Engaging Actors in Co-Designing Heterogeneous Innovations

In this paper we share and analyze our experiences staging a co-design process in which we through different interventions engage important actors in designing. Our experiences are taking from an innovation and research project about user-involvement in textile design processes. As the project focused on textiles role in healing hospital environments, the co-design process analyzed is a process of designing textile products for these environments.

During the co-design process we engaged architects, engineers and textile designers. The focus in this paper is specifically on the challenges related to translating and transporting the results of these different events due to the institutional and professional framing of projects and design processes.

We are analyzing these through an actor network approach and use the translation term to describe how the participants slowly became engaged in our project’s agenda by going through the different stages of translation. The paper is finalized with reflections on the difficulties in engaging actors in a co-design process and transporting results into the existing framed context of design and architectural work.