Sampsa Hyysalo‘s latest book is published! And it’s open access: find it here https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-95437-5.

Sampsa argues that there have long been manifestos and declarations imploring design to be responsible and relevant, stressing the importance of moving beyond narrow commercial interests and beyond the idea of design as simply problem solving. Yet the demands on designers to make positive social and environmental change may easily become too unrealistic. Rather than finding themselves needing to become social scientists, psychologists or systems analysts themselves, Sampsa presents a path of design participation, which shifts design towards developing ways by which others can define and solve problems – and together with social scientists, entrepreneurs, civil servants, and so on.

Through eight chapters, we are led through real examples and what they tell us about design participation: what design work is done in co-design workshops, who participates when paying attention to participation mixes, design in long timeframes as design-in-use, the varieties of designer-user configurations, and the various contexts of design for sustainability transitions and energy transitions. Andrea Botero and I contributed to chapter 3 on what we learn from designers working with people actively engaged in design, through design-in-use, as well as learning from people designing for themselves, such as open design makers and hackers.