Some of the benefits of co-design
The activity of co-design is interchangeable with that of personalisation when a service user and a provider set about creating the desired service for an individual. If an over arching objective is to make services more personalised, than a huge amount can be learnt about the design of the activity of personalisation by working with a small number of customers.
Through such work, service designers gain insights on how people see and communicate their needs, how they perceive the role of the provider and the requirements of the support they need. The practical tools for personalisation can be designed with those who will need to use them.
Co-design is a very public and visible process. As uncomfortable as it can feel, transparency through greater collaboration is key to both managing expectations early and getting honest and accurate (and therefore useful) outputs. The scale of this openness needs to be managed carefully as scrutiny by too many can mean that political assuagement or appeasement overrides the careful crafting of a solution emergent through the process of designing.
Co-design has challenged many professional designers because the idea of allowing anybody to have a go is seen as a threat to quality as well as a denial of skill and talent. One view is that there is some truth in this, but it’s often the case that those expressing such a concern are basing their view on a conventional understanding of what design does, and an unclear picture of an emerging role for design and designers.
The lone designer can solve simple problems and give form to solutions, but complex challenges demand collaborative platforms and projects. It’s also worth remembering that tangible and elegant solutions still need to be designed and this is the unique contribution of trained designers.
A belief is that professional designers are valuable in new ways and not to the detriment of what designers have always done well. However the activity of designing responses to complex challenges is too important to leave only to designers.
Read more about how we generate co-design through using co-creation here.
Comments
Having been involved in service design for ten years (before it was really known as service design!), co-creation/co-design has been the enduring method that allowed me to get to the heart of the customer’s challenges whilst also generating solution options to these challenges.
This is indeed a real challenge for both managers, leaders and designers, because it forces these positions (built on status, time served and seniority rather than innate ability)to be set aside - you’re no longer the expert or boss, you become the facilitator and niave learner.
In the future people will have a DQ (design quotient) to go along with their IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient)and this will be a sought after trait for employers.
Or, to put it another way ‘Do you have the rare ability to put your ego aside when it counts’.
The flexiblity of having business accumen with design accumen (or creative accumen) will pay dividends for organisations of all types.
In reality, successful people in organisations already display such capacity and put it to work daily (you can have a high DQ but not bring it or use it in your work)- often it is part of their talent-set but they don’t even know they are using it.
In reality, everyone has the capacity for ‘design thinking’ (or is that just ‘holistic’ thinking)to a greater or lesser degree. It just needs to be made explicit and they need to be shown how to utilise it to problem-solve more effectively and creatively.
Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind starts to outline this in general terms.
As someone who has an unusual mix of brand, people and operations experience it was seeing how this could work in brining more effective solutions to the table quicker. This meant ‘getting out of the way’ and using co-design (and other) methods to break out of old thought patterns. That converted me to service design (which I would argue is as much philosophy and approach as it is professional practice).
With co-design, it is also important that it is seen as one method and not a ‘cure all’, it needs to be mixed with other methods to ensure a rounded set of solutions is generated and it needs to be an inclusive practice (this can assist in breaking down common silo working).
In certain situations co-design can lead to the ‘flattening’ of the challenge, in that the challenge, despite best efforts, may not be fully understood or ‘unpacked’ by the participants and coming to ‘closure to quickly at the ideation stage is also common. This can lead to sub-optimal solutions being generated, leading to a series of outputs rather than outcomes.
As a tool to be skilfully applied in the right situations and facilitated well, it is indeed very powerfull.
By David Hicks on 04.02.2010
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