Maybe you’ve recently made a commitment to Inclusive Design. Maybe you’ve found yourself ‘behind’ in the ‘racial awakening’ — maybe you’ve been asleep and missed the awakening of the last hundreds of years. No matter!

Now you’re working toward inclusion — you understand it’s an important piece of moving forward: you simply can’t check your politics and your bias at the door. You’ve drafted a DEI/Justice statement. You’re doing workshops, reviewing practices, rethinking policies. 2020 and 2021 have helped you see differently. And you want more…

So, what’s this I hear about co-design? What is this delicious advancement in how to marry design with social justice (recognizing that nothing is neutral and they have been linked all along)?

Tread carefully friend, co-design will ask you to challenge so much of what you haven’t…

You can’t mandate that co-design happens. It’s as awkward and silly as mandating that trust or vulnerability or honesty happen at a particular time, in a particular place. In other words, it’s entirely context-dependent. There are of course things you can do to make people and places more inclusive, more welcoming, more open and freer of power dynamics and biases (though, let’s face it you can’t eliminate them (though you can be aware of them and name them)).

Co-design requires that you question many things you might be taking for granted; namely, the designer’s role changes. You are more facilitator from the back, sweeper*, than you are keeper of brilliant design ideas. Now you are focused on delicately putting just enough structure together AND NO MORE to leave space for the co-design from anywhere and everywhere.

And that structure is as importantly about the methods and equipment and practices and physical location and how “invitations” happen, as it is about the mood and tone and authenticity and so many soft details that upend power and communicate intentions and expectations — — equity happens here.

And our technologies, our businesses, our hierarchies aren’t built this way, they don’t build equity and in many cases they are built to perpetuate systemic barriers that stand directly in the way of equity.

In 2017 I wrote the following about how co-design can happen. It’s almost all questions that have no clear black or white answers — this work requires that we calibrate and re-calibrate constantly and within communities.

Questions

What is co-design?

1. Is co-design just doing something together — and then how is it different from participatory design? It seems it’s not just this. Co-design wants to directly address the power differential (us vs. them) in design activities.
2. So, is co-design when we’re on the “same level” and doing this together? Or does it fundamentally break down levels?

• But then why am I paid to be a designer at my job? And how do I stay away from co-design looking like absolving myself of my work and offloading it onto the backs of others?
• What is my qualification? What is my expertise? If I can’t design for another person’s lived experience? And what if I’m too close to the lived experience? What if I’m living the experience, am I supposed to try to be objective for the sake of “objective” design? But I can’t be objective…inclusive design showed me I have biases…
• Who gets paid and how? How do you appropriately show appreciation? This territory seems well beyond Starbucks gift cards! Who gets money and how much? And who decides?
• And how do we do this “inviting” — words matter — you’re invited to someone else’s space — that reinforces power.

This is new: we want to create it but haven’t figured it out yet

1. This is the ethos (break down the barriers between ‘designer’ and ‘user’) but we’re not there in many contexts
2. So, co-design is often aspirational — the word is aspirational. I can’t even guarantee that it will work if I set it up as co-design.
3. Doesn’t absolve you from empathy and even requires more

How can those of us with design jobs do this?

1. “We weren’t experts in x— we aren’t x people — we tried things out together”

• in some ways not being experts helped us co-design together
• no competition
• genuine collaboration and exploration and questioning

2. Can you do co-design with an expert — what is an expert? Who decides?

• Depth and breadth of something (experience? training? intention?)
• Privilege of research and of being a designer is doing this in many contexts and regularly and learning from it
• Participants are because they’re living a life (which they are an expert in — their own life)

3. Is it possible to quiet the expertise? Is that desirable? Can we re-envision using expertise? This seems as though it can become quite awkward if it isn’t done authentically.

At least we know it’s about “Nothing about us without us” — having those for whom the outcome is intended involved in the process

1. but how much participation and when?? Early?, middle?, late? Who decides? Who is the decider?

2. Can they really contribute? Do they really contribute? What do we do with their contributions? Aren’t these questions reinforcing the power dynamic? Some are builders — this is true.

The problem of tokenizing

1. Just like personas being used to represent entire demographics
2. if you lean on that one person to represent more than one person you fail
3. how many is enough? how much is enough? who decides?

I think we know we’ve done or achieved co-design after-the-fact. I think it’s something we can see in retrospect. No one individual creates co-design — people, the way they come together and the way they agree to collaborate, collectively create co-design.

*Sweeper: Opposite of a leader, the last person in the peloton. Their job is to make sure no one gets left behind on no-drop rides. The sweeper should know the route and be able to contact others in the group if trouble. And encourage those struggling. https://hincapie.com/ride-with-us/stories-from-the-saddle/a-to-z-of-group-ride-cycling-terms/