Civic Service Design: Co-Design 101
A brief guide to understanding the practice and importance of co-design.
Background
NYC Opportunity launched the Service Design Studio (SDS) to help spread valuable methodologies that are often underused in government. Our approach begins by trying to understand the needs of people who use and administer public services, and designing the service to meet those needs.
Co-design is a participatory practice that the SDS team has channeled when scoping projects and design opportunities. It is a process that agencies can use to ensure their projects are reflective and mindful of front-line staff’s experience and the communities they serve. Co-design is a means of redistributing power back to stakeholders who don’t typically have a seat at the table.
What is Co-Design?
Co-design, as the author KA McKercher defines in Beyond Sticky Notes, is about designing alongside community members:
“Co-designing is sharing power and designing with communities, not for.
Co-design is about challenging the imbalance of power held by individuals, who make important decisions about others lives, livelihoods and bodies. Often, with little to no involvement of the people who will be most impacted by those decisions. Co-design seeks to change that through prioritizing relationships, using creative tools and building capability. It uses inclusive convening to share knowledge and power.
Co-design is a design-led process that uses creative and participatory methods. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, there are patterns and principles that can be applied in different ways with different people. Importantly, co-designers make decisions, not just suggestions…”
As a practice, co-design promotes the usage of participatory methods. Service designers like Victor Udoewa, redefine design by using a decolonial lens. Udoewa simplifies design as a process of gathering information, coming up with an idea, and trying it out. From this lens, communities have been co-designing throughout history. Udoewa’s analysis further supports the growing applicability of co-design, because affected communities have been creating solutions with consensus throughout history.
“Participatory design is [an ancient practice]… we cannot talk about alternative futures, without talking about alternative pasts.” Victor Udoewa (2021)
Co-design is a method of sharing power through participation. As a strategy, co-design shifts the involvement of partners with lived experience from being “consultants” to key decision makers and shapers of the work.
Co-Deciding: Why is decision making power so important?
Shared decision making power is the central function of co-design. It’s unrealistic to share every single decision throughout a project but there are key decisions that need to be made with or by those with lived experience to authentically be considered co-design.
Recognizing these five forms of power can help City Agency staff share decision making power:
- Privilege: What privileges might you have and how could this affect relationship building?
- Access Power: Who is included/excluded and why?
- Goal Power: How have the goals and outcomes been determined, and who has helped determine these?
- Role Power: Who is making key decisions? Who is interpreting/prioritizing findings?
- Rule Power: Who decides how a group will work together?
- Goodwill, Bijil-Brouwer, Bendor (2021)
“There is no co-designing without co-deciding.” — KA McKercher (2020)
Levels of Collaboration in Design
- Designing at people 😶: Top down design decisions are made on behalf of the communities best interest.
- Designing for people 🙂: Top down decisions are made by City Agency staff based on what they assume are on behalf of a community’s best interest. Some input from the community may be involved but decision making power is not shared.
- Designing with people 😀: City Agency staff share power and make decisions in partnership (consensus decision making) with the community.
- Design by the people 🤩: Grassroots design decisions are made by the community, and City Agencies support in fostering advocacy and implementation of these decisions.
“We move decision-making and knowledge-holding from an elite group of individuals to a diverse team of co-designers. This includes people with lived experience, who know things that professionals don’t.” — Bovaird & Loeffler (2013)
Why co-design for public services?
Generally why it’s important…
Co-designing offers opportunities for collaboration and exchange using creative and participatory methods. By sharing power through all stages and prioritizing relationships, NYC agencies, and offices can build trust within their communities. The involvement of people with these unique perspectives can help us to understand and define the problem and opportunities for improvements more accurately. This can reduce cost and risk by focusing on specific community needs instead of ideating what we think these needs are. Collaborating with communities guides the design process in a way that accelerates innovation and problem-solving, leading to sustainable, efficient, and effective solutions.
How SDS has adopted
SDS has integrated co-design methods as a guiding process and principle for two recent projects: 1) The Designed by Community program, and 2) A participatory contract review project with staff at a non-profit organization that provides re-entry services under a City contract.
Designed by Community (DxC) was designed using a community-led framework, akin to what Victor Udoewa might refer to as radical participatory design. DxC is a paid fellowship and project funding opportunity to support community members in designing and developing hyper-localized solutions in their community, for their community. The DxC program enables community leaders, in solidarity with non-profit community-based organizations (CBO), to create and execute a community-led initiative that responds to the community’s desires and needs using Service Design methodology. Within the DxC program, community leaders are fully integrated team members, who are paid, and serve as the primary decision makers over the project scope, program design, and budget allocation. The Studio staff provides coordination, facilitation and skills exchange to bolster their capacity to do the work.
Within the participatory contract review project, non-profit organizational staff are positioned as the primary decision makers over the project’s scope and final output, which will be language adopted into the contract as part of the renewal process. The Studio coordinates and facilitates meetings and research. Through these activities, staff with lived experience working in the field have the agency to decide the focus of the project (goal power) and who will inform the project (access power). Additionally, the Studio uses direct quotes obtained through focus groups and semi-structured interviews, to report back to the larger team, validate where everyone stands, and make decisions to move the project forward. Using direct quotes helps to ensure that the community’s insights and intentions are not misconstrued by any bias that can happen when analyzing and interpreting qualitative data (role power).
You have the power, to share power!
Co-design offers the City an opportunity to build the necessary relationships and trust with communities needed to foster a healthy and trusting service ecosystem. While co-designing may feel like a big leap from the way services are traditionally designed, it's a worthy approach that fosters learning and benefits beyond the outputs of the project.
Looking for some support?
Are you an NYC City employee interested in bringing co-desing into your work? We’d love to support you. Reach out to connect with us, Book a time for open office hours with the Service Design Studio at the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. (City employees only!)
