Staging Negotiation Spaces: A co-design framework

Today, many design projects are collaborative in nature. This means that designers must navigate multiple concerns held by a range of involved actors. This article investigates the expansion of the designer role from creative expert to stager and facilitator of negotiations during the design process. In doing so, the metaphorical notion of an inviting stage director is used to develop a new framework termed ‘staging negotiation spaces’. This framework is informed by experiences and practices from participatory design and analytical insights from actor-network theory. To illustrate the applicability of the framework, it is used to analyse and understand the staging, facilitation, and reframing of negotiations during a co-design process in a large international electronics company.