From stakeholders to actors: an actionable approach to designing responsibly with AoD–SNS

Responsible Innovation (RI) has highlighted inclusion and responsiveness, yet remains less explicit about how participation and responsibility are negotiated across evolving innovation arenas. This article examines how stakeholders are enacted as dynamic actors in such processes. Drawing on Arenas of Development (AoD) and Staging Negotiation Spaces (SNS), this analysis examines a qualitative case study of a student-led design project on sustainable funerals in Denmark. In this quiet domain, participation is neither self-evident nor institutionally formalised. The analysis shows how designers staged successive negotiation spaces through intermediary objects, including models, prioritisation games, scenarios, and dialogue games, enabling concerns to be articulated, contested, and reframed. The article contributes to RI scholarship by conceptualising participation as a reconfiguration across arenas and by introducing navigational work across arenas as an analytical lens for tracing how responsibility becomes negotiable through the defining of actors, material inscriptions, and institutional gatekeeping.