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Abstract Co-evolution accounts have generally been used to describe how problems and solutions both change during the design process. More generally, problems and solutions can be considered as analytic categories, where change is seen to occur within categories or across categories. There are more categories of interest than just problems and solutions, for example, the participants in a design process (such as members of a design team or different design teams) and categories defined by design ontologies (such as function-behaviour-structure or concept-knowledge). In this paper, we consider the co-evolution of different analytic categories (not just problems and solutions), by focussing on how changes to a category originate either from inside or outside that category. We then illustrate this approach by applying it to data from a single design session using three different systems of categorisation (problems and solutions, different designers and function, behaviour and structure). This allows us to represent the reciprocal influence of change within and between these different categories, while using a common notation and common approach to graphing quantitative data. Our approach demonstrates how research traditions that are currently distinct from each other (such as co-evolution, collaboration and function-behaviour-structure) can be connected by a single analytic approach.