In co-design those impacted by design are invited to become active participants in the design process. People are able to contribute to the shape and the direction of the design, regardless of their design expertise. In this way co-design can be considered a democratisation of the design process. Design opens up to include users and other stakeholders as idea generators, decision makers and partners.
At this years UX Australia conference in Melbourne Natalie Rowland (@redrollers) and I had the opportunity to share some of the key principles and concepts that underpin our approach to co-design. Our presentation, Doing Co-design, What, Why, with Whom and How focused on the role of different tools and methods to enable participation by stakeholders and users in the design process. We also looked at how the tools, triggers and scaffolds we use and the approach we take is shaped by different contexts and considerations.
Nat and I covered examples from recent projects including the co-design of HIV testing services with Australian men, the co-design of online youth mental health programs with young people and mental health professionals and an organisational wide co-design training for program for librarians, aimed at preparing them to become co-designers themselves.
In our presentation we reflected on several questions often raised in relation to co-design: How creative can users be? What happens to the expertise of designers? And, how do you know when your organisation is ready to adopt a co-design approach? The slides from the presentation are below. You can also catch the audio of the presentation on the UX Australia site. We’ll also be sharing some of our co-design workshop planning tools here soon too.
I haven’t time to write up my notes on the rest of the conference, but slides from all the presentations are available from the UX Australia Conference site. There are some also great highlights form the conference provided below in both written and sketchnote form.
@tuna’s Sketchnotes (thanks Gary!)
Sketchnotes from the team at UXMastery
@bencrothers Sketchnotes
And a couple of great round ups of each Day by @_rebeccajackson Day One Day Two
Thanks again to @maadonna and @docbaty for organising the conference.
