From no design to co-design: How do we build co-design capability?

This article describes a three-part learning path from no design to co-design. It's aimed at aspiring co-design facilitators, organisational development professionals, and team leaders. Commissioners of co-design might also find it interesting to know what skills to look for in an individual or agency (and whether there’s design in your co-design). Thank you, Alison Sharp (Meld) and Opher Yom-Tov (ANZ), for sharing your design capability frameworks. Join me in this work in progress.

Introduction

Co-design continues to appear in strategies and recommendations. Yet, while I love to see it, promises of co-design appear in organisations that don’t engage in design (Figure 1) beyond dedicated design or engagement teams. Co-design also appears in organisations that don’t support co-design projects or facilitators (e.g. ensuring individuals tasked with leading co-design have capability and support). So, as an aspiring practitioner, where do you start?

Individuals and organisations without an existing design mindset and skillset often stumble in trying to adopt co-design. Are design basics among the building blocks for aspiring facilitators of co-design? Do we need to learn to design before co-designing? Might learning from established design practice make our co-design efforts more impactful?

Figure 1: Design fundamentals - mindset and skillset

Let’s start with a few issues (going from no design to co-design)?

While some individuals and teams may have the skills needed (Figure 1) to design and co-design, the increasing popularity of co-design isn't matched by an equal increase in capability. Here's what I see in attempts to go from no design to co-design.

• Attempts to move straight to co-design can prevent aspiring co-design practitioners from knowing where to start or create feelings of overwhelm. Starting at co-design may be analogous to starting a brand-new sport to an advanced level, skipping the building blocks in-between that enable safe and effective technique. If we don't see design as a building block of co-design, where is the path to strong, safe-enough design practice? Without a clear learning path and support, individuals attempting to lead co-design often experience burnout.
• Co-design efforts led by people without fundamental design (Figure 1) and movement-building skills often get stuck in endless meetings without action. This might be due to not knowing how to work with diverse groups to gather and synthesise insights, identify priorities for action, work with existing good service patterns (instead of making up your own), or turn ideas into prototypes. You might see a lack of skill in confusing and unproductive sessions where the facilitator asks for blue-sky thinking (note reader, sarcasm) or where there doesn’t appear to be a facilitator. Poor facilitation can damage co-design enthusiasm and waste valuable resources (time, money, hope).?

While many capabilities are needed to facilitate co-design, design plays a critical role (the clue is in the name co-design).

Curious professionals without a design background (e.g. industrial design, architecture, user experience) often ask where they can learn co-design. I see where they benefit from learning structured approaches that many designers take for granted (for example, making the invisible (e.g. assumptions, beliefs) visible through visual techniques or creating time-bound prototypes to test, iterate and generate meaningful feedback). This isn't to dominate or replace existing skills - rather complement, remix and re-make.

Here's a draft of a learning path from no design to co-design?(a work in progress)

As a designer and design educator, I try to explain a learning path in three stages (loosely aligned to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning). While we don't need everyone involved in co-design to have these skills, people leading co-design need fundamental design skills to lead creative and generative design processes. While many design practices sit outside this structured approach, well-defined and repeatable approaches build individual capability, shared processes and ultimately, organisational capability.

??? Download an editable draft of the framework

I focus on core design skills, not skills for particular applications such as digital design (such as information architecture). Designers, please don't @ me from inside the UX or digital-design bubble ????

Stage 1: Learn to design (in a structured way)?

You're building your mindset, skillset and confidence. While some of these skills appear simple, they contain worlds (such as prototyping and facilitation). You are learning to:

• Understand the importance of starting with questions, not solutions.
• Recall when and how to move between exploration (divergence) and action (convergence).
• Listen openly to others, write and ask quality questions (i.e. open-ended, concise).
• Consider multiple solutions (beyond the usual suggestions of more funding, physical space or staff).
• Understand how problems and solutions can co-evolve (e.g. as we're developing and testing solutions, we learn more about the situation, which changes our design).
• Tell the difference between data, observation and insight.
• Deliver information and insight in different ways (visually, verbally, written).
• Understand and undertake basic synthesis (not just analysis) using different inputs and data (for example, observation, interviews, statistics, white papers, strategy documents).
• Create and test basic prototypes, and suspend judgement.
• Look beyond your sector for inspiration (for example, good service patterns).
• Guide basic idea generation with clear constraints, inspiration and outcomes.
• Recall how to host and create collaborative spaces where people feel welcome, valued and included.
• Understand the need for clear boundaries, care for self and others and basic procedures such as for serious disclosures.
• Deliver basic group facilitation and other facilitated activities, such as usability testing.

As you start to understand theory and use design tools, you’ll look for practical experience on different kinds of challenges (e.g. visual, product, service, organisation, system) and with different groups of people (e.g. community, professional groups, sectors etc.) You’ll also look for opportunities to work with experienced practitioners and adjacent professions (e.g. strategic communications, community organising, strategic foresight, reform).

Stage 2: Progress your design capability?

You're experimenting with different approaches (including from other disciplines) and become more confident and capable of leading others through design processes. You might be developing specialist skills (such as facilitation or service design). You'll build on your basic design skills to:

• Reflect on your practice while doing it (not only afterwards).
• Tell and co-tell stories with increasing impact, building alliances and networks. This is likely to involve developing negotiation skills.
• Re-frame problems and opportunities to inspire action and optimism. This might involve working effectively with partners to bring insights, ideas and change to life (e.g. artists, poets, community-builders, journalists) - doing this well can include skills such as writing a clear brief, providing feedback and keeping work on track.
• Apply design beyond visuals and products into services, organisations and systems (such as health, justice, housing).
• Ensure facilitation is more inclusive (e.g. of differences in neurotype, trauma-awareness), productive (getting people unstuck) and courageous (e.g. calling-in and calling-out).
• Deliver and work within non-linear approaches to design (such as starting with prototypes, working iteratively, or moving between different phases and activities simultaneously).
• Extend skills beyond the basic generation of ideas, considering other approaches (such as subtraction, joining-up existing concepts, remixing etc.)
• Support others to envision new realities (incremental and radical).
• Advance prototyping and testing skills (such as policy prototyping, working with numerous stakeholders, enabling peer researchers to test prototypes).
• Begin to incorporate power literacy and knowledge of critical theory into your design processes (e.g. white privilege, intersectionality, positionality, patriarchy, hetero and cis-normativity).
• Advance synthesis skills, including identifying metaphors and analogies.
• Build on the ideas and aspirations of others, de-centre self-interest and need to be the 'creative hero' or problem-solver. Begin to share skills and coach others (and, in return, have them coach you).

Progressing your skills will take time and a diversity of experiences and mentors.

Stage 3: Work with increasing complexity?

You're working with humility and likely focusing on other people’s capabilities and creativity. You’re likely working with increasingly complex groups (e.g. many organisations, many citizens) and complex challenges with no apparent or single solution. You'll build upon the skills described above to:

• Create and effectively communicate your own frameworks and approaches (ensuring attribution of the work you are building upon or remixing)
• Critically examine design itself (see more from Critical UX).
• Evaluate and combine different design (e.g. human-centred design, participatory, design-by) and non-design approaches (e.g. movement-building, strengths-based practise) based on the desired outcomes, context, collaborators and constraints.
• Support others to identify and challenge the status quo, work sensitively and productively with and within conflict.
• De-center yourself from design efforts (see Design Justice Principles), for example, through community or peer researchers, building their capability and confidence (or know when to get out of the way for others to lead and advocate for change).
• Go beyond ‘dot voting’ into robust deliberative decision-making approaches that factor in equity-centred decision-making (such as weighting some people's feedback higher.)

Download an editable draft of this framework

?? Aspiring co-design facilitators, where are you on the learning path? What stands as a skill you'd like to learn?

?? Practitioners and educators, what have I missed?