While GK VanPatter uses ‘Participatory Co-creation’, and others, e.g.
within service design, use the term co-creation, inspired by participatory design (PD), I use the terms co-design and co-designing. These terms do overlap, but they have different origins and are interpreted quite differ-ently. Therefore, before I get to PD, in this section I present my views of co-design and co-designing in relation to different views of co-creation.
Many others work with and suggest ways to look at co-design and co-cre-ation. One example is Sanders and Stappers’ paper Co-creation and the new landscape of design (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). They illustrate the
“current landscape of human-centred design research as practiced in the design and development of products and services” with a figure (ibid:2):
Tied to this landscape, Sanders and Stappers argue that creation and co-design have been growing in the area of participatory co-design research. They acknowledge that today the terms co-design and co-creation are often con-fused and/or treated as synonyms. In their online survey behind making the illustration, they have found co-creation broadly applied both from physi-Figure 4/ Illustration of co-creation and the new landscape of design by Sanders &
Stappers (2008). / Reprinted with permission by Liz Sanders.
cal to metaphysical and material to spiritual issues. Further, more practi-cally, they have also found different opinions about who should be involved, when, in what role, etc. To be clear, they ‘take co-creation to refer to any act of collective creativity, i.e., creativity that is shared by two or more people.
(…) and co-design to indicate collective creativity as it is applied across the whole span of a design process…’ (ibid:6). In opposition to others considering co-design as collective creativity among a team of designers, they propose to view co-design broadly capturing creative processes in which designers and people not trained in design continually collaborate (ibid:6).
Of course, illustrations like this one are highly subjective, expressing the particular interests and positions of their creators.29 Yet, the diagram does capture several issues relevant to the present argument. The verti-cal dichotomy between ‘user as subject’ and ‘user as partner,’ for example, relates to the discussion above of designing for and with. Similarly, their view of co-design as involving more than two people – usually designers and others not trained in design working together – across the whole span of a design process also corresponds well with my views of co-designing.
The term co-creation is quite new
Emerging from the business world around the millennium, in comparison with the term co-design arising with the field of cooperative/participa-tory design in the late 1970s/1980s. Thus, in addition to the two horizon-tal dimensions in Sanders and Stappers’ diagram, ‘led by research’ and
‘led by design’, this can be said to add a third dimension, namely ‘led by business’. The phrase co-creation was first used and coined by, manage-ment and business strategy thinkers, C.K. Prahalad and V. Ramaswamy in their article Co-Opting Customer Experience (2000). In particular, their influential books and articles, such as the article The Co-Creation Con-nection and the book The Future of Competition seem to have contributed to establishing the term and spreading it in business strategy literature as well as in some business practices (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2002/2004).30 Prahalad’s political influence in business management seems to have had great influence on the spread of co-creation or co-design outside e.g. PD research environments – which I, of course, approve of with an interest in proposing co-designing approaches.
However, I would argue that his publications do present several limita-tions as regards their relevance to understanding and staging co-desig-ning. The Co-Creation Connection (2002), for instance, contains a lot of business cases integrated with some overall recommendations about how to change from values of companies to values of consumers, including
dia-29 Inherent in the Figure 4, for instance, I read an interest on the part of Sanders and Stappers in positioning their own work around ‘generative design research’ within the
‘participatory design area’.
30 In May 2008, the magazine Business Week reviewed Prahalads recent book ‘The New Age of Innovation: driving cocreated value through global networks’, saying that the
book was ‘laying out a new landscape of business driven by consumer co-creation and service customization’ (Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008 / Businessweek).
Chapter 2
logue, access, risk reduction and transparency. But these four suggestions only very briefly address the complexities of practice, including how busi-nesses need to quite dramatically change to establish co-creation or co-de-signing practices. In other words, the article does not really discuss how these processes of change can be implemented. Here participatory design (PD) continues to fill a gap, a point which I extend further below.
In Denmark, my understanding of co-creation as a shift from designing for to designing with is echoed by the Danish Design Association (DDA), which states that ‘co-creation changes the game of innovation from design-ing for people to designdesign-ing with people’ (DDA – copenhagencocreation).
In August 2009, DDA hosted a two-day seminar called ‘Copenhagen Co-Creation’, inviting international experts as well as interested profession-als with the intention to collaboratively create a ‘Copenhagen CoCreation Manifesto’. In the end, the event did not result in one manifesto, but a series of four manifestos, reflecting internal disagreements and conflicts among participants. One group would see co-creation as a method, which could be applied now and then; while the other saw co-creation as an approach.
The understanding of co-creation as an approach – as processes of con-tinual collaboration with shared ownership of the co-designed outputs – in line with Sanders and Stappers’ description and how I above described co-designing with, has clear similarities with my own views on co-design, or rather co-designing as an approach. In other words, I understand a co-de-signing approach as a process where everyone – ‘users’ of course included – can and should continually participate in and contribute to the co-designing, because the co-designed products, systems, environments and services then have a much better chance to fit the practices they will eventually transform.
As I see it, co-design is not (yet) particularly led by business, but is still mainly led by research and views of ‘users as partner’, to use Sanders and Stappers’ terms. As mentioned, the term co-design has been used in partic-ipatory design research for a long time, but was further established with the journal CoDesign, with a first volume published in 2005.31
Summary / Co-designing… and/or co-creation
In this section I have sought to relate co-designing with different (research, business and methodological) views of co-creation. In my view, co-design
31 With this journal, the terms co-design and co-creation merge – as expressed in the full title of the journal: ‘CoDesign – International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts’. As stated on its website, the aims of the journal are ‘to report new research and scholarship in principles, procedures and techniques relevant to collaboration in design and research; collaborative design issues; and to stimulate ideas and provoke widespread discussion with a forward-looking perspective’. CoDesign is concerned with research in any design domain concerned specifically with the nature of collaboration design. In this, the journal seeks to include different types of design, encompassing collaborative, co-operative, concurrent, human-centred, participatory, socio-technical and community design among others. (Last checked 31. January 2012 – see: http://
www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/15710882.as)
– and especially co-designing – is best understood as denoting an overall approach of processes of continual collaboration as commonly understood in participatory design. Also, since the terms co-design and co-designing emphasize ‘design’ as a part of this practice, as the title of this thesis indi-cates, rather than using the term co-creation, I have deliberately chosen to explore co-designing.