Does Co-design Matter?

Often we hear people asking ‘what is co-design’? Is it a new trendy term for working together and collaborating? In this article we explain what it is and why Arteri uses co-design as an integral method in our practice – and why it should be in yours.

What is co-design?

Co-design is bringing people – whether customers, users, citizens or stakeholders – and communities together to design new policies, processes, services, or products.

Collaboration is embedded in the co-design process. With more people, there are more ideas. And with more diversity – of background, language, or role – there are even more ideas. Often, this also results less bias which creates a more robust design. This type of divergent thinking encourages multiple solutions before the group converges on a single idea to develop and refine.

 Co-design takes collaboration a step further and aims to:

• not only explore problems but also solutions collaboratively

• connect with people in a meaningful way

• design solutions based on community need and organisational/governmental constraints

• seek feedback, validation, and input on the project from the community.

Co-designing means you get a fit for purpose output that meets the needs of the community.

But, there are some limitations:

• conflicting schedules mean that true representation from your community may be hard to achieve

• some participants may feel unheard or unable to contribute with a group of experts

• building consensus can be difficult especially if there are dominating personalities.

For those reasons, Arteri always recommends engaging a facilitator to help co-design.

How to implement co-design?

We won’t tell you here how to do co-design (although, we’ve linked a few articles at the bottom of this article to help). But, establishing a co-design practice or mindset is just as important as the actual doing.

Get buy-in

Often, the hardest part is getting buy in from your stakeholders to change the way things are done. Co-design may be new to many of them, and so you’ll need to convince them of the benefits.

Map your stakeholders

You’ve got the go-ahead to co-design for your new product or service – that’s great!

The first thing we recommend you do is map your stakeholders. This makes sure that you have a clear alignment with the teams and business you’re working with.

Start curating a list of user types, customer types, designers and developers who will contribute to the project. Think about core people inside the business, the influencers and key stakeholders. Don’t forget the out-of-the-box thinking too.

Focus on the types of people, rather than the actual people. You can add names to the types of people later.

Remember to think broadly. You’ll be using a design thinking framework, so you want a broad spectrum of who is impacted by your project.

This list are the people who’ll co-design with you. And you’ll need to bring them along on the journey at different parts of the process.

Doing co-design

Collaboration is about getting people together. Co-design takes it a step further, and is about finding the right people to get together.

You’ve found the right people if you’ve done your stakeholder mapping. Now it’s time to do the co-design.

Your co-designers should research with you, develop ideas, drive change. These are the people who know everything about the process, the people, the services, the technology they user. They are also acutely aware of the pain points. Often, by involving these people in the design process, you can get them to drive change and advocate for adoption.

There are many ways you can co-design with your stakeholders: mapping exercises, interviews and research, workshops, ideation sessions. And once you’ve completed discovery, get your stakeholders and co-designers back involved to synthesise the data you’ve collected. They’ll see new perspectives, get exposed to the pain points uncovered, and they can help you define solutions.

They may even help you prioritise activities and where money can be invested.

Share early, share often

If you have a facilitator, like Arteri, to help you co-design, they’ll actively embed co-design as part of the design thinking process. They’ll ensure all people have fair and equal voice.

If you’re managing co-design yourself, make sure that you’ve created space and time to ask for feedback, thoughts, and validation. Do this early, and often. Give space for your participants to communicate with you in a way that works for them.

Develop the product or service

As you near the end of your  design thinking process  you start to develop the product or service, this doesn’t mean we stop using co-design principles. You still want to make sure every one of your previously identified and engaged stakeholders are part of this process. You may even want to bring in a group of users to start testing and designing together with.

This is crucial, because the main difference between co-design and collaboration is that co-design is about the user group. The people who are actually going to use the product or service.

Circle back

Using the design thinking process, remember to step back if you need to. As you and your co-design colleagues and users are sharing and thinking and dreaming, you may find that questions or ideas you hadn’t thought of before come to life. Go back: ideate, prototype – even empathise if you need to.

Co-design is a way of design thinking and so the principles and processes should overlap.

Read More

If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve got a solid understanding of what co-design is. You can learn more by reading:

• Victorian Government has a great article on co-design.

• UTS discusses what co-design really means.

• Roadmap to Informed Communities published a guide to co-design (including links to methods and tools).

Or, if you’re a visual learner, watch:

• The Power of Co-design from the Tamarack Institute

• What is co-design? (in UX and Product Design) by Relab Studios

Get In Contact

Are you looking to thrive in a world of rapid change and shifting customer expectations? Reach out to Arteri to discuss how our design-driven approach can help your organisation build products, services and strategies that target your people and investment in solving the right problems - https://www.arteri.com.au/contact