2. Co-Design and Engagement
What is Co-Design?
Co-Design is a term that has become a buzzword and as can happen with buzzwords, its meaning can get fuzzy as people start to use them in different ways. Co-design stands for ‘cooperative design’, which is a process not a workshop or an event. Co-design is about a systems approach to engaging people with lived experience, service users, and advocates into the design process, with the idea that this will ultimately lead to more active people creating improvements, innovations, lower costs, and solutions towards a problem.
Cooperative – because it is a socially democratic process includes the diverse voices of people involved in or experiencing the issue, such as homelessness. At a minimum this includes the relevant sector voices, the voices of decision makers (e.g. government), and the voices of people who have lived experience. It could include community members or other professional and experts too depending on the context of your plan.
Design – because it utilises a disciplined, step by step design process derived from the work of places like the British Design Council and Stanford Design School as will be shown later in this section. This process is a guide to develop solutions with the most likelihood of success.
Co-design may occur in a broad range of ways such as board and advisory group membership, consultations, working groups, project teams, systemic advocacy positions and so on. Participation in co-design is a paid role, for people with lived experience who are providing expertise (And not there as part of a paid employment role) that specifically requires a perspective informed by a personal experience of homelessness, housing insecurity, mental illness, addiction and so on – regardless of whether those circumstances do or do not continue. A key idea of co-design is that people, as ‘experts’ of their own experience, become central to the design process. That way plans and solutions are not imposed, and that creates the potential for incredible systems change.
Benefits of Co-Design
It is well-recognised that the more lived experience, end user, or consumer interests are integrated into the design process in the work of organisations, the better the outcomes for all involved and impacted by the outcomes. These include:
- Generation of better ideas with a high degree of originality and user value.
- Identify multiple solutions to problems that can be adapted into tailored interventions and responses.
- Improved knowledge of the needs of people experiencing the issue.
- Immediate validation of unique ideas or concepts.
- Higher quality and more credible outcomes.
- More efficient and effective decision making.
- Lower development costs and reduced development time.
- Better cooperation between different people or organisations, and across disciplines.
- Through engaging end users early on, implementation issues can be integrated into policy design and help mitigate problems before they emerge.
- Evidence-based understanding that can lead to the development of real time data, which can be integrated directly into decision processes.
- The risks of policy failure are shared with citizens and stakeholders.
“Somewhere along the way people who have experienced homelessness went through something quite horrific, we struggle with it, but we persevere. People and the system have abandoned us and can treat us appallingly. The drugs or alcohol may have been the only escape from the hurt, the only way we could sleep.
Unless you have experienced it, you can’t imagine just how unimaginably cold, terrifying, dangerous and lonely it is when you’re out there. Many people can’t cope and take their own lives to escape and sleep.
Whilst this makes us survivors colder and tough, un-trusting, sometimes a bit over-bearing or even scary, most of the time it is just self-defence because of what we have gone through. All we need is love and respect.
Some of the most resilient, generous, caring, and inspiring people are homeless or have been homeless. You will never get people more passionate in helping find solutions Treat people like you would want to be treated and they will surprise you. Only by partnering together will we ever end the cycle of homelessness.”
– HOME Lived Experience Advocate
The Conditions for Co-Design
Co-design cannot happen in isolation, but requires a focus on the conditions:
- Willingness to act on new learnings: Co-design should only be used when there is an appetite and readiness to take action on lessons and change.
- Leadership support: The success depends on leaders in supporting an open-ended design process and supporting the changes that come from it.
- Time carved out: Staff need to be allocated time to participate in co-design.
- Diversity of people: People with lived experience and staff from various backgrounds and all levels are required.
- Optimism from leadership: In co-design, groups ideate many concepts that may not work, and then test these ideas. This process works best when leaders are optimistic throughout.
- Open-mindedness: When we hold back snap-judgements and listen with an open mind, we can discover new insights.
- Knowledge sharing throughout an organisation or system: Leaders should enable ideas and knowledge to be accessible to everyone.
- Distributed leadership and power: Focus on the empowerment of all-involved by enabling them to be part of decisions and changes.
Co-Design v Co-Production
Co-design is different from co-production, in that co-production involves individuals with lived experience participating in the tangible delivery of services and supports (not just in the design of services and supports). Co-production projects offer rich learnings given that the involvement of individuals with lived experience seems to start with co-design, and then deepen into co-delivery. Ultimately, a co-design journey will likely lead to many instances of co-production (where people with lived experience are engaged in co-production with professional staff or peers).
Engagement
A co-design process is best practice and has the ability to be used for any lived experience involvement, even a one off interview or meeting for example by collaboratively deciding on all aspects of that interview prior to (e.g. location, payment, subject etc.). This requires effort and planning. However, due to the nature of an involvement of people with lived experience, or more likely an organisation or person’s capacity or resources, co-designing everything you do, every step of the way may not be possible. For example, you may need someone with lived experience to provide feedback on ‘X’ in a single hour-long meeting, but you cannot afford much else for this project. In this circumstance, engagement with people who have lived experience is appropriate if following this toolkit’s guidance and recommended resources – a co-design approach where possible will support making it a positive engagement.
Co-Design Process
Keeping Co-Design On-Track
