Workshops as a Catalyst for Common Good

Workshops are a popular way of co-designing with communities as well as tackling societal issues with art and design. This article explores the meaning of workshops in art and design practice beyond the concrete outcome achieved in them. It extends the perspective from artist and designer to other participating stakeholder groups and reflects through their experiences, which kind of collaborations, aims and mode of working workshops can catalyze. The article examines different stakeholder experiences of workshops through two studies: quantified questionnaires done in five different co-design workshops as well as qualified interviews held after a co-design project with fourteen different stakeholder groups. As a result, the article reflects on the short and long termmeanings of workshops in co-design and discusses how workshops transform design and research practice