This is not a project in the strict sense, but a collaboration started around the topic of participation at Aarhus university. A group of us organized a workshop at the Aarhus decennial conference of 2015 with the title “Unfolding Participation. What do we mean by participation – conceptually and in practice”.

The workshop explored five themes: time, tools, participants, reflexivity, and politics. The identified challenges for participatory design included: the need for critical engagement with respect to participation, the role of the participatory professionals, staged participation versus DoItYourself, participatory design at the micro and macro level, and the epistemological and theoretical foundation of participatory design. Some questions aimed at more dialogue with other disciplines: what is meant by participation in different fields?

This workshop led to a call for paper for a special issue of CoDesign on the more focused topic of Unfolding Participation over Time in the Design of IT. The aim of the SI was to continue and contribute to the debate around the conceptualizations and understandings of participation in participatory design by rethinking notions and practices of participation as they relate to temporality. Our paper in the SI brought forward five lenses for understanding the unfolding of participation in the design of IT