Co‐Design and the Collective Creativity Processes in Care Systems and Places (original) (raw)

Creative processes in co-designing a co-design hub: towards system change in health and social services in collaboration with structurally vulnerable populations

Evidence & Policy, 2021

Background:Co-design is an approach to engaging stakeholders in health and social system change that is rapidly gaining traction, yet there are also questions about the extent to which there is meaningful engagement of structurally vulnerable communities and whether co-design leads to lasting system change. The McMaster University Co-Design Hub with Vulnerable Populations Hub (‘the Hub’) is a three-year interdisciplinary project with the goal of facilitating partnerships, advancing methods of co-design with vulnerable populations, and mobilising knowledge. Aims and objectives:A developmental evaluation approach inspired by experience-based co-design was used to co-produce a theory of change to understand how the co-design process could be used to creatively co-design a co-design hub with structurally vulnerable populations. Methods:Twelve community stakeholders with experience participating in a co-design project were invited to participate in two online visioning events to co-devel...

Expanding design space(s) : design in communal endeavours

2013

The present research inquires into the contemporary shapes and strategies of situated and participatory perspectives on design. It proposes a re-conception of the notion of design space to capture the wider interplay of possibilities, practices, and partly assembled technologies, as well as developing competencies and social arrangements that are the basis for ongoing design choices. In so doing, this work looks at the arrangements that evolved at the intersection of two design research engagements. The first engagement deals with the life project of an association of seniors developing an alternative housing arrangement with its related growing-old-together practices. In particular, the first case study draws on a mutual journey to design and develop what the community refers to as their everyday life management system or Miina, which helps them coordinate their daily joint practices. The second engagement looks at forms of active citizenship in the interactions of citizens both wi...

Dotte Agency: A Participatory Design Model for Community Health

As community activists resist racial injustice, food insecurity, and infrastructural delinquency, many groups are attempting to articulate the voice of the citizen. It is within this landscape that architects have historically struggled to find common ground in order to afford democratic access for citizens to engage in discussions about the future of their city. In seeking a balanced relationship between practice, academia, and the public interest, the field of architecture has become increasingly aware of its own fuzzy ethical boundaries. Based upon surrogate models of other professions, there has emerged a proactive movement towards Social Impact Design, a design philosophy that seeks to make a positive difference in the world. Within practice, architectural firms have been responsive to these aspirations, broadening notions of environmental sustainability to include terms of social resiliency. As a result, methods of community-based design have been coopted as a vehicle for speculative development, largely made possible through corporate philanthropy. This 'social-washing' of the design process has become increasingly fluent in its new vocabulary, where terms such as 'empowerment', 'community engagement', and 'the public realm' proliferate. The net result is the loss of ethical authenticity and the perception that architectural design cannot serve as a tool for real social change. Similar to many urban core areas, our community faces a health epidemic compounded by poverty, where there are more safety net clinics than grocery stores. In response to requests for collaboration, and through cross-disciplinary academic partnerships in both public health and social welfare, we've begun to leverage design advocacy in order to improve health outcomes. This has evolved into an alternative model of practice that advances public design through interdisciplinary, adaptive and incremental spatial agency. It is a sustainable practice that fosters conversations and supports events originating from within the community. Our service goes beyond the constraints of a building, and instead seeks to scaffold an infrastructure of public health through methods of participatory design and advocacy. In seeking to address issues such as poverty, mobility, and racial inequalities through design, we have faced our own challenges validating this methodology to our peers and colleagues in academia and in practice. By championing the ‘small bets’, however, we have begun to produce disruptive prototypes that challenge the status quo on how cities should shape the built environment. By meeting residents where they are, our design tools include active citizen participation, grassroots policymaking, and rapid prototyping. We are finding that this process of incremental and collective action provides a great number of innovative design solutions. Through that process, the community sees itself as a partner in the design outcome, and lifts up the work as a reflective representation of its will towards a healthier community. Through new forms of design intelligence and collaborative design tools, our critical spatial practice demonstrates new ways for how architectural design can be relevant to society. This paper will identify a set of particular principles and exemplary models from the field of Social Impact Design expanding upon those experiences.

Co-production and Co-creation: Creative Practice in Social Inclusion

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2010

We apply techniques drawn from interactive media art in fieldwork for social inclusion. Advanced mobile media and grassroots DIY techniques are used to bring creative practice with digital media into community based outreach work. We use these techniques in a participatory context that encourages the co-production of cultural output. We triangulate across artistic practice, technology engineering, and the social sciences to leverage methods from digital media art practice in contexts that result in social innovation.

Game over or play it again and again.: participatory design approach within Special Housing

Activities that are fun, social, engaging and put something at stake are positive for your health no matter age or condition. What can you do if you suffer from dementia and are living at a Special Housing? According to research you should dance, visit the garden, get tactile massage discuss artworks etc. Still, despite all these proposals there are many voices from this domain, telling stories about living without live. Suffering from dementia may affect your ability to speak for your self and initiate activities. How can we know what they want and not what we think they need but they don't seem to get or might not even want? Why don't we ask them? We propose more focus on participation and design methods to guide the way. In this report, the author discusses the experience in conducting a Participatory Design research project intended to develop a technological and a related organizational intervention. The aim was to support people with dementia living in a Special Housing with fun and engaging activities. A short description of Participatory Design as an approach within research projects and a description of how it was used in this research study are given. We then discuss the experience in conducting the research, some of the users' comments and responses, challenges, success stories and drawbacks when trying to design and test an activity in a readymade setting with fixed schema for several weeks ahead. The overall reflection being that Participatory Design has great potential for interventional projects and research focusing on leisure activities in everyday life for people with dementia. We proposes this being due to the two concepts-participation and design

Agonistic participatory design: working with marginalised social movements

CoDesign, 2012

Participatory design (PD) has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work-oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and 'innovation'. What 'democratic innovation' entails is often currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratised through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative 'innovation' practice more in line with the original visions of PD based on our experience of running Malmo¨Living Labsan open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long-term collaborations among diverse stakeholders. Three cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts 'agonistic public spaces' (as opposed to consensual decision-making), 'thinging' and 'infrastructuring' (as opposed to projects) are explored in relation to democracy, innovation and other future-making practices.

Co-designing for Society

Healthcare is the issue that touches the lives of everyone. Adapting, changing and continually innovating healthcare is a complex undertaking requiring contributions from many different stakeholders including governments, professionals, carers, patients and the general public. But how do these groups come together, work together and share ownership in identifying challenges and creating and delivering solutions for the future of healthcare? thinkpublic is a multi-disciplinary social innovation and design agency. We aim to design better healthcare and develop lasting skills and capacity among service providers and users. We do this by using an approach called co-design. Our approach of co-design is grounded in understanding the real life experiences, ideas and skills of people, who use, need and run services. In the first Design + Health edition of the Australasian Medical Journal (AMJ) we presented Alzheimer100 a project where co-design was used to collaboratively identify issues in dementia and develop a range of innovative responses that addressed them. In this paper, we build and elaborate on co-design, outlining in more detail its approach, tools, processes and practices.

From engaging to empowering people: a set of co-design experiments with a service design perspective

""The authors draw a parallel between a set of fast co-design activities within an action research called ‘Ideas Sharing stall’, and a series of systematic co-design sessions in the framework of the ‘Creative Citizens’ project. The two experimentations result from a renewed activism on the part of city dwellers, which can be currently observed in the city of Milan. Both the research projects move in the field of service design for social innovation adopting a participatory approach known as community centred design. The paper describes the work done in the two contexts discussing their purposes and tools and outlining two formats of intervention for co-designing services with citizen participation. The first model relates to people’s engagement, while the second is more linked to their empowerment. Thus the discussion focuses on the relation between them, highlighting the role and form of service designer action in the shift from engaging to empowering people in enhancing social innovation. In conclusion the importance of service designers collaborating with other local actors in the project development is underlined, suggesting they be seen not so much as facilitators but as vision bearers, triggering, inspiring and leading the community centred design process ""

Emerging spaces in community-based participatory design: reflections from two case studies.

In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers-Volume 1, 2014

This paper engages with issues of universality and locality in the context of community-based participatory design (PD), and focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with incorporating local views and forms of participation in the design process. The notion of 'designing for participation' is advanced as a quintessential perspective for approaches in which design practices are re-configured from a community-centric standpoint. Building on insights from PD and community development studies, as well as on empirical evidence from two community design studies, we argue that designing for participation appears to be located in a space between the designer's and local views of participation, which are at times both ambiguous and conflicting. To overcome these tensions, we argue for the importance of engaging critically and reflectively with PD in community contexts, and in this process capitalising on disciplinary dialogues that can expand the viewpoint from which PD projects are negotiated and evaluated.