How Co-Creation Can Help You Build Better Teams

By Katerina Cizek

Co-creation is everywhere – across countless disciplines – but hard to see. 

In our book, Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, William Uricchio and I, and our team, define co-creation as “An alternative to the single-author vision [that] involves a constellation of media production methods, frameworks, and feedback systems.” The challenge we identified is that even when co-creation is seen, it is often labeled as niche and relegated to the periphery of professional and scholarly disciplines.

Visual artists told us that in art galleries, co-created work is often physically exhibited in side rooms, signposted as less crucial than single-author work featured in the main gallery space. In harder sciences, such as engineering and architecture, participatory designers lamented that their work is often considered a marketing or user-testing add-on, rather than a central part of the “core business.”

“In our research for our book, we kept hearing that, everywhere, co-creation was deemed a side-hustle.”

Some of the limitations are hardwired into technologies: in publishing, editors report that they run into issues with multi-authored books with more than five authors. Amazon, for example, simply can't accommodate all the names – they cut off at five. Google Books and Google Scholar have similar limitations.

In our research for our book, we kept hearing that, everywhere, co-creation was deemed a side-hustle. Most co-creators we met did their collective work on the side of their desks. Co-creation was an add-on, an extra, found in the margins of budgets, plans, and agendas.

Making co-creation more visible

Not only is co-creation structurally marginalized, it is also camouflaged, going by different terms in various disciplines. As visual thinkers, we began to sketch and map co-creative practices across disciplines and sectors. And in this picture, we decided to center co-creation rather than making it peripheral. What if we visually brought all these side practices into the center and went out from there to the disciplines?

That is how our interactive wheel for co-creative practices – conceived by Co-Creation Studio and designed and built with Helios Design Lab – was born.

In this interactive tool, one can select from five sectors and ten disciplines to reveal the definitions of 63 practices associated with co-creation. Together, they represent a diverse set of interests and goals. We use rainbow colors to highlight the ideas of a wide spectrum and at the same time a certain unity or set of relations. Co-creation is the white light in the center. We are not interested in claiming and defending territory with a single word and a definition. Rather, we aim to broaden the understanding and processes of collective work, no matter what you call it in the field you come from.

“They often miss that just behind their backs, sitting very close to them, are fellow co-creators.”

We use this interactive tool a lot in our presentations and workshops. We ask folks to imagine that co-creators sit in the center of this circle, but they are busy justifying what they do as they face outward toward their own legacy disciplines, professional organizations and scholarly colleagues. So they often miss that just behind their backs, sitting very close to them, are fellow co-creators. They may refer to their work differently or use different terms and language to describe it, but it is all in the wheelhouse of co-creation.

Co-creation and collaboration

As one exercise in our studio workshops, we ask teams to identify which colors are strong in their project. Then we ask them which of the other colors might contribute to their work.

Over in the purples, for instance, you find science and technology. Here, in a deep indigo blue, you can click on a short definition of open-source models:

"A philosophy that promotes free access and distribution of products, usually software and code. It was coined in 1998 during the Freeware Summit after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code. It is seen as an opportunity to advocate for the advantage of an open development process over a private one.”

In the greens of society and business, we find a pistachio-colored wedge describing the co-creative approach of social entrepreneurship: 

“Social entrepreneurship is the practice of using start-up companies and other entrepreneurs to develop, fund, and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues, and create impact-driven investing. While for-profit entrepreneurs typically measure performance using the business metrics of profit, revenues, and higher stock prices, social entrepreneurs run non-profits, or blend for-profit goals with positive return-to-society goals and therefore use different metrics and bottom-lines.”

Back in the blues of industrial design and engineering, there’s a sky blue that explains co-design as a product-design practice: 

“[Co-design] reflects a fundamental change in the traditional designer-client relationship. The co-design approach enables a wide range of people to make a creative contribution in the formulation and solution of a problem. This approach goes beyond consultation by building and deepening equal collaboration between citizens affected by, or attempting to resolve, a particular challenge. A key tenet of co-design is that users, as 'experts' of their own experience, are central to the design process.” 

It is a tool readers report they return to frequently, especially at the start of new projects, to refresh their memory on the different terms and language other fields employ. They also report it’s a great starting point on new projects to think about what other disciplines they may consider in forming or expanding new teams.

Try it yourself

Of course, these 63 practices are just the beginning, and like our book, they are meant as a starting point for articulating the philosophy and practice of co-creation. There are still millions of colors in the rainbow spectrum of disciplines, sectors and worldviews for us collectively, to define.

How might the wheel help you think more creatively about the composition of your own team? What deficiencies or synergies does it help you to identify? Are there ways that co-creative practices can foster more meaningful collaborations in your work? We invite you to explore for yourself.

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Katerina Cizek, an Emmy and Peabody–winning documentarian, is the Artistic Director and Cofounder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Her latest book, Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, is the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice, tracing co-creation in media-making that ranges from collaborative journalism to human–AI partnerships.