In this edition of CoDesign we have an eclectic mix of contributions which show just some of the variety of work that fits within the journal's remit. Fleischmann and Daniel's paper presents work in design education; they address the provision of design experiences during design education that begin to prepare practitioners for a working life in which they can play a professional role within multidisciplinary collaborations. In the domain of digital media design they describe a scenario for designing, within the learning environment, which places demands on students to work with colleagues from other disciplines to apply their knowledge collaboratively within an application context which replicates some of the challenges presented by authentic settings of work practice.
The paper by Fleischmann and Daniel, with their description of practical interventions, contrasts with Alexiou's paper which theorises about how individual and social accounts of design can be unified through the lens of studies in complexity theory. The paper pays particular attention to emergence, starting first with individual cognition, and moving onto design as a social activity, in an attempt to bring together these two distinct accounts via the notion of design as a complex distributed process.
The final contribution to this issue by Hussain presents a case study of working directly with children who use prosthetic legs. The author uses the challenge of considering how to empower these users, and to what extent it is practical to do so through engagement in the design process, as a way of exploring and appropriating prior models for distinguishing different levels of participation. Along the way she questions what it is possible for the design practitioner to achieve when seeking to benefit from user participation in design in challenging field-work contexts.