“Is Co-Design Complicated?”

“Work Hard In Silence, Let Success Be Your Noise” -Anonymous

The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) has made frequent and consistent public commitments to co-designing the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) with people with disability. The NDIA describes co-design as bringing people with disability and their families and carers into the design and development of the NDIA’s work to help get the best outcome.

More generally, co-design is usually described as an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help make sure that the result meets their needs and is usable. This approach is based on research that suggests that designers create more innovative concepts and ideas when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own.

The good news is that co-design is frequently mentioned in NDIS reports and speeches and that the Independent Advisory Council acts as a key co-design platform within the Scheme. The NDIA is also active in encouraging people with disability to work at all levels of its staff team.

However, the NDIS exists in a complicated environment. The Commonwealth, state and territory governments and service providers all have a say over how it works as well as people with disability and their families.

It is significant that the term ‘co-design’ is not mentioned in the law itself or in the announcements about the bilateral agreements. The effect of this is that some of the very big decisions about the NDIS are being made by the federal government or negotiated between the federal and state and territory governments without the input of people with disability.

Sometimes an outcome co-designed by the NDIA with people with disability organisations gets over-ridden by the arrangements made by the federal government or between the federal and state governments. When this happens people with disability are left feeling like co-designed decisions have been ignored.

For people with disability and their families, co-designing the National Disability Insurance Scheme means a lot more than consultation. To us it means shared decision-making at all levels. It means doing away with the outdated and inequitable view of people with disability and their families as clients and recipients first, and instead treating us as experts with true capacity to help build the NDIS.

Therefore our preference is for the Commonwealth government, all the state and territory governments and the NDIA to all make further efforts to ensure the voice of people with disability is central to decisions made about the NDIS at every level. However, we understand that some of the discussions and negotiations happen in very complicated circumstances and short time frames and so encourage all parties to always be clear about which decisions have been co-designed and which decisions have not.

Co-design involves hard work but the concept itself is not difficult. Co-design is a place to start an honest conversation between all the people involved in the mental health system, meeting as equals with a common interest.

Honest conversation about real issues is the beginning of co-design. Creativetechniques can be used to help different groups of people get involved, and some of these approaches are described in the rest of this chapter, but at its heart, co-design is about dialogue and that can happen swiftly and in any context.

Reports (like this one) share knowledge in one direction, from the writers to their audience. When the audience already knows something about the subject, the words on the page are enough to make the connection. When the audience does not read, does not understand, or perhaps actively rejects the information, then the words on the page have little power to bring about change. Something similar happens when we share stories of personal experience. More emotive and powerful than many reports, stories are still one-directional communication.

Bringing people together face to face to share knowledge – that is to meet for the sole purpose of hearing each other’s stories and learning together – is a powerful tool for change. Relational practice is essential for co-design (Dunston et al., 2009). Unless we can join forces and recognize each other’s humanity, how can we do business together, let alone make progress?