Democratic design experiments: Between laboratory and parliament

Designers and design researchers are increasingly exploring societal challenges through engagements with issues that call forward new publics and new modes of democratic citizenship. Whatever this is called design activism, social design, adversarial design, participatory design or something else we here see design engagements which are both controversial in their commitment to agendas of social change and experimental in the sense that they openly probe for what can possibly be enacted. In this conversation we want to explore how such engagements may be seen as democratic design experiments that form a third space of re-presentation and emergent civic action between laboratory and parliament.