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Aloha Hufana Ambe, Isaac Salisbury, Tobias Grundgeiger, Daniel Bodnar, Sean Rothwell, Nathan Brown, and Ben Matthews. 2026. Frames of Participation: Design as Enquiry in Exploring Technological Futures of Emergency Care. In the Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2026, Milano, Italy. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796624.3796646

In Participatory Design (PD), participants and designers bring their distinct worldviews together to co-create technological futures that marry users’ insights and domain expertise with the possibilities of technology. Designers typically focus on achieving design-related outcomes; however, there are additional insights to be gained from paying close analytic attention to participants’ orientations in their spoken interactions when engaging in PD activities. This paper analyses contributions to a PD workshop conducted with 12 emergency department (ED) doctors in the course of a larger project looking at new technological support for emergency work. The workshop explored doctors’ reactions to a set of speculative technology concepts and scenarios. Participants’ responses reflected multiple orientations including how they framed the workplace, the role of technology in future work practices, their professional role, the values of work, and the scope and nature of design. We propose ‘frames of participation’ as an analytic lens that makes these orientations visible, offering a practical way to identify and interpret how participants position problems and possibilities in PD workshops. We show how such framings shape what is taken up in discussion and action, and we present how this lens can guide analysis and facilitation to produce more grounded, and context-sensitive process and outcomes in future PD work.