By Kisha Bwenge
From USAID to The LEGO Group, city governments to private car manufacturers, “co-creation” as an approach to building initiatives and products alongside their eventual users and implementers is generating a lot of buzz.
But at a time when people are using co-creation to mean-well, anything really-how do we make sure we’re not using the term in a way that causes confusion or encourages trendy-but-impractical solutions?
At Reboot we’ve led dozens of co-creation journeys for a wide range of people, including journalists, policymakers, technologists, researchers, and local communities. And so we’ve had ample opportunity to consider, amidst the infinite possible objectives and trajectories, what makes a co-creation journey have integrity? What makes it deliver on the promise that including stakeholders in the design of an initiative will make it better-more effective and more sustainable?
In this episode of our “Buzzwords and Fuzzwords” series, Strategic Designer Corey Chao talks about the “guiding lights” that he uses to design a co-creation process. First, he says, consider who should be in the room, and why. Second, prepare for existing power dynamics. Third, think beyond a single “touchpoint” to the grander arc of the whole co-design process.
Go ahead, give him a listen.
Originally published at https://reboot.org on March 5, 2020.
