyse how institutional framings of policy issues collide with those held by communities, and how co-design practices surface, negotiate, and reconfigure these conflicts. Through two English case studies: 1) School Food Systems and 2) Breakfast Clubs, we show how co-design reveals divergent interpretations of public problems and enables collaborative reframing toward implementable clumsy solutions. The findings highlight co-design’s under-recognised capacity to make frames visible and negotiable in policy contexts. This practice of participatory frame navigation furthers our understanding of design’s contribution in policy-making contexts.

Local urban governments struggle to approach environmental goals in the global climate crisis. An understanding on the necessitiy to increase fair citizen engagement in governmental sustainability initiatives has become fundamental, the challenge emerge on how processes can become resilient beyond specific project initiatives. The concept of infrastructruring, here understood as a situated effort to hold together socio-material constellations that enable certain ways of acting, provides a foundation for long-term interaction between the public sector and citizens. But as the participatory design community is strong on providing ”points of entry” for citizen participation it remains less clear how one cares for nursing relations after projects end. Analyzing an ongoing case of a municipality’s efforts to engage citizens in sustainable co-creation towards climate transition. We introduce ”points of exit” as an analytical concept and how the concept of ”aligning actants” is relevant for participatory design, policy development and governance models.