Navigating with people and objects - strategic concerns

This chapter describes and elaborate on how different staging strategies enable a purposeful and collective shaping of design and innovation drawing up experiences across a diversity of cases from practice as described in this volume. It is demonstrated how staging can be applied to strategically bridge established networks and mediate across highly diverse knowledge practices and to politically navigate and enact spaces for front end innovation and transitions. Further, it is shown how development and circulation of objects through transformative spaces can prompt articulation and representation of concerns and how preconceived ideas may be challenged through experimentation. Finally, the authors point at how the navigational skills of the professionals engaged in staging design and innovation can be developed through rehearsals, design inquiries and ongoing negotiations attending to diverse articulations of interest in the ever-changing condition of development.
Key words: Staging, strategy, mediation, navigation, spaces, objects.