1  Introduction

• A competitive manufacturing sector needs innovations in manufacturing

• Participatory design is one specific and widely studied approach

• Visualisation technologies in participatory design is a key factor

• Virtual Environment (VE)  technologies have successfully been applied in participatory design

• Augmented Reality (AR) technologies afford the capability to visualise virtual phenomena

• There could be a great potential to integrate these methods

• A hypothesis of participatory design process combining different reality-virtuality technologies is presented.