Co-Design
Design Processes
A collaborative design process involving various stakeholders, including end-users, to ensure diverse perspectives and input in the creation of a product or solution. Co-design emphasizes inclusivity, shared decision-making, and collaboration, fostering a sense of ownership among participants and enhancing the relevance and success of the final design.
In practice
Involves collaborative design efforts with end-users, stakeholders, or other team members. Co-design is important throughout the design process, promoting inclusivity and diverse perspectives. Its significance lies in leveraging collective creativity, ensuring that diverse insights shape the design, and ultimately resulting in solutions that better meet the needs and expectations of the entire user community.
Questions
What is Co-Design?
Co-design brings the people who will use something into the act of designing it, as contributors rather than as subjects to be researched.
Why do you use Co-Design?
It surfaces constraints and needs that no amount of observation would reveal, and it produces buy-in from the people who have to live with the result.
How do you use/apply Co-Design?
Run structured sessions with materials that let non-designers make and choose, then bring their decisions back into the work honestly rather than as decoration.
When do you use Co-Design?
When the users know things the team cannot, which is nearly always in health, civic and accessibility work.
Who uses Co-Design?
Service and social designers, and increasingly product teams in regulated or specialist domains.
