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Background: Digitalization is one of the drivers of change in both public and private organizations. It is therefore relevant to understand how a government agency like the Swedish Transport Administration manage and experience change. Methods: In this qualitative study, interviews (n = 15) with respondents with insight and connection to digitalization and change highlight factors related to digitalization and change-capacity within the agency. Results: The results of the interviews are presented in a thematic analysis. Five themes were identified: Digitalization, management control, stability requirements, organizational culture, and lack of a comprehensive view. The research literature in the field of change creates a fund for a discussion about the Administration's situation regarding digitalization, development, and transformational change. Conclusions: The results indicate that the Transport Administration still has a long way to travel in terms of organizational readiness for change. To address this issue, the Transport Administration should prioritize the development and implementation of a comprehensive change management strategy including clear communication, active engagement, and participation from all employees, and a focus on building a culture of adaptability and continuous improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than four decades, participatory design has provided exemplars and concepts for understanding the democratic potential of design participation. Despite important impacts on design methodology, participatory design has, however, been stuck in a marginal position as it has wrestled with what has been performed and accomplished in participatory practices. In this article, we discuss how participatory design may be reinvigorated as a design research programme for democratic design experiments in the light of the decentring of human-centredness and the foregrounding of collaborative representational practices offered by the ANT tradition in the tension between a parliament of things and a laboratory of circulating references. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article gives an introduction to (participatory) design games in three rounds. Firstly it argues that designing design games is a particular and very productive genre for formatting participation and design dialogues. Secondly it presents some of the main contributions to the development of design games in a historical perspective, and thirdly it introduces three recent PhD dissertations that all in very different ways have investigated design games in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User-centred design is a widely acknowledged practice. Much attention has been paid to the methods, tools and processes on how to conduct design research and field studies with and about ‘users’ and existing or possible ‘contexts of use’. The underlying driver is that the design team will be better at designing if they have an empathic understanding of the people to design with and for. Currently, more effort is invested in engaging various stakeholders in collaborative design activities that nurture an attitude of human-centredness as a strategy. Empathic design approaches are essential in such strategies as they value subjective and experiential perspectives in design. The objective of this paper is to illustrate and discuss different kinds of formats that can be used to work with representations of field research findings and insights in ways that can be open-ended. Being open-ended means that they can allow and inspire new individual interpretations for various participants in the collaborative design processes, which include users, designers and other stakeholders. What is argued for here is the value of incompleteness of field study outcomes as it invites sense-making through making new interpretations which lead to empathic understanding and engagement. Rather than communicating the final results, design in supporting collaboration is applied in a process of exploring what it is that will create value for specific people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one on the open-ended collaboration designer for emerging social practices in which participatory design is seen as prototypical practices by Björgvinsson and another one on the essential of participation in the era of ubiquitous computing by Brereton and Buur.

The notion of laboratory or simply 'lab' has become popular in recent years in areas outside science and technology development. Learning Labs, Innovation Labs, Usability Labs, Media and Communication Labs and even Art Labs designate institutions or fora dedicated to change and experimentation. Influenced by these currents, we use the expression 'Design:Lab' as a shorthand description of open collaborations between many stakeholders sharing a mutual interest in design research in a particular field. Many have reacted to the term 'laboratory' or 'lab' as foreign and awkward to design, and we as well as others have frequently used other metaphors like workshop, studio or atelier in design research. In this article we will argue that the laboratory metaphor is particularly suitable and useful for the Design:Lab, and we will give examples of how we have worked with the Design:Lab as a platform for collaborative inquiries and knowledge production based on design experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses design games as a particular genre for formatting design dialogues. In the first part of the article we review the participatory design literature for game-oriented framings of co-design. We look at what constitutes game and play, we discuss other authors' use of games in collaborative settings, and finally we examine the board game as a particularly interesting game format. In the second part of the article we present and discuss two board games: the User Game and the Landscape Game. We show how these games respond to particular challenges, and how they have interesting characteristics in being both 'as-if' worlds to explore and shared representations of what the players accomplish. In the last section of the article we discuss how new games may be designed and played and what makes a good design game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a contribution to a more conscious use of tangible mock-ups in collaborative design processes. It describes a design team’s use of mock-ups in a series of workshops involving potential customers and users. Focus is primarily on the use of three-dimensional design mock-ups and how differences in these affected the dialogue. Reflective conversations were established by using tangible mock-ups as “things-to-think with.” They served as boundary objects that spanned the gap between the different competencies and interests of participants in design. The design mock-ups evoked different things for different participants, whereas the challenge for the design team was to find boundaries upon which everybody could agree. The level of details represented in a mock-up affected the communication so that a mock-up with few details evoked different issues, whereas a very detailed mock-up evoked a smaller variation of issues resulting in a more focused communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data presented in this report indicate that freezing of male accessory tissue in rabbits which have been previously sensitized by injection of saline extracts of rabbit male accessory glands material, elicits the formation almost exclusively of the IgG class of immunoglobulin and constitutes, therefore, a booster type of antigenic stimulation in these animals. It is suggested that the marked decrease in antibody activity shown by most of the iso-immunized rabbits following freezing of their male accessory tissue could be attributed to immune complex for- marion between the circulating antibodies and an autoantigen that may be released as a result of the cryo-immunization. An alternative explanation for the decrease in antibody activity is that the antibodies complex with the homologous auto- antigen which is fixed in situ but exposed in the freeze damaged tissue. The possibility that the antigenicity of antigen-antibody complexes may be a factor in the abrupt increase in antibody titre, from the minimum level at the 3rd or 4th day to a peak at the 7th or 8th day after cryo-immunization, is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Yanki Lee on the roles of designers in the co-design process and another by Christina Brodersen, Christian Dindler, and Ole Sejer Iversen on staging imaginative places for participatory prototyping.

Antisera taken at various intervals over a 21-day period, from six rabbits subjected to cryosurgery of the accessory glands, were passed through columns of Sephadex G-200. The appropriate pools were made, adjusted to the initial serum volumes, and tested by tanned cell haemagglutination for antibody to rabbit accessory glands antigen. In every instance it was possible to demonstrate a predominant 19S activity in the bleedings obtained at 5–8 days; in most of the rabbits the presence of 78 activity could be observed in the later bleedings, and it was found to be the major form at these later stages in the immune response.