Marco Kellhammer and Eileen Mandir
Urban mobility transitions generate persistent conflict. They unfold as sociotechnical controversies in which concerns, values, and imaginaries collide across actor levels. Participatory design futuring can make such conflicts visible by enabling residents and other actors to negotiate alternative mobility futures. Yet once collaboratively developed scenarios move beyond workshops into public events, visual artefacts, reports, media, or policy-facing formats, it often remains unclear what happens to the concerns they carry: which are amplified, which are weakened, and which are transformed beyond recognition.
This short paper introduces the Concern Translation Canvas as a systemic design method for tracing how concerns move across actor levels and moments of translation. The canvas combines Callon’s moments of translation with Rasmussen’s sociotechnical hierarchy, extended through the concepts of boundary objects and matters of concern. Its horizontal axis distinguishes problematisation, interessement, enrolment, stabilisation, and re-opening. Its vertical axis maps urban society and citizens, institutions and administration, media, and politics and government.
The canvas was developed through retrospective and iterative mapping of the aqt project on low-car neighbourhoods in Munich. Events, activities, and boundary objects were first collected in a dense Miro map and then refined through three iterations into a cleaner canvas representation.
The contribution is methodological and provisional. The Concern Translation Canvas offers a structured way to reflect on how participatory futures travel, where concerns may stall or shift, and how visual and dialogic artefacts can mediate between civic, institutional, media, and political arenas.
Keywords: Actor-Network-Theory, Design Futuring, Civic Participation, Boundary Objects, Futures Literacy