<p>Co-design is increasingly adopted in Higher Education to support diverse educational innovations. Often framed as inherently collaborative and empowering—promoting inclusivity, agency and collective intelligence—co-design might be underpinned by assumptions of shared understanding and communicative alignment. We problematise these assumptions as multi-domain co-design interactions are dialogical sites prone to linguistic unease, particularly among individuals with heterogenous domains of expertise and specialised linguistic repertoires. Drawing on Linell’s notion of meaning potentials, we conceptualise meaning as created, negotiated and redefined in emergent interactions across participants and contexts, rather than fixed or pre-given. From this perspective, we frame linguistic unease as a potential feature of multi-domain co-design interactions that reveal the limits and possibilities of shared meaning-making. This exploratory study examines how participants experience and navigate linguistic unease in multi-domain co-design interactions. We argue for the need of positioning co-design metalinguistic awareness as a foundational design step. This may facilitate collaborative reflection among participants on the scope and limitations of their heterogenous domains of expertise and linguistic repertoires, while fostering reflexive engagement with meaning potentials and supporting more inclusive and equitable multi-domain co-design environments.</p>