Co-design or Faux-design? A chat with Jo Szczepanska
An image of two dice with the dice having “co-design” and “faux design” on different sides.
‘Co-design’ in social policy is a paradox. On the one hand, it refers to a transformative set of mindsets, tools, ways of knowing and ways of collaborating to design better (and better design) services, policies and systems. On the other hand, everyone seems to be doing it, but our services, policies and systems remain the same! Either co-design isn’t cracked up to what it claims to be, or people aren’t really doing co-design. I believe it is the latter.
I’ve written about this in the context of mental health reform in Victoria, noting that others have provided much deeper guides and analyses than me. Early in February I once again came across a position description that encapsulated what is wrong about co-design (or what purports to be co-design) in my view. In essence, a role that was to oversee co-design in a mental health reform context lacked any of the core competencies (around co-design), connections (to consumer communities), nor did it designate (through an identified position), make desirable (through non-essential ‘desirable’ criteria), nor welcome (through it’s inclusion statement at the bottom that welcomed various communities) consumers to apply for the role.
In response to my post, a far more experienced co-designer than myself, Jo Szczepańska, reached out with feedback. Jo is an experienced designer, researcher and co-design advocate. She’s currently fulfilling four roles (that I know of!), with cohealth (Design Practice Lead), the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (Director), RMIT (Lecturer), and Founder of Co-design tools. They’ve designed in a range of health and social service settings and from my perspective always bring a social justice lens to whatever they do.
After her comment about the position description, I wondered whether she would be open to sharing more knowledge and expertise in the form of a written interview. Here it is below!
So, why don’t we invert this a little and start in the negative. What is ‘faux design’?
Faux design is really any type of engagement labelled co-design but missing crucial elements.
Missing any people with lived experience
Not having a mix of people; i.e often inviting people who are convenient over those with most value to add, or that will be most affected
Low or no collaboration - for a variety of reasons from poor facilitation, to power dynamics, physical space, accessibility, budget or time
Rigid scope - especially when it prevents any creativity or meaningful input
No designing - people don’t make anything, often meaning a staff member makes decisions before or after a session as opposed to when people are together
People affected by the design or decision have no power to affect the outcome, ideas and choices can be overwritten at any time
Faux design can be deliberate coercion, people are manipulated down a path or towards an outcome, because the organisation isn’t ready or willing to accept feedback or change to the degree the community might want them to
For those of us that have experienced the beauty and potential unlocked by real co-design, it's important to see the distinction and call faux-design out. We should be replacing the word co-design from many final reports, because although it was an aim, we stopped short.
And how does that differ from real co-design?
Real co-design has teams of people that are most affected by a design or decision working together to improve the outcome.
To me co-design needs the following elements:
a group of diverse people with different background, knowledge and skills
cooperatively and creatively working together
to jointly explore and envision ideas
make and discuss stories (past, present, future)
tinker with mock-ups or prototypes.
Co-design is an intentional way of working together. Unfortunately most of the time just working together already has challenges. Communication, bias, inequity, power dynamics and politics to name a few.
What opportunities does real co-design have to support better services, system and community responses to issues?
Co-design processes are intentional and action-oriented. From my own practice I’ve seen co-design work as a powerful tool to focus design, explore new ways of doing things and amplify the voices and ideas of people who might not otherwise be present in design or development of services.
Co-design in the service, system and community space is the only way to design something that works for people, and truly meets their needs. If you do it well, you get well grounded and resilient programs, policies, and interventions. Things make sense and you are delivering something that genuinely will make a difference to peoples lives.
For designer folk there are many benefits of Co-design in Service Design Projects Steen, M et.al (2011) The Value of Codesign Trischler, J et al. (2017).
What skills and knowledge do you think the best co-designers have?
Skills and knowledge of great co-designers will depend on the topic at hand.
As co-design is a team sport, no individual will have or hold all co-design skills or knowledge you need. Often in my projects we do have moments, where we find the edges of what we know collectively, that’s when we ask ourselves “who can help us with this?”, “who is missing?”, “how do we invite them in”. The team you start with in co-design might not be the one you need later down the track.
If you want to get very geeky in ecology it’s called edge effects when there changes in population or community structures at the boundary of two or more habitats. In co-design you create potential by creating spaces that allow different groups of people to overlap. Learn about Deep diversity at work or the concept of the Edge effect and creativity.
For me great co-designers to work with are
good at communicating when things are good, and when things are bad
are willing or curious to try things out
show respect and humility; or some self awareness that they might not know everything
practise creating space for others and sharing decisions
have a magical skill to contribute or might find one; painting, listening, making cups of tea, cheering people up, excel spreadsheets, reading white papers.
have the ability to look at things from different perspective even if it’s not something they do everyday: looking systems, advocacy, practical parts of how things work, and individual lived experience
the final skill that makes co-design possible is the ability to change your mind! Not everyone can do that, and a great co-design host makes space for that change to happen.
If you want to go deeper a great place to start is the Co-produced capability framework for successful patient and staff partnerships in healthcare quality improvement: results of a scoping review (2020)
Ideally the process of co-design is playful experience where you learn and share skills with one another (yes serious play makes us creative). If you’ve come our from a co-design project with no new relationships or skills i’m sorry to tell you it’s faux-design.
And what about mindsets and experiences?
For mindsets I often lean on the work of KA McKercher in Beyond Sticky Notes: Doing Co-design for Real (2020).
Elevating lived experience
Practising curiosity
Offering hospitality
Being in the grey
Learning through doing
Valuing many perspectives
Mindsets “Co-design thinking… is about understanding the lives of others”(Buchanan 2001; Leadbeater 2004)
What’s one organisational factor that influences whether co-design is possible?
Co-design done well can transform an organisation, as it realigns itself with communities, I have seen it happen and it’s magnificent! The biggest organisational factor is quite honestly investment in relationships and willingness to change (especially if it’s difficult).
Do we have healthy relationships with the communities we want to collaborate with?
If not, how will we invest in our staff, communities and collaborative infrastructure to make co-design possible?
For me there are two documents I refer to when assessing organisations and projects to see if co-design has a chance, 95% of the time we are missing a key piece of the puzzle to be successful. We have the time but not the money, we have the stuff but not the community, we haven’t healed past wrongs but want to design beautiful futures.
The organisational foundations for co-design are everything, because in the co-design process everything else dissolves, you step across a threshold into the uncharted and unknown with strangers. People involved in co-design, staff and community members need the safeguards and security to imagine and transform, that is not possible when you can’t hold a space for them.
Antti Pirinen’s Barriers and Enablers of Co-design for Services from 2016 still holds very true, the list of barriers in Figure 2 are a heartbreaking reality that there are many ways the potential of co-design is underulti
John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge 2018 report “The Water of Systems Change” distilled six types of conditions that shape the current system; in many ways these are the things we need to change for co-design to be meaningful and sustainable
Making your organisation co-design by default means significant investment and consideration around accessibility, communication, payment, employment, shared-decision making and capability uplift. Shortcuts make the process unsustainable.
Learn more about barriers and enablers to co-design here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YbfT4eEVzUWsXPGNRWU_b3ykFUmhDbWO/view?usp=share_link
What are you working on right now?
I’m always working on many things all at once, and in many ways I enjoy the practical side of designing with communities, creating/teaching new ways of co-designing in accessible ways and advocating for system-wide reform to make co-design possible. Feel free to follow along with my spicy takes -
I’m currently working mostly at cohealth practicing, prototyping and testing ways we can become more community or client-led. A lot of my work is looking for opportunities to push practice and building relationships for co-design to happen.
One of the interesting lines of work at cohealth is the Mental Health and Wellbeing Local services, and I am super lucky to be collaborating with a talented and diverse pool of community designers in Brimbank to discover and define what this service evolves to become!
The goal for all of my work is how do we bake-in co-design into the fabric of organisation, not something we bolt on when convenient. For me this means finding others with backgrounds different to my own: finance, IT, legal, policy backgrounds so we can make co-design something that is valued, remunerated and “just the way we do things”.
Other pictures
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VZcGAXa-sg4TeYufU5QldeouITFnNLSF?usp=share_link
Barriers and enablers poster
