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[hildebouchez]

What the f* is [ko:di’sain] anyhow?

For the opening of our BudaLab, Lise from Designregio Kortrijk attracted the attention of a few local designers and asked them to come up with a project that would promote the principles of co-design to the larger public.

Research has shown that the Flemish consumer associates design with artistic and expensive stuff, and has in times of crisis, lost interest in the status-narrative of design. It is obvious design is in crisis…

Design thinking, service design, social design, user centered design, people centered design, participatory design, co-creation, co-design,… are the new buzzwords, but no one really seems to know what they really mean, or how they differ…

So the guys of elevenfeet, 5am and Fordesign were asked to help us out with the kick-off event. At first they came up with an open source production-line that would show the public what it really means to be ‘open’ and how a consumer can become a producer. Co-creation is in this process essential. Different players all add to the ultimate production.

However, in this proposal, the user or consumer wouldn’t really be involved. He or she could witness the process, but there was absolutely no ‘doing’, no participation on a real and direct level. So the idea started to grow to create a production-line in which consumers could participate, and thus co-design. And so, the first [ko:di’sain] workshop saw the light in our BudaLab.

Consumers were asked to bring along an object that had lost value, because it was out of fashion or out of use. Throughout the workshop the collection of these objects would be the starting point to create a set of new objects with new functions and altered fashions. Consumers would be advised by a team of designers and students, plus with the fablab and workshop at hand, they would actually be able to personally design and especially make a thing. Consumers would in other words literally be introduced to, and participate in the ‘makers movement’.

In other words: they pimped their thing!

But is that co-design? I don’t think so …

The [ko:di’sain] workshop showed us very clearly that although all participants and designers and students physically worked together in one space, in one mind, with one goal, every single participant was mainly in his own flow, creating his own thing. Co-design must be much more than that, no? …

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During the Interieur Biennale and the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven (2012), PROUD organized a masterclass between the two design cities, questioning what is co-design anyhow?

The masterclass looked a lot less fun than the [ko:di’sain] and attracted a lot less people, but added to a more precise understanding of this extremely complex process.

Lancaster who hosted the masterclass concluded that:

For us co-design is a really quite different activity to designing, even to designing in a participatory or user centred way. Our task was to distil the essence of this distinction and then find a way to explore and describe this in a master class setting. One thing for sure is that with a co-design approach this was never going to be a 2 hour lecture.

As part of the development process we developed 8 fundamental principles of Co-Design, these are

1.     Agree how the success of the project will be recognised

2.     Move in and beyond your normal design practice

3.     Involve and respect lots of people in the ideas generating parts of the process

4.     Use the expertise of all participants in the process

5.     Let everyone be creative in their own way

6.     Challenging Assumptions Explore and challenge assumptions

7.     Expect to go beyond the average

8.     Bring the process to the best possible conclusion with the best possible design outcome

Our thinking was that this is very much an incomplete list and that we would encourage people to add to rather than presenting the definitive list of fundamental issues, actually if we could we would have had these cut into blocks of stone with the bottom snapped off to encourage a search for the missing issues. As it happens in our master class we did get an addition that is quite important

            9. Think about the timescale, tempo and rhythm of a project

We explored this in the 3 hour master class, delivered in Eindhoven as part of Dutch Design week and co-delivered to our partners at Buda Island in Koptrijk, Belgium. We did this through a series of tools that challenged small groups to address one of these issues and then to use these responses as a foil to talk about co-design, its value (and difference from) design. The results was a very active dialogue where the designers and public service attendees drew effectively on their own experiences mediated by the tools provided to explore the issues around co-design.

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However, a couple of days after the masterclass we had a partner meeting in Kortrijk with all the PROUD partners.

I witnessed how France disagreed with England, how the Dutch approach differs from the Belgian and how Finland again has a different understanding of what co-design should be… It felt like a Eurovision DesignFestival...

The only true conclusion that can be made at this point is that through trial and error, this questioning has

... to be continued …

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