In this introductory article to the special issue 'Co-Design and the Public Realm', we discuss a common interest in how meso-and macro-political institutional contexts frame and are informed by Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design processes. We argue that unilateral focus within PD and Co-Design on the micro-political scale of fieldwork obscures interactivity with institutional framing processes, undermining their potential as sites of critique and political change. Our argument is drawn from a study of literature on the role of institutions in relation to PD and the public realm and our experience as participants in an EU-funded research project. The case study descriptions unpack how various institutional frames inform PD processes and how, conversely, PD processes inform various institutional frames: metacultural frames, institutional action frames, and policy frames. To highlight the move to engaging with and creating new institutions, we introduce the notion of institutioning.

This paper critically looks at the role of people with dementia (and their network) when involved in a participatory design (PD) process and the role of designers when involving a person with dementia (and their network). Two participatory projects (ATOM and Dementia Lab) were analyzed and challenges in doing PD together with people with dementia are defined. Author Keywords People with dementia; participatory design ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 User Interfaces INVOLVING PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIA IN RESEARCH AND DESIGN PROCESSESDementia is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of psychiatric and cognitive symptoms. Personality changes, depression, hallucinations and delusions are the most known psychiatric symptoms. On a cognitive level people with dementia almost always suffer from a deterioration of memory (such as amnesia), difficulties in language (aphasia), the inability to perform purposeful movements (apraxia) and orientation in time and place (agnosia) (APA, 2000). Additional behavioral and cognitive problems (irritation/frustration, short attention span, an inability to learn new routines,…) can occur. As a large group of people with dementia belong to the group of older persons, physical ailments like impaired eyesight, hearing or physical coordination are likely to appear (Lobo et al., 1999). A wide variety of types of dementia exists and the way it affects daily life will be different for each person. Involvement in research and designTo involve people with dementia in a research and design process is not an easy thing. In the domain of design of IT applications, Span et al. (2013) found that only 2 out of 26 research projects involved the person with dementia not as an object of study or informant, but as a partner (or co-designer) in the design and research process. To see the person with dementia as a mere object of study or to only rely on proxies stems from the vision on the person with dementia as the 'uncollected corpse' (Miller, 1990) or as someone who no longer possesses a sense of self. Kitwood (1997), however, states that a person with dementia must be recognized as a person with thoughts, emotions, wishes and thus, a person who should actively be included in research. Participatory design with people with dementiaTo actively include people with dementia in research and design can be done by using participatory design methods. Although we see good examples of working in a participatory manner with people with dementia (Holbø, et al., 2013;Lindsay, Brittain, et al., 2012;Mayer & Zach, 2013;Meiland et al., 2012), the question we are trying to answer in this paper, is what the challenges experienced in doing PD with people with dementia in two projects were. We will look at the role of the participants (person with dementia, designer,…), the analysis and the scalability of the research results and the impact of the PD process on the participants. CHALLENGES OF DOING PARTICIPATORY DESIGN WITH PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIAWe define 7 challenges in doing PD with people with dementia coming from our ...

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