What can Design Laboratories do?

The distinction between design and use is getting blurred in several ways as products and services increasingly are co-created in use, and use and users proliferate and diversify. This has led to a growing interest in staging what we here will call design laboratories that both involve future users in codesign and incubate emergent everyday practices of design in use. In this panel that brings together researchers from some of the environments that most vigorously has pursued this line of inquiry we will ask what it is that constitutes a successful design laboratory and what we can expect design laboratories to accomplish in a world of diversity.