Collaborative arrangements between users and designers today are enacted in a broadening array of circumstances. These include extended, even years-long projects within corporations, the public and third sectors, as well as open-ended, peer-to-peer open design initiatives. Building on a literature review and analysis of four concrete participatory design projects, in this paper we argue that besides skills in selecting and implementing co-design methods, there is a larger repertoire of issues that need attention, if one takes the promises and limits of participatory design seriously. We elaborate on how these issues have purchase in the interplay of four interrelated domains: the strategic considerations that drive all those implicated, the mundane acts involved in co-design work, the choice of methods that is conditioned by strategic and mundane issues, and the producing of design outcomes permeated in turn by all the above. These domains co-constitute each other in such a way that one domain cannot easily be considered apart from the others. Participatory design understood from this perspective is not about facilitation skills, but rather skills to translate among strategic, mundane, method and design domains, and being aware of how they qualify and permeate each other in order to achieve results.

This paper studies intelligibility in constructive design research, in which the main instrument of knowledge creation is design. Constructive design research is situated between design practice and research, meaning it has to build on practices that make it intelligible to many audiences. We call this multiple intelligibility, examining it through the case of an empathic design program in Helsinki, Finland. The case focuses on how the designers in the program have managed to build a practice that is intelligible for different audiences. By looking into the practical grounds of the research program as a topic of analysis, we study theoretical practices that create connections to research, methodic practices that create a connection to practice and recipient design practices that lie at the heart of intelligibility in empathic design. Based on the findings of the case, we suggest policies for constructive design research to manage multiple intelligibility across different audiences.

People not only purchase and use products and services, but creatively appropriate, hack, redesign and even innovate in them. Typologies of active use have emerged in various disciplines, remaining piecemeal even if complementary. Together they produce a blurry depiction of active design engagement, despite active use being pivotal to many emerging design approaches. To remedy this, we synthesize a taxonomy of different aspects of active use and design engagement. Use as-is, active use, locally new designs and globally new innovations mark different intensities of engagement. These can concern the material form of design, new uses, new meanings, adjustment to local settings, or the collective endeavours to shape communities and organizations, ideologies and imaginaries, and global platforms that facilitate active use.

We report on a rapid and practical method to assess social dimensions of performance in small-scale and industrial fisheries globally (Social Wellbeing in Fisheries Tool (SWIFT)). SWIFT incorporates aspects of security (fairness and stability of earnings, benefits of employment to local fishing communities, worker protection, and personal safety and health in communities associated with fisheries); flexibility (including opportunity for economic advancement); and the fishery's social viability (including whether the fishery is recruiting new harvesters and diverse age classes of workers, whether women's participation and leadership in global production networks are on an upward trajectory.). We build on resilience research by conceptualizing wellbeing in terms of security, flexibility, and viability, and assessing wellbeing at individual, community, and system levels. SWIFT makes social performance measures more broadly accessible to global production networks, incorporates an everyday understanding of wellbeing for people involved in the seafood industry, and helps put social sustainability into measurable terms that are relevant for businesses.

By examining mobility in remote Arctic areas, we analyze how challenging environmental conditions, while affecting technology performance, evoke people's creativity and efforts as technology users. Based on historical materials and ethnographic observations of user inventiveness in the transport sector in the Russian North, we define and document a phenomenon of "proximal design" in three different modes: the proximal complementation of "distant design" machines (trucks and military equipment) to ascertain their reliability; the emergence of a new type of homemade all-terrain vehicle called a "karakat," made from salvaged parts to specialize in times and locations where other vehicles turn unreliable; and the traditional craft of sledge-making by nomadic reindeer herders of the Yamal area, where even materials are proximally collected and shaped. Our main argument is that continuous tuning, modification, and redesign of technology carried out by immediate users in situ make it possible for humans and machines to function in extreme settings and that this can lead also to emergence of enduring design principles. We outline key characteristics of proximal design such as constraining environment, inventiveness by necessity, flexible construction, personalization and symbolic meaning, and social embeddedness of making/maintaining practices.

Using the case of calls-for-help to police and fire communications centers and their incident record forms, we present a detailed investigation of how documents play a constitutive role in formal organizations. We take an ethnomethodologically informed approach to the problem, delineating how standard forms in bureaucracies enable organizational participants to coordinate actions across time and space and, at the same time, produce people who perpetually produce such documents or work from them. We focus in this regard on person description. The call-taker needs to translate the call into preset categories, and thus enlist the citizen in the work of inscribing the incident in the way the form requires, (re)producing certain categorizations of personhood, especially race and sex. In this way, organizational documents and their inscriptions function as a kind of technology of reification for these categories.

A critical feature – and resource – of many face-to-face service encounters is a ubiquitous bureaucratic document, the 'standard form' (see especially Suchman and Whalen 1994). But despite Max Weber's classic observations of the crucial role played by written documents ('the files') and the work of those who generate and administer them ('subaltern officials and scribes of all sorts') in all matters of organisational business (Weber 1978: vol. II, 957), study of the functions and uses of documents in modern organisations, whether paper or electronic, has been largely neglected by the human sciences. Strangely, this has even been the case for studies of formal organisations and bureaucracies, which rarely make more than a passing reference to any actual documenting, reading or filing activities. And this is despite the fact that from the invention of the first writing systems in the late fourth millennium BCE, and especially from the printing revolution that began in early modern Europe (Eisenstein 1983) and continues to this day, written documents were absolutely crucial to the co-ordination of many people across time and space by rendering information concrete and readily distributable (see especially Giddens 1979, 1987).

In 2004 Fujitsu asked PARC to carry out an ethnographic investigation of their software business, focusing on their development processes, and while doing so to build an ethnographic capability in their own organization. One of our biggest challenges was to convince Fujitsu's system engineers — and the development organization more generally — of the value of ethnography for their business. They are used to translating what they hear from customers about the workflow into a standard framework of system requirements and specifications; it was difficult for them to see the relevance of putting any significant focus on understanding what is going on in the workplace at the level of everyday work practices. Moreover, in their work with customers, system engineers commonly proceed in a carefully planned and highly structured manner, where every activity is expected to yield predictable outcomes. For them, the open‐ended nature of ethnographic fieldwork seemed dangerously chaotic and unpredictable. The lessons learned from our experience with both our initial teaching of the engineers and the organizational fieldwork we later did together helped us design a new ethnography‐training course that incorporates the task of conveying the full value of organizational and business ethnography.