Ever wondered how the design of our cities influences the way we live? In this episode, Betsy MacLean and Nisha Baliga of Hester Street discuss the many facets of collaboration in their urban planning and design work: from crafting conversations that uncover people’s lived experiences, to disrupting power systems that intentionally keep folks out of decisions concerning their own neighborhoods and communities.
How do you design what is arguably the largest, longest running co-creation project in history? Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, tells us how the online encyclopedia defied all odds to become a millions-strong stakeholder exercise; and how the Wikimedia Foundation uses co-design everyday to build the infrastructure for a global, free knowledge movement.
What began as a 24-hour design challenge addressing racial inequality in Ferguson, MO has since grown into a powerful organization fighting inequity with its own brand of collaborative design. Antionette Carroll, founder of Creative Reaction Lab, speaks about Equity-Centered Community Design—and how Black and Latinx youth are using design as their tool of choice to dismantle the very systems designed to exclude them.
For Adam Kahane, co-design was a calling—one that he discovered in 1991 when he literally received the call to help facilitate South Africa’s monumental transition from apartheid to democracy. In this episode, Adam shares what he has learned in the 30 years since that fateful call: finding strength in humility, negotiating for peace in the absence of trust, and busting the myth that co-design = magic.
This exercise prompts you to examine the ways you have already practiced co-design, identify the things you feel good at already and the things you want to learn from using *Design With.*
This exercise walks you through the adaptation of a common design facilitation tool for a co-design activity. By taking the Spectrum Line exercise and adding your own prompts and pacing, you will practice the skill of shaping and reshaping a generic approach to meet your own specific goals.
This exercise invites you to think through different stakeholder groups connected to your project, from the intended beneficiaries to the operational actors and other partners. Use this activity to pinpoint the perspectives required, brainstorm the considerations your team should weigh as you plan for their inclusion.
This exercise asks you to fast forward, past the co-design process you will inevitably lead, and into the throes of implementation. It prompts you to think through the details, imagine what barriers you might find there, and pick a co-design lens—a set of priorities you can adopt during design and planning to help address those barriers from the start.
This website includes research, ideation, and prototyping tools specifically focused on the design and evaluation of new initiatives. It guides practitioners to the tools that are most applicable to specific project phases, and provides tutorials for how to apply them based on the sorts of stakeholders they are working with, or the underlying objective they are trying to achieve. The site is a living library hosted by an interdisciplinary Service Design academy at Politecnico di Milano.
This tool is a set of facilitation methods that emphasize making all participants feel empowered to contribute. Many of the tools here are designed to emphasize storytelling, discussion, and group collaboration across differences.
This kit includes typical design tools, but with excellent supporting documentation guiding viewers through the rationale for selecting one over the other, and recommendations for how to use them. Developed by a consortium of foundations, this collection is oriented toward projects in the public sector or focused on international development.
When facilitating any convening, from a training session to a strategy co-design workshop, we recommend this set of tested principles developed from Reboot's direct experience. These principles are organized according to the three main phases of facilitation: pre-engagement, the facilitation itself, and post-event follow-up.
Drafted specifically for cities and countries developing Open Government plans, this collection is full of rich case studies and examples of different protocols for collaboration beyond a single workshop—with recommendations focused on building relationships, getting good representation, and sharing data and decisions. Compared to many design toolkits, this one is focused on longer-term process.
This exercise helps you pinpoint the important decisions that happen during the implementation of a program, product or service, and identify which ones—and in which cases—you would ask stakeholders to help resolve. By mapping your logic for which decisions are shared and which are not, this exercise prompts you to think of co-design not as a single touchpoint but as a much longer arc.