The co-design approach, designing together, circumsribes an equable space where design thinking and practice harness collective intelligence...A space where stakeholders and communities of interest can contribute to improving economic and socio-cultural equity, while strenthening societies' enterprises and institutions, and regenerating the environment.
Benefits of the co-design approach…for businesses
- Encourages strategic and holistic thinking
- Focuses on risk managing the future
- Helps innovate for new product and service development
- Generates revenues or cost-savings from eco-efficiency strategies
- Creates stronger supply chains and business networks
- Enables strong co-ordination of sustainability objectives
- Enhances communication around sustainability issues
…for social enterprises and community interest companies
- Encourages strategic and holistic thinking
- Engages multi-stakeholder communities giving them a voice
- Locates expertise in and close to the enterprise
- Helps innovate for new service development
- Democratises decision-making and encourages transparency
- Enables strong co-ordination of sustainability objectives
…for designers and design agencies
- Encourages strategic and holistic thinking
- Reveals new eco- and socio-enterprise opportunities
- Extends the skill base to deal with complex sustainability issues
- Provides a new innovation approach for clients
- Innovates in new product/service development
…for design education
- Strengthens students’ abilities to think holistically
- Provides a new skillset for design facilitation
- Encourages deep understanding of users and stakeholder involvement in the design process
- Raises a deep awareness of sustainability issues
- Provides design teachers with new tools
…for design activists
- Enables greater leverage for those using design for positive change
- Encourages involvement of key actors and multi-stakeholders in the design process
- Ensures more democratic participation in design activities
- Facilitates engagement and activation of key actors and multi-stakeholders
The co-design loop
The co-design loop ensures there is a continuous design cycle of:
…Experiencing - what we already collectively know and feel
…Problematising - understanding the deep underlying problems together;
and
…Solutioning - creating, designing and delivering solutions together.
Experiencing is a key part of the co-design loop, where we understand how designed artefacts, buildings or services are already impacting on our lives and the wider environment.
In this way co-designing becomes a way of ‘ giving a ‘nudge’ to now, a way of co-futuring.
Co-design:
…inspires socio-eco innovation
…is holistically and strategically orientated
…offers day-to-day management and implementation tools
…builds capacity and adaptability in individuals, enterprises and institutions
…creates new socio-cultural relationships
…reveals new opportunities for sustainability
Co-design is also about generosity, a new mutuality between the citizen designer (everyone) and the design professional, revitalising what it means to design.
It is about gifting… so I offer the concept of Design Seeds, where we can share our design thoughts and more.
Alastair Fuad-Luke
(March 2009)
