Prompted by Professor Gerhard Fischer’s presentation at work yesterday on behalf of CSIRO, I felt I should define what co-design isn’t, because there seems to be some ambiguity floating around especially amongst those new to participatory design, user-centered design (UCD) or citizen-centric service design. For practical purposes I’m taking the broader definition of co-design that overlaps participatory design rather than the more academic definition.
If you’ve read Tim Brown’s book Change by Design (though an excellent read I found it a little open-ended in a way that left it vulnerable to misinterpretation) you might be left with the impression that co-design is about inviting consumers of products and services you create into the design process in a way that gives them equal role in the design process to expert designers such as yourself.
This is not correct. I remember back in the days of web design freelancing where I would have clients send me hand-drawn logos or their ideas of how the navigation should be structured. You just can’t work with that sort of material. In the user experience design field we have techniques for letting consumers and clients influence the design indirectly in order to skim off the good stuff and discard the bad stuff. User research, user testing, prototypes, focus groups, persona development and so on.
By all means invite product and service consumers into your building, into your meeting rooms and even to sit alongside you as you work but understand that their contribution is knowledge and ideas, not design expertise.
The wrong view of co-design is akin to the architect who spins his drawing board around to the client and invites them to doodle on their carefully-crafted blueprints and then sends the blueprints off to the builder. What the responsible architect would do is help convey the experience to the client in a way that the client can interpret, participate in and contribute to in a meaningful way that ensures as much knowledge as possible is then input back into the design process. In the example of the architect this might be done with virtual 3D models, polystyrene constructions or even a pencil and a notepad.
There’s nothing wrong with letting a client scribble on blueprints but only if that’s the best way to help the client understand what they’re working with and how to contribute and only if it’s not allowing low-quality amateur design creep in. Designers are facilitators, they extract knowledge in a way that surveys and even focus groups can’t by eliciting the participants’ feelings and ideas that aren’t neccessarily front of mind or that they might not volunteer in other less collaborative and more passive forums.
Shove a service architecture diagram across the table to a member of the public and they’ll stare at you blankly. Some might feel they need to contribute and so pick up a pen and scribble or ask a few questions but it is the designer’s responsibility to place co-design participants in a space where they can speak their language and be more open and contribute meaningfully.
Favouring the majority is a big concern with collaborative design, undoing the hard work of expert designers and researchers who have laid the groundwork for fair and equitable service delivery. Especially with blatantly open processes such as social voting and ranking systems, the items with the highest number of votes will be followed through on whilst the needs of the minority will fall under the radar thus reintroducing social class biases and inequities that we’ve worked so hard to resolve.
This is why I think there is a big need for UX designers and specialists who can readily apply their techniques and approaches to service design to transition into service design before lay people bypass this massively useful body of knowledge and try and stumble around in this “new” participatory design arena especially in government where the consequences could be tragic.
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
