During the past five years design has been recognised as a powerful innovation driver. Design methods and tools have also been applied in new fields. One of them is social innovation, which is aimed at developing new ideas and solutions in response to social needs. While different initiatives have demonstrated how design can be a powerful approach in social innovation, especially when it comes to systemic thinking, prototyping and visualising, some concerns have been raised regarding the limitations of applying design in this field. Through a specific case, this paper will discuss and suggest some approaches and concepts related to design for social innovation. Coming from a participatory design tradition, we focus on the idea of infrastructuring as a way to approach social innovation that differs from project-based design. The activities that are carried out are aimed at building long-term relationships with stakeholders in order to create networks from which design opportunities can emerge. We also discuss the role of prototyping as a way to explore opportunities but we also highlight dilemmas.

The public sector, increasingly acknowledging a need for change but strongly influenced by market logics, is experimenting with new forms of co-production of public services based on collaborations between public providers, citizens and societal actors. At the same time, Co-design researchers, are using approaches of infrastructuring and commoning to navigate questions of participation and collaboration in co-production. By discussing the case of ReTuren, a co-produced service for waste handling and prevention, this article presents how infrastructuring and commoning can offer guidance to civil servants engaging in coproduction. In the case, civil servants on an operational level and an 'embedded' co-design researcher worked side-by-side in the co-production of the service, jointly articulating and appropriating approaches of infrastructuring and commoning. The case reveals that the joint appropriation and articulation of these co-design approaches can lead to the development of new ways of operating and perspectives in the public sector. However, it also highlights that this joint effort needs to involve people across organizational levels in order to minimize possible contextual and worldview breakdowns within public organizations.

If municipalities were the caring platforms of the 19-20th century sharing economy, how does care manifest in civic structures of the current period? We consider how platformsfrom the local initiatives of communities transforming neighbourhoods, to the city, in the form of the local authorityare involved, trusted and/or relied on the design of shared services and amenities for the public good. We use contrasting cases of interaction between local government and civil society organisations in Sweden and the UK to explore trends in public service provision. We look at how care can manifest between state and citizens and at the roles that codesign and co-learning play in developing contextually sensitive opportunities for caring platforms. In this way, we seek to learn from platforms in transition about the importance of co-learning in political and structural contexts and make recommendations for the co-design of (digital) platforms to care with and for civil society.

Fabriken is a makerspace, a public workshop equipped with tools and machines that can be used to make (almost) anything: from fixing a flat tire to build a robot, from backing to meet new people. This space has been set up with the aim of opening production, to investigate what happens when means of production are made public and when people make things together by sharing facilities and skills.From a participatory design perspective the making of Fabriken can be understood as process of design-fordesign and infrastructuring. The paper discusses how Fabriken came to be and how, in looking for a strategy to design-for-design and infrastructuring, there has been a shift from a design-before-use to a design-in-use approach, where the tactics of events, small-scale interventions and long-term engagement have been used to foster a process of participatory making of the space.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare two boundary organizations situated in Malmö (Sweden) and oriented toward opening production. Particularly, it looks at how the two organizations tried to establish and communicate their boundaries during their official opening events, which were structured according to the format of hackathon. Design/methodology/approach – The authors adopted an ethnographic approach and followed the two events, observing and interacting with organizers and participants. The findings reported here draw upon data collected through direct observation, the authors’ experience as participants, unstructured conversations, e-mail exchanges. Findings – This paper analyzes the two events in order to show how different cultures of opening production lead to different ways of performing hackathons and, consequently, how these events affect the process of establishing and communicating the organizational boundaries. Originality/value – The paper looks at the potential of events structured according to the format of hackathon as a way for boundary organizations to position themselves.