What is co-design?

Co-design is more than consultation

Consultation usually asks people to comment on a proposal that already exists. Co-design involves them earlier, while the challenge is still being defined and different responses remain possible.

This does not mean that every participant has the same job. Designers still bring research, visualisation and prototyping skills. Service staff bring operational knowledge. Specialists contribute technical or legal constraints. People with lived experience show how the issue works in practice. Co-design creates a structured way for those forms of knowledge to shape the same decisions.

Why organisations use co-design

Products and services often fail because the team building them understands the organisation better than the people using it. A process may look efficient on an internal diagram while remaining confusing, inaccessible or unrealistic in everyday life.

Co-design can expose that gap before a solution becomes expensive to change. It is particularly useful for public services, where a single experience may involve citizens, frontline staff, local authorities, charities, suppliers and policy teams. Bringing those perspectives together can reveal conflicting needs, duplicated work and overlooked barriers.

The aim is not participation for its own sake. The aim is a better-informed design decision and a solution that can work in the setting where it will be used.

A typical co-design process

There is no single mandatory sequence, but many projects move through the following stages:

1. Frame the challenge. Define what is open for change, what is fixed and who is affected.
2. Build the group. Include people with relevant lived experience, delivery knowledge and decision-making responsibility.
3. Understand the current experience. Use interviews, observation, journey mapping or service data to make the existing situation visible.
4. Generate possibilities. Turn needs and problems into ideas through structured collaborative sessions.
5. Make ideas tangible. Create sketches, storyboards, role plays, service blueprints or simple prototypes.
6. Test and refine. Put the proposal in front of the people who will use and deliver it, learn from the result and revise it.

The process is iterative. Testing may uncover a problem in the original framing, sending the group back to an earlier stage.

The role of facilitation

Good co-design depends on careful facilitation. Workshops do not automatically produce equal participation. Seniority, technical language, confidence, time, disability, language and previous experience can all affect whose ideas are heard.

A facilitator designs the conditions for useful collaboration. That includes explaining the purpose, setting realistic boundaries, choosing accessible activities, making space for quieter participants and recording how decisions are reached. Participants should know what influence they have and what will happen to their contributions after the session.

Where power is uneven, separate preparation or smaller sessions may be more effective than putting everyone in one room and calling it collaboration.

Common co-design tools

Tools are useful when they help a group think together. The method should follow the question, not the other way around.

• Journey maps show a person's experience across steps, channels and organisations.
• Service blueprints connect the visible user experience with the people, processes and systems behind it.
• Storyboards and scenarios make a proposed future easier to discuss.
• Idea cards and prompts help groups create and compare alternatives.
• Role play exposes handovers, language and practical difficulties in a service interaction.
• Prototypes let participants experience and change an idea before it becomes a finished service or product.

Low-fidelity prototypes are often enough. A paper form, rearranged room, scripted conversation or clickable sketch can answer important questions without requiring a full build.

Co-design and service design

Service design examines how an experience works across people, processes, touchpoints and systems. Co-design describes how stakeholders can participate in that work. The two approaches often overlap, but they are not identical.

A service-design team may conduct research and create a blueprint without sharing design decisions with users. A co-design process deliberately gives affected people a role in shaping the response. Conversely, co-design can be used for products, places, policies and community initiatives, not only services.

What good co-design produces

The visible output may be a prototype, a set of service principles, a redesigned journey or a prioritised plan. The less visible outcomes can matter as much: a shared understanding of the problem, stronger relationships between groups and evidence about which assumptions were wrong.

Co-design is not a guarantee of consensus or success. It can still produce weak ideas, and some decisions remain constrained by law, safety, resources or organisational responsibility. Its value comes from improving the evidence and range of experience used to make those decisions.

Questions to ask before starting

• Which decisions can participants genuinely influence?
• Whose experience is essential, and who is currently missing?
• What support will make participation accessible and worthwhile?
• Who has authority to act on what the group learns?
• How will ideas be tested rather than accepted on enthusiasm alone?
• How will the team report back to participants?

If those questions do not have credible answers, the project may be consultation presented as co-design. Clear limits are more respectful than a promise of influence that the organisation cannot keep.

In summary

Co-design brings lived experience, professional expertise and design practice into the same process. At its best, it helps teams understand the real problem, make alternatives visible and learn through prototypes before committing to a final solution. Its success depends on honest boundaries, representative participation, skilled facilitation and a clear route from workshop activity to decisions.