Co-design: Disrupting a common cast of characters

In many organisations, movements and system reform efforts, we remain stuck in our roles and battles with each other. We spend too much time writing rebuttals and meeting in separate rooms and not enough time learning, designing or deciding together.

In maintaining the same cast of characters (pictured below, imperfectly), we stay in our corner, making assumptions and judgements about other people. From this, we scatter our change efforts like confetti over a busy dance floor. As a result, our perspectives on the challenges, the opportunities, and the assets available in our context are narrower than they could be. Therefore, limiting our capacity for innovation. So how can co-design, among other strategies, positively disrupt this dynamic??

Image description for 'the same cast of characters': Colourful abstract shapes sit in four groups. The first (blue) group represents funders, policy-makers, staff and politicians, the second (green) academic and technical, the third (pink) artists and writers, the fourth (orange) individuals, community organisations, advocates, neighbourhoods and families.

Are you unconvinced that we are stuck in a common cast of characters? Start here

If you don’t believe that we are stuck in a common cast of characters, here are a few examples. If you're already convinced, keep scrolling.

• Front-line staff are often asked to represent the views of people with lived experience, denying people with lived experience the opportunity to speak for themselves. This also prevents each group from learning about each other outside the service-delivery relationship, which is fraught with uneven power differences.
• Advocates and professionals are often pitted against each other, despite individuals from each group sometimes sharing goals to better systems and conditions for people who receive support and deliver support.???
• Corporate and front-line staff are often disconnected (worse, at conflict) with few opportunities to learn, design and decide together.
• Organisations taking a multidisciplinary approach often continue to leave people with lived experience out of conversations and decisions.?
• Professionals are increasingly busy within systems, and many fail to look outside organisational boundaries to other people who care about the same outcomes (for example, citizens, academics and community organisations).
• Funders and policy-makers may make decisions at a great distance from the people’s lives for whom those decisions will impact.
• Artists have much to offer to opportunity and problem-spaces. However, they may be seen as only having decorative value or value in communicating the work already done (instead of being part of the discovery and design process from the beginning).?
• Aspirations such as patient-centred design often fall short. While designs may conceptually improve outcomes for patients, one-dimensional ideas often severely impact staff (subsequently making the proposals for patient-centred care ineffective).?
• As in our societies more broadly, we often leave children, young people, older people and disabled* people out of change efforts entirely, citing vulnerability as the reason.?

When we’ve fought for our position or identity, it becomes a big part of us. Something we are wary of loosening or reimagining. To embrace many perspectives (a core mindset of co-design), we must soften our tendency to blame, armour up and stay in our corner. Embracing many perspectives doesn’t mean giving up what we believe or putting ourselves in harm’s way, but it does involve being willing to be changed (Wheatley).?

Image description: The abstract and colourful shapes are reshuffled to overlap and have lost their labels denoting differences in roles or characters.

How can co-design disrupt the common cast of characters?

Co-design (what is this?), when facilitated well, moves beyond discussing and making recommendations about what should or could happen into creatively testing and implementing new approaches. No, co-design isn't a magic bullet, but it can be a way forward. Here are four ways that co-design can disrupt the common cast of characters:

1. When we work together, we test our assumptions and ideas in real-time. I’ve frequently seen this prevent or reduce waste by stopping isolated teams from creating ideas that few people want and even fewer people would benefit.?
2. When we're liberated from a single role (i.e. professional, advocate, funder), there is an opportunity to bring more of ourselves. As Josh Moorehouse reminds me, we are all a multiplicity of things - of experiences, identities, hopes and frustrations.
3. When we learn with people unlike us, our understanding becomes multi-dimensional, and our sense of possibility expands. This can offer new insight and new direction. It can help shed new light on stuck situations.
4. When we learn ‘up close’, we move from abstraction to connection—connecting to other perspectives, to the reality of people’s lives and experiences. I’ve seen this have profound changes for co-designers who subsequently changed their work, their relationships and their advocacy.?

For those who are new to the game, co-design is a design-led process where we move together in partnership (and in the same room) through the phases pictured below:?

Image description: Circle diagram begins with 1. Build the conditions 2. Immerse and align 3. Discover 4. Design 5. Test and refine 6. Implement and learn. The circle re-starts at 1.

So how can we slow down and be more interested in each other? Especially when we feel there is no time and when we think we already know the answers to our unasked questions. Where can we reshuffle the common cast of characters??

*I use this term in response to repeated calls from disabled people for identity-first language. If you are non-disabled and uncomfortable with this language, here’s a few places to start: Disability Visibility (the website and the book) Growing up Disabled in Australia edited by Carly Findlay.