I’m a big supporter of co-design as a design approach. Organisations who invite end users and customers into the design process as active participants are demonstrating a humble admission that they don’t know everything and need the subject matter expertise of the people they’re designing for.
However I’m a little concerned that co-design is starting to become a bit of a buzzword. It’s being treated like the Next Big Thing in design, that all design processes should go the way of collaboration and distributed participatory design.
Co-design is just one technique. Implemented poorly, co-design is nothing more than the focus groups and market research from decades ago. Implemented well, it can result in a fantastic outcome. One of the biggest benefits of co-design for me is the positive perception the process creates from customers towards the organisation. People liked to be consulted and acknowledged as the subject matter experts. Creating that goodwill will certainly aid the deployment of new products and services through your new network of champions and ambassadors of co-design participants.
However co-design isn’t everything. It’s not the ultimate design process and does have flaws. Trying to wrangle external participants can take up a lot of time and may fail to uncover the latent needs of people that other techniques such as goal-directed design or deep dive ethnography might.
Of course it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Perhaps you start off with passive research, then internal brainstorming to come up with the spark of an idea and then elaborate on that idea through co-design which is then finished off with formal usability testing.
For me, co-design is one of those tricky things like persona development. If it’s not managed properly it’ll compromise and undermine the entire project.
// 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.
