The psychology of co-design?
In the last few years the term ‘co-design’ has cropped up more and more in design circles and even in popular culture to the extent I would say it qualifies for the term ‘zeitgeist’. Like every new term it initially struggled for a definition being mixed with similar areas such as participatory design, co-discovery and ethnographic research.
The UK Design Council even turned to crowd sourcing to help define what co-design meant, finally plumping for:
“A term, short for collaborative design, that means a community centred methodology that designers use to develop a partnership with a product or service’s end users, in order to make their solution more effective.” — Taken from the Design Council, Design Glossary
So co-design is the process of involving people in the design process with the aim of creating a better product or solution. In short, it is a method to create good design, with good design being defined by the Design Council as:
“Good design is sustainable design, it is a process that uses a sequence of steps that defines problems, discovers solutions and makes them real. Creativity generates ideas and innovation exploits them. Good design connects the two shaping them to become practical and attractive products and services.”
Having been involved in several projects that adopted the co-design methodology it got me thinking if there might be other psychological factors that have an influence over the results. My big question was whether co-design actually produces better design or whether it just produces a perceived higher value of the result from the people who have participated in the process?
A great deal of research has been carried out on how the pride of creation and ownership changes people’s attitudes towards the results. However, it can also be explained outside of the laboratory. When I was sixteen I was the ecstatic recipient of a model remote-control car for Christmas. It was the Bigwig model from the popular car kit manufacturer Tamiya and required me to build the car myself from the box of springs, sprockets, wires, servos and other bits that would finally form the model car. The model took me over two months to build (and rebuild after driving a partially built prototype into my parent’s radiator) but was finally ready. My pride in the car was immense and I proudly presented it to my parents, my friends and my relatives; my pride far outweighed what I would have felt if I’d instead received a pre-built, professionally-built version of the same model. The question is was my car actually a better end product or was it just my perception of its value that was different?
Dan Ariely, behavioural economist at Duke University, and his team created an experiment to test whether this hypothesis held up. A group of participants were asked to build an origami object from instructions and then asked to bid an amount they were willing to pay for their creation. On average, the creators of the objects said they’d be willing to pay 23 cents. However, when people outside of the experiment were asked to similarly bid on the paper creations the average bid was 5 cents. It seemed that the people involved in the process of creation valued their efforts far more than the unbiased passer-by. In an extension to the study origami experts were asked to create the same models and again external people were asked to bid how much they would pay for the creation. In this case the average bid rose to 27 cents showing that the people involved in the process of creation had a substantial bias when evaluating their own work when, in fact, the end result was not objectively better (and in fact worse) than those produced by an expert.
If this is the case then can these results be translated to the process of co-design? Can it be said that that the co-design methodology creates a positive bias for those who take part in the process but not create a better end result for the masses? Do projects that adopt collaborative design simply bring a small sample of the end audience along for the ride and then evaluate the results by asking that same sample? I’m not saying this is necessarily the case but the possible bias should be understood when evaluating projects of this nature. In the same manner as the origami experiment the results of co-design projects should be evaluated by people who have not been party to the process, just exposed to the results. After all good design is not all about the process but about the results of the process. There are exceptions to this rule such as when the objective is to increase understanding and interest in a design project. The evidence shows that bringing people into the process will make them more favourable to the proposal, but it doesn’t actually make the proposal better. So as a persuasion technique co-design is a valid tool but it may not produce a better outcome.
Designers should also be aware of the use of Hooray Words when describing the processes they use. Hooray Words are words and phrases that sound like they are describing something but actually leave no ground for disagreement. Politicians are famous for using Hooray Words to get the agreement of the electorate such as when Tony Blair announced at the 1996 Labour party conference that his three priorities in Government would be “education, education, education”. Well, that does sound good and who could possibly disagree as he hasn’t actually said anything. We all agree that education is important but people disagree about which policies will lead to the highest standard being achieved. The same can be said of David Cameron when he announced “I think the role of Government must be to empower” (2009).
Philosopher, Jamie Whyte, suggests that a simple test for substance in a statement is whether anyone sane would ever disagree. So when I read statements such as:
“The co-design methodology puts the end-user first.”
“A community centred methodology that designers use to enable people who will be served by a designed outcome to participate in designing solutions to their problems.”
I can’t help but worry.
I do think it’s also a little misleading to think that before the term co-design was coined design teams failed to liaise with people in the design process. It’s certainly a truism that it’s beneficial to have direct contact with your end audience in order to understand their needs, and good design teams have always done so but this is not the same as co-design. The following video shows the process the team at IDEO went through to design their new shopping trolley/cart.
The two phrases that stick out from the video for me are:
“The trick is to find real experts so you can learn much more quickly that you could by trying to learn about it yourself.”
and;
“Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of a lone genius”.
The process IDEO took may have been co-discovery, through interviewing and visiting people who use and work with the focus of the project, in this case shopping trolleys, but it was the varied group of experts who took this feedback and actually designed the final product.
One reason co-design could create a better solution is through the simple fact that it involves more people in the design process. The more people you throw into the mix, each bringing their own ideas and perspectives, the more likely you are to get more suggestions to the solution. However is this really an efficient methodology? It may be the case that if you give an infinite amount of monkeys each a typewriter they’ll one day produce the works of Shakespeare, but the fact is Shakespeare got there first, and on his own (well, that is if you ignore the various conspiracy theories). Even if you do get many people collaborating in the design process it still requires expertise to sift through and judge what is good and what is bad, good ideas can come from anywhere but not everywhere.
So is co-design a valid methodology to produce better design outcomes or is it an example of a placebo effect that brings people on-board but with no advantage to the final product? The Design Council asked for views from designers, public service staff and others and the list makes for interesting reading. Read the comments from people here, and by all means leave your own opinions, experiences, validation of co-design in the comments area below.
