CO-CREATION
+ CO-DESIGN

IN A POST

DESIGN ERA

ABSTRACT// The boundaries between the conventional design dis-
ciplines are blurring (Rodgers, 2008). As such, new praxis spaces
are emerging that present new opportunities for collaboration with
clients and audiences. Designers need insights beyond “product”
function in order to develop meaningful and “purposeful” designs
(Sanders and Stappers, 2008), ones that resonate contextually.
Designers need to recognize that all people are creative and that
as designers we can amplify this creativity using participatory
methods that involve collective agency and discovery learning.
Generative techniques such as co-creation and co-design can be
powerful tools for innovation and social change when applied as a
methodology across the whole span of a design process.

FOREGROUND// I am in favour of a design that is: user-centered,
problem-focused, purpose-oriented, community activating, cul-
turally sensitive, scientifically informed, interdisciplinary, and
fundamentally, necessary and useful (Frascara, 2008).

Working on the assumption that technological and_ social
change co-evolve, and often in non-linear and unpredictable ways,
I understand that technologies (things and products) construct
and configure users (uses, needs and expectations) just as much
as users (uses, needs and expectations configure and construct
technologies (things and products) (Galloway, 2007)

KEYWORDS// Co-creation, Co-design, Participatory Design, Des-
ign Research, Design Education

30 CURRENT

Author:
Deborah Shackleton, Associate Professor
Emily Carr University of Art + Design

POST DESIGN ERA// All disciplines go through stages of evo-
lution. “Back in 1980, Alvin Toffler’s bestseller The Third Wave
(Bantam) predicted a new type of ‘prosumer’, someone who is a
mix of DIY (do-it-yourself) producer and consumer in offline
marketplaces” (Shuen, 2008, p.1). Three decades later social
media and muliti-modal platforms have made this a reality in
both the offline and online worlds. As Business Weeks’ Nussbaum
on Design likes to remind us, we are living in a time of unprec-
edented public awareness of design, where as Lupton (2005) has
observed, “every designer is a citizen, and every citizen is, to some

”

degree, a designer” (p. 12). In this context, the designer of 2015,
to paraphrase the AIGA, will need to master new competencies
that involve a “broad understanding of the issues related to the
cognitive, social, cultural, technological and economic contexts
for design” as well as possess an “ability to respond to audience
contexts recognizing physical, cognitive, cultural and social
human factors that shape design decisions” (2007, p. 1).

Research in or through design has been about the discourse and
“viscourse” of making (Bonsiepe, 2007) and the combining of
intuition and aesthetics with cognition and function. However, the
size and complexity of challenges in areas such as energy, govern-
ance, food safety and healthcare requires a rethinking of design
education as more than the partnership of intellect (noesis) and
composition (poesis). If Sanders and Stappers (2008) are correct
in their assertion that we are in the throws of a human-centered
design revolution or a “post-design” era, then the stronger under-
graduate programs will be those where “students bring content,