In collaboration with our strategic partners, The Glass-House Community Led Design, we recently organised and delivered an event to explore key terms used to describe collaborative design activity: co-design, co-production, participation and community-led design. These terms are used by some people interchangeably, while others assign specific meaning and kinds of practices to each one. To explore how these terms are used and understood in practice, we invited different people to share their experiences and knowledge about these terms: students, academics, practitioners, active citizens. The focus was on collaborative design in the context of placemaking.
Following the world café method, participants were seated in small groups around tables, each focussed on one theme. After spending some time at their table, members of each group were able to move around, explore and contribute to discussions about other terms. At the end we put the outputs of each table (notes and sketches) on a wall and collectively tried to explore connections between them. A bunch of us from the Design Group were sat at the tables to help facilitate and capture conversations.
As expected, the different perspectives and experiences that the participants brought to the tables, helped generate very interesting and rich conversations which revealed many overlaps as well as differences between terms. Co-design was thought to be a term that focusses on designing ‘together as equals’ while co-production seemed to be perceived as a term describing a holistic collaborative activity stretching along the whole design process including the production of outputs/design objects. Participation was a more controversial notion as it was perceived by some as a generic term including different levels of engagement in the design process (from simple information sharing, to consultation, to collaboration), while by others it was perceived as a more top-down approach that is initiated by those in power. This second notion of participation was discussed in opposition to community-led design which was associated with collaborative design which is specifically initiated from the grassroots. All these notions ignited conversations around power and trust, as well as the role and contribution of designers and experts as enablers in the process.
We still have to analyse the conversations and outputs produced in more detail, but to get a taste of the workshop, have a look at the Beyond Buzzwords film:
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