Co-design, co-production, co-nfused? We explain.

Co-design done well is a wonderful development process — you get amazing insights, a solid understanding of user needs and it creates a shared vision.

Co-design done badly is disastrous — it’s misleading, a waste of money and a distraction. It also becomes a way of justifying failure.

Likewise, co-production is an exciting way of delivering satisfying outcomes and meet user needs — but it’s often misinterpreted and misunderstood.

But what are co-design and co-production? How are they used and why are they important? The words co-design and co-production are often mistakenly used interchangeably, which can lead to confusion. In this blog post, I help unpack these terms so that it’s easier to understand how they enable insights into the innovative design of children’s services.

Video that explains the concept of co-production.

Video that explains what co-design is and how it works.

Co-design is a design approach in which a designer encourages people to identify a problem and empowers them to solve it. Designers lead those involved to think beyond their current situation and guide them to not just imagine an ideal future but to take steps to help make that future a reality. The designer’s role is also to take these ideas to the next stage; the designer might mock up and present a concept to the team, test a prototype or develop an alpha.

Co-design done wrong

There are four main reasons co-design goes wrong:

1. Designer-less design: Co-design is sometimes thought of as a way of getting stakeholders without design skills to deliver design. This is because some people think that a designer’s role is simply to make things look good. But involving designers in co-design ensures that user needs are always kept front and centre.
2. Misunderstanding the role of a designer: Facilitation by a designer is an essential component of co-design. Sometimes their skills and resources are undervalued, but designers are experienced at providing safe and enjoyable ways for people to communicate, engage, share ideas and try them out.
3. Old habits: If people are used to doing things the way they’ve always been done, it can be difficult for them to think like a designer. Designers can be crucial here because they can give people the permission to think the unthinkable or at least more broadly than their regular remit
4. Process-less design process: research, synthesis, prototyping, testing and improvement — good design needs good processes.

Good design is about improvement or creation of a system, a product or a service: design is the process of making things better. Part of the designer’s job is the ability to try, fail, learn from mistakes, improve, try again. In order to bring about meaningful change, any co-design project needs one or more designers to guide, facilitate, mentor, structure and manage the process.

Co-production is not an interchangeable term for co-design: it might be the solution at the end of a co-design process but it is not co-design. Co-production is a practice that involves a service user in every stage of the production process and it relies on the idea that the people who use the service are best placed to help produce it.

So for example, when I buy a flat pack set of drawers from IKEA, I’m part of the production process that breathes life into that chest of drawers. When I sort and recycle my household rubbish, I’m a co -producer in a recycling service. And when I go through an airport and check in with an app or a ticket I’ve printed, I’m an active participant in producing that service.

In the context of health care, we know that the ‘activated patient’ has better outcomes when they understand their diagnosis, follow their care plan, change their lifestyle and, essentially, co-produce their health care.

Co-production demands that the designer understands the user, their needs, their motivations and, importantly, their capacity to contribute to service. Capacity is one of the vital components that end-users bring to a co-production process along with different combinations of motivation, skills, knowledge and ability.

Co-design with young people at Barnardo’s

Barnardo’s has complex challenges, which can’t just be tackled by one person or even one team. When looking at a set of complicated service user needs, it’s crucial to gather skills from all different areas of Barnardo’s, from service users and providers to communicators. We’re committed to ensuring young people’s voices are heard in decision-making processes and in the change in services we design.

To ensure we stay on track, we need to invite practitioners, managers, technologists, service designers, digital developers and service users into the design process to co-design new solutions; solutions that are useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable.

Photo of children during a workshop with the Service design team and IKEA.

Co-design helps us make this commitment real because it not only enables us to reach our service users — many of whom are vulnerable young people — in a variety of different ways, but it allows us to use the expertise of Barnardo’s staff to do so. For instance, using young people’s input we can find out from them how they prefer us to contact them, how they prefer to contact us, as well as how they prefer us to refer to them. Then, we can draw on that research and call on safeguarding, communications, and children’s services experts in the organisation to help make an appropriate product that young people will actually use.

To do this, we work with the people that know them best (the practitioners) to understand how they learn and how they are best placed to give their views. We are learning that by providing a range of methodologies and materials for our service users, we can get a glimpse into how they want things to be and crucially the reasons why we should be designing them in a particular way. This removes barriers to engagement and streamlines their experiences.

So for example, in one particular co-design session we asked young people to design their own digital mental health service. We were keen to understand what they need to be there and then how they would want that to look and feel. By asking them to speak out loud as they sketched out ideas and discussed in groups, we uncovered invaluable insights about the subtle changes we can make, which can improve their journeys to engaging and gaining support from us.

The capacity, skill and motivation that service users bring to service design and service delivery is a powerful force well worth harnessing if for no other reason than it helps us deliver better services to more children and young people and helps us use our scarce resources better.

Davie is a service designer in the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team. To get the latest updates from the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.

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