Playing the Cards

How can collaborative artifacts mediate processes of researcher–practitioner interactions to make research more co-generative? Research on knowledge co-production has paid little attention to how joint theory building is socio-materially mediated and tends to downplay discovery and wonder as sources of generativity. This article provides an empirical investigation of the use of thin categories on hard-copy A5 cards, combining brief texts and images to communicate tentative theoretical categories and involve practitioners in theorizing. Playing these cards opened up a new discursive space in the dialogue, making it an event of tactile engagement, ludic interaction, and power symmetry. We discuss how the transformed dialogue can be understood as processes of (a) dealing–touching–receiving collaborative artifacts that invite participants into rating, comparing, and combining, and (b) thickening of thin categories by recognition/appropriation and expansion/search. The article implicates a new vocabulary for mediating collaborative research, combining visual and material elements with notions of social poetics.