The Way We Co-Design, Part 1: Exploring co-design in conversation
A transcript from Change is in the Making Podcast, Episode 16
Kevan:
Welcome to Change is in the Making. This season, we’ve been walking through the Changemaker’s journey, what it takes to lead change through the lens of design thinking.
Veronica:
This episode is the way we co-design. It’s about the practical switched on sprints and sessions we use to move from a problem statement to a testable solution for any type of challenge.
Kevan:
For some the word design or co-design might make us think right away, a visual or digital solutions. This is a reminder that design is problem solving. It can be used at any scale in any situation where you are trying to find a novel approach to address a felt need.
Veronica:
Co-design is uniquely the approach of problem solving together. While some forms of design favor the solo independent expert, the co and co-design stands for community or collective co-design is a participatory effort to build something for the future. And this episode is all about the methods to do it in really practical ways. So Kevan, can you kind of give us a picture, an idea of how and where this can happen?
Kevan:
Yeah. Often the most easy to recognize version of this would be something like a, like a hackathon or a design sprint that might be a single day session or a multi-day offsite. It can also take place at a larger scale, so online platforms can facilitate some version of co-design and so can large unconferences in ways to convene gatherings where people are exploring new directions. For the sake of today’s storytelling on the podcast, we’ll be kind of thinking more of the in-person engagements that span a couple of days in the form of a sprint, but I’d encourage us to be seeing this as absolutely scalable to something larger and also reduceable to something that could even take place in the course of a few hours depending on the size of the challenge and the number of participants that you’re trying to.
Veronica:
I was wondering if we could unpack a little bit the, the reasons why this particular way of approaching design works
Kevan:
Yeah, it’s a great question there. There can be a lot of squeamishness about undertaking a process like this because on the surface it sounds like, Oh great more meetings or Oh I have to clear my whole schedule to do that. And it’s interesting once you get into it and you see the amount of time saved through a process like this and you knew you could do it the slow way and it might take you about six months to do it asynchronously over email with no set deadline to eventually get to where you need to be. Or you can compress it into the form of one day or a couple of days to to really speed things up. So speed would be one of the reasons why you would choose to do it this way though it often seems, it seems like a scheduling challenge to gain that speed.
Veronica:
Yeah, and just hearing you say, or you could spend time on email. My own experience with trying to create something new is that so often those daily rhythms of putting out fires or what is the tyranny of the urgent? As some people say it only seems to allow for the most conventional solutions. So it might be an issue of like it will take longer, but it might also be an issue of and you might not get to the truly new thing that you’re hoping to see. You might get bogged down in. Absolutely. Every everyday.
Kevan:
I just think of the signal that that sends to a team or a community that we’re going to block off this amount of time. To answer this question, it’s so liberating to put aside those things that, that come up in your day to day to say, we’re going to give this thing our priority and our attention now to see where it can take us and, and what I’ve found is that people can, can really resist or even resent having the thing get plopped on their calendars, but within just a couple of hours of collaborating together, that all fades away as they realize the incredible ground being covered. I hear it almost every time I do one of these things and there’s like the, the, at the lunch break on on day one people will say, we have covered more this morning. Then we have in this problem area for the past two years that I’ve been at my organization, it’s just incredible how much gets unlocked when you actually pay attention with a group of people towards solving a problem together.
Veronica:
It’s just sort of like interrupting the track we are on is so hard. Right. Especially when you have deadlines and your to do list and you’re like locked in. But that’s exactly the type of locked in newness that keeps us from innovating and keeps us stuck. So Kevin, when we do this with partners and with clients, there’s a little bit of this moving between yes that’s something we want to do. And then the hard work of actually getting people to put it in their calendars cause we’re not talking like one or two people here. This is a group activity. Do you have any examples of groups that have found ways to work with work with their team to show that this is worth it and have moved into that?
Kevan:
One of the stories that comes to mind, I was from an engagement we did this summer with a nonprofit in Vancouver and they came to us with a really specific question. They wanted to build an online impact map to showcase their impact and we said to them, you know, if, if you want to do that, there’s great mapping tools that are available online. You could go get one and just do that. And if you have questions though about how to communicate differently than it might be worth doing a bit of a co-design session to see what else is there beyond the out of the box solutions. They agreed. They said it’s not just this thing we’ve thought of already that we want to deploy. We believe that there might be a different way to solve this core problem that we have. So could we engage in some co-design work to get there?
Kevan:
So we agreed to do a four day design sprint together and at the start we started where they were starting, which is to say we’ve had this idea for an impact map that showcases our impact in the community, but we know there’s something more. Maybe it’s something about how we can achieve our, our actual vision for this community, which is all about like reducing loneliness and increasing community connection and inviting other participants to, to contribute not just financially but with their, their time, their talent and their treasure. So that became a slightly more interesting starting point. The how might we questions shifted to say how might we encourage community contributions through a two way platform that achieves our, our vision as a nonprofit. So from there we checked in with their executive team to ask, is this resonating with something that we want to even be spending time on?
Kevan:
Brought them into the room. And right there is one of those culture changing moments where we’re seeing the conversations happened between the team and the executive. That kind of hadn’t happened in a while, but needed to happen and getting alignment. Yes, on the problem statement, but also with each other it was, this is this beautiful, crucial moment. This is just day one. Again, this is the moment where at lunch somebody saying, we've made more progress today than we have in weeks or months. By the end of the day they're saying we're gonna shoot for this longterm goal, answer this question, serve this audience and pick this target. And now they're equipped to move through the rest of the steps. So by the second day we're doing a landscape scan, doing some lightening demos of what else is out there that is in this sort of space. Like what other organizations have tried to draw out community contributions in this two way type of manner facilitated by digital to support interesting missions.
Kevan:
Then we're looking at Kickstarter and hello neighbor and Kiva and these sort of peer-to-peer platforms. We're sketching out different things on the wall that showcase interaction moments and and things that are aligned with their curiosity. And then we embark on some of our own sketching. So from some independent work from the participants in the workshop where they're doing some, some crazy eights and they're doing some of their own mind mapping into some group sketches where they're exploring ways to mash these ideas up into this sort of pitch contest that takes place into this filtering of ideas of, of what standing out and what needs to be laid to rest until we're getting to the point where one single prototype exists now on paper and it's time to storyboard it and map it out like an interface. And once that's done where I'd like at the end of day three and we're ready to turn it into actual for them visual digital designs, those get created.
Kevan:
Then by the last day we’re connecting with real users from their community to say, here’s what we’re thinking. We have a sense that digital can help bring our communities together in different ways, allowing you to start new projects that enhance the community, where you get equipped with the resources you need to change your block or your apartment or your workplace. What do you think of this? Do you think this would help you? And from there it almost didn’t matter whether users liked it or not because they had moved from simply an idea into testing in less time than it would have taken them to, you know, arrange, I don’t know, a social bowling trip. As it happened, users fell in love with this and their team is ready to go make this thing a reality and they learned so much about themselves that week. They moved from vague ambiguity to a very clear concept that directly achieves their vision.
Kevan:
That is so unlike what they came to the table with and it came through that process of surrendering the initial idea to a how might we question and following the steps that we’re talking about here. It’s really beautiful. Even just this week I’m still in contact with them. It’s been, it’s been months and just seeing the collaborative energy that is on this team, they’re ready to be doing some of these design sprints just with themselves independently. They’re bringing in new team members that are trying these tools for other projects. They’re seeing that there’s a, there’s a faster different collaborative open way of working. That is has been available to them this whole time, but they hadn’t been using it and it’s, it’s, it’s just gorgeous.
Veronica:
Yeah, it kind of moves from just a production mindset of like just do the things, just get the things done to really opening up to creativity. I think what holds true through different ways of problem solving is this willingness to learn this almost child likeness, right? This sort of comfort level with ambiguity, this space to play this space, to be wrong, to test things. What all of these problem solving methods have in common is that sort of space to mess around.
Kevan:
I love that. I’ve, I’ve, I see that all the time in the sprints that we’re doing. It’s so rare to give yourself enough time in a meeting to actually get to the end of a thought and then pursue that to its actual natural end. But when you have a full day together followed by another day together, you’re going to
get that terrible idea out and then you’re going to explore what’s next after that terrible idea to find the actually interesting idea. The, the spaciousness that is afforded when you make the time intentionally with others to explore new directions means you can do exactly that. Not waste time, but spend the time to complete a thought to understand what actually needs to go instead of just taking your first impulse.
Veronica:
It’s, it’s kind of like immersing yourself in focus and flow too. Right? Which we don’t get a lot of these days. I think there’s something there about that idea of like coherence, like to actually sit with a problem with your team altogether over the space of a day or a few days. It almost sounds like a luxury. Like we’re, we’re used to time. I’m used to timeboxing every 30 minutes and making sure I’m getting to, you know, several different projects on my calendar to kind of take time to go deep on something could feel really good I think to today’s professional.
Kevan:
Yeah, I love that. It was really interesting as you say, that is, you know, a two day, a three day, a four day sprint or workshop is still ultra timeboxed. We’re, we’re using timers down to 30 seconds, eight minutes, 20 minutes. We are really pushing people through specific paces with that exact point of view. But is within the frame of having that luxury of time, you could sort of think about it as a, as a retreat or an offsite or even the way like a wealth program to camp experience goes. Yeah, it’s a luxury, but somebody has really paid attention to the design of these activities to get you to the experience you need to have and you’re, you’re totally right. A a team that gives itself the chance to participate in something like this is, is bringing the necessary rigor to something that deserves the space.
Veronica:
Mm. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s very focused. It’s also very structured to be able to achieve that focus and be able to achieve what you’re trying to within a certain time. I love that it’s both end, right. That having almost like this low coherence of focus. And then also you know the rigor of time blocks.
Kevan:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a, it’s interesting in a session like that, just to notice the difference between participant energy and facilitator energy for the facilitators, we literally have a spreadsheet and a slide deck up on our screens. The spreadsheet is minute by minute what activities we’re moving into, who is facilitating what needs to be accomplished while on screen are the instructions for what to do and the participants don’t have an awareness that that exists. They’re just following the instructions. So there is a freedom and the flexibility in simply doing what’s needed from you, but it comes exactly from that both end guidance of, and this is the process that is leading somewhere super on purpose
Veronica:
Yeah. It reminds me of a pretty famous quote by Annie Dillard. How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives, but then she, she goes on to say some more things that aren’t as well known. I’m a schedule defense from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand in labor with both hands, at sections of time. It is a mockup of reason in order, willed, faked and so brought into being a piece in a Haven set into the wreck of time. A lifeboat on which you may find yourself decades later is still living. And I think about how, how completely detailed that spreadsheet that you just described is and how it is. It’s, how did she say it? Willed, faked and brought into being. So yes, yes, you are creating something, a little artificial there. You’re creating some artificial urgency, but that’s a scaffolding. It’s almost a protective structure to, you know, to put around this special time to help people do what they need to do.
Kevan:
That’s amazing. You’re, you’re totally right. And I love that quote slash poem that’s almost an ode to co- design, right?
Veronica:
Good old Annie Dillard.
Kevan:
That’s so great.
Veronica:
That brings us to the end of this conversation and to the start of the next episode, a companion exercise we’ve created for this podcast. It’s a guided audio facilitation that takes you through your own co-design workshops step-by-step. You can use it on your own or with a team to experience this process firsthand. You can also visit domain seven.com forward slash podcast where you can find related resources. Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on social channels. That’s domain seven.com forward slash podcast
Kevan:
if you have feedback or questions about co-design processes, please get in touch. My email is kevin@domain7.com, veronica is veronica@domain7.com this episode was planned and written by myself and Veronica and it was produced by Kurt Wilkinson.
Veronica:
Our team leads Sarah Butterworth helps create the space for creative endeavors like this podcast and the domain seven culture as a whole provides incredible support. Domain seven is a global agency working to transform systems and culture through people-centric methods. You can learn more@domains7.com
Kevan:
if you enjoyed this conversation, please consider sharing this episode with someone else you can think might find it valuable.
