can be co-produced and co-owned through dialogue across differences in experience, values, and knowledge [ 1].

This kind of work raises a number of ethical questions. In co-design, ethics has been framed as a matter of phronesis [ 2], experience-based ethics oriented toward action. Pelle Ehn and Richard Badham [ 2] highlight how doing the right thing in collaborative design processes requires an ongoing confrontation with the practical situation at hand. Ann Light and Yoko Akama [ 3] discuss ethics as a tension between obligations and care.

Obligations represent an ethics of rights, general principles that a co-designer should follow when engaging with people (such as giving participants the right to represent their own practice).

Care calls for an ethics of mutuality
that builds upon the recognition
of preexisting relationships and
interdependencies between people
and things [ 3]. Thus, it is important to
pay attention to the specific context
in which the design action unfolds; to
acknowledge designers’ own stakes and
positions in the design process; and
to recognize the limited power of any
participant or artifact in controlling
the design process and its outcomes [ 4].

In our engagement with participatory processes that cut across societal structures, we are meeting ethical challenges related to representation, accountability, and tradition and transcendence. To cope with them, we see mutual learning playing a central role.

THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION

In some sense, the tension between
obligations and care has, from the
outset, been a challenge for co-design
in the Scandinavian tradition. This
tension comes from combining the
political ambitions of increasing
democracy in work life with the wish
to simply create better designs based
on valid information from contextual
use. Such an alliance of motivations is
not a bad thing in itself, but combining
democratic aspirations with business
models and technological innovation
does make for a complicated set
of agendas that pose problems for
participation in several ways. On
the one hand, the introduction of
technology and innovation has been
foundational for financing research.
That fact in itself highlights how design
and technological development are
integrated with the politics of market
economies and, however strong
ambitions for social well-being or
inclusion are, technical design projects
run the risk of drifting as the interests
of the powerful are maintained through
the legitimacy of collaborative design.
In the worst cases, agendas and design
briefs are already fixed, although not in a
visible way, and co-design efforts cannot
challenge existing hierarchies of power.
Instead, designers have to position
themselves in a complex entanglement
of different agencies.

On the other hand, participation is subject to the same challenges as democracy itself; it is a matter of

Weaving accountabilities (Macramé workshop at Re Turen Lindängen in Malmö).