This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), which permits reproduction, adaptation, and distribution provided the original author and source are credited. AbstractThe field of Strategic Design supports designers in researching and designing for the complexity of today's cities by embracing the idea of strategic dialogue, in which designers align with different actors and their interests. In this article, we discuss how democratic dialogues -foregrounded in the Participatory Design (PD) tradition -play a role in complex urban design processes (i.e. 'infrastructuring') and entail different types of dialogues of which strategic dialogue is merely one. After framing Strategic Design and PD, we describe five designer roles and their associated dialogues. This description forms the basis of an exploratory typology of democratic dialogues that was applied and exemplified in a case study about a Living Lab in the neighbourhood of Genk. The Lab attempts to design alternative futures for work in the city together with citizens, public and private organisations. We claim that engaging with this typology allows designers to understand and design infrastructuring processes in the urban context and to open up different design dialogues and roles for discussion.Keywords: democratic dialogues, living lab, urban context, designer roles, infrastructuring. ResumoO campo do design estratégico apoia o trabalho de designers que pesquisam e projetam para a complexidade das cidades de hoje. De fato, ao abraçar a ideia do diálogo estratégico, os designers se alinham com diferentes atores e seus interesses. Neste artigo, discutimos como diálogos democráticos -que estão em primeiro plano na tradição do Design Participativo (PD) -são relevantes em processos complexos de design urbano (ou seja, de "infraestruturação") e implicam diferentes tipos de diálogos, entre os quais o diálogo estratégico é apenas um. Depois de enquadrar Design Estratégico e PD, descrevemos cinco papéis do designer e seus relativos diálogos. Esta descrição constitui a base de uma tipologia exploratória de diálogos democráticos que foi aplicada e exemplificada em um estudo de caso sobre um Living Lab, no bairro de Genk. O Lab tenta projetar futuros alternativos para o trabalho na cidade, juntamente com os cidadãos, organizações públicas e privadas. Afirmamos que se envolver com esta tipologia permite que os designers entendam e projetem processos de infraestruturação no contexto urbano e se abram para diferentes diálogos de design e papéis para a discussão.Palavras-chave: diálogos democráticos, living lab, contexto urbano, papéis do designer, infraestruturação.

IntroductionDesign thinking has become a central issue in contemporary design discourse and rhetoric, and for good reason. With the design thinking practice of world leading design and innovation firm IDEO, and with the application of these principles to successful design education at prestigious d.school, the Institute of Design at Stanford University, and not least with the publication of Change by Design, in which IDEO chief executive Tim Brown elaborates on the firm's ideas about design thinking, 1 the design community is challenged to think beyond both the omnipotent designer and the obsession with products, objects, and things. Instead, what is suggested is: (1) that designers should be more involved in the big picture of socially innovative design, beyond the economic bottom line; (2) that design is a collaborative effort where the design process is spread among diverse participating stakeholders and competences; and (3) that ideas have to be envisioned, "prototyped," and explored in a hands-on way, tried out early in the design process in ways characterized by human-centeredness, empathy, and optimism.To us this perspective sounds like good old Participatory Design, although we have to admit it has a better articulated and more appealing rhetoric. As active researchers in the field of Participatory Design for many decades, we fully embrace this design thinking orientation. However, we also hold that, given design thinking's many similarities to Participatory Design today, some of the latter's challenges also might be relevant to contemporary design thinking. In this paper we put forth both some practicalpolitical and some theoretical-conceptual challenges and dilemmas in engaging in design for change. We do so using the background of our own idiosyncratic encounters with the field and our view on how Participatory Design as a design practice and theoretical field has emerged and evolved since the early 1970s.

Participatory design (PD) has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work-oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and 'innovation'. What 'democratic innovation' entails is often currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratised through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative 'innovation' practice more in line with the original visions of PD based on our experience of running Malmo¨Living Labsan open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long-term collaborations among diverse stakeholders. Three cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts 'agonistic public spaces' (as opposed to consensual decision-making), 'thinging' and 'infrastructuring' (as opposed to projects) are explored in relation to democracy, innovation and other future-making practices.

This article argues in favour of seeing co-design as an open-ended exploration where prototypical practices are explored that engender favourable conditions for ongoing negotiation of meaning. Participatory design approaches to designing for specific practices are reviewed with particular focus on how to handle constantly evolving practices, where some design researchers argue for creating open and flexible technical systems while others emphasise design as primarily concerned with questions of changing practices. By discussing an extended participatory design project in which new ways of engaging in informal learning through self-produced videos were explored in an intensive care unit, I argue first and foremost for viewing co-design as prototypical practice which is explored through an open-ended exploration of possibilities. Second, I argue that a focus on practice necessarily requires in situ explorations to see if the proposed design explorations invoke relevant prototypical practices in the midst of work. Third, I argue that a focus on practice entails viewing tools as temporary props for various settings, rather than as central features that define the settings of learning, knowing and working.