As a ‘participatory design coach’ and ‘codesign lead’ I support (largely) public service teams to work differently together with others in the system, and those communities impacted by inequity and sustained disadvantage, to address the complex social and economic challenges many of our communities face. The goal is to together build our understanding of the systems conditions, beliefs and behaviours that hold the status quo in place, and to work collaboratively to build our capability and capacity (across government, business and community) to try and shift these. Drawing on design-led social innovation frameworks this happens through listening, collective sense-making, mutual learning and reframing, trying, testing and prototyping different possible directions and ways of working. Inherent within this are learning loops and building the capacity of teams and organisations to build a learning culture.

Everything I do really can be explained as developing a ‘learning orientation’ within individuals and teams with the idea that such a stance (over fixed ideas about what the problems and solutions are) better equips us to understand the system and respond and adapt in ways that better recognise the history and complexity of why things are the way they are, and what it will take to enable change that leads to outcomes that matter for families and young people.

Increasingly the work that I have been involved in to support innovation and change has utilised the design process primarily as a means to facilitate learning and build capability and capacity for change - not just produce prototypes of new ‘innovations’. This is particularly so when the process is facilitated in a way that whānau (family) or youth lead, which means that families and young people are empowered and supported to lead the design process themselves. There is increasing evidence to show that the qualities of the design process make it a compelling process through which to learn about something and to build critical life skills (for young people and adults). For example students at a school in Auckland increased their wellbeing literacy and knowledge about wellbeing through a self-directed design process. Students explored notions of wellbeing through their own perspective, that of their peers, and through formal models of wellbeing following a design process that resulted in them building their own prototypes and innovations to express their ideas for supporting better wellbeing. Student feedback suggested that this was an engaging way to learn about wellbeing because the process created a safe environment to play and explore different ideas, and to express their learning in forms that were meaningful to them. At the same time the design process - as an active process of action and reflection also helped to build critical thinking skills, confidence and connections between students, contributing to other learning and wellbeing outcomes. This was true not just of the students but also of teaching staff and external community partners and service providers that participated - the system was readied to better understand and respond to the needs of young people through participating in the design process - not just as a result of what was produced at the end. This potential for building of social connections, executive functioning skills and confidence - all critical to enabling changes in the lives of whānau experiencing sustained disadvantage have also been demonstrated in other initiatives. 

Design, and especially co-design is often touted as a fix to complex social challenges. However we are seeing the value comes not from the conventional reading of the role of design to produce something ‘new’ - rather this is the by-product, the learning, connections, capability and increased literacy and readiness to act differently around the issue is the real product or value of design. Design as process for learning, building collective action and capacity building is an important space for more research.

The teams that I am working with have a remit to try and support place-based transformation. This requires them to understand and seek to respond to what is happening at a local level on the ground for practitioners and families right now, as well having a view to addressing the ways in which the system conditions and broader policy settings are contributing to holding the status quo of poor outcomes we see on the ground in place. Increasingly adopted within this complexity space is the notion of ‘strategic learning’ often understood as part of a developmental evaluation approach. Inherent in this is an understanding that in order to understand the system and how we might best support change —we need to intervene into the system, try and test things out, and that by doing this. Prototyping small changes or testing out new approaches, we won’t be identifying the ‘answers’ but rather are participating in a process of testing and adapting our strategies as we learn more about the system, the opportunities and barriers for change, and potential ways to respond. This requires us again to shift our expectation of design as a problem-solving tool, to being a framework for collaboration, testing and learning. Prototypes or designs produced are not the solution to the problem, but only through testing and trying things out in rigorous ways and learning from this can we build an informed understanding of what is going on in the system and make data-informed decisions and what approaches might make the most sense - whilst at the same time modelling and encouraging the news kinds of skills, behaviours and capacities the system will need to adapt in order for us to shift from status quo to something different. This entire orientation to social innovation and change requires that teams and organisations both value and have a readiness for learning.

Much of my work involves working with government teams and practitioners to build their capability and capacity for co-design and social innovation. In practice, this means: helping to build or advocate for the skills, mandate, motivation, confidence and conditions to support more participatory approaches to policy and service development; encouraging the use of approaches such as prototyping to experiment with policy and policy directions to enhance decision-making; and expanding the ways in which evidence is conceived of and applied in policy making such that it also includes lived experience, active testing and learning with communities and indigenous knowledge systems. There can be resistance to introducing these new practices, at a range of levels and we have spent a lot of time thinking about the best ways to platform this capability building so that it is meaningful, actionable and immediately connected to people’s work practice and spheres of influence. A critical part of the capability building framework we have developed to support this recognising the role of the organisation as a ‘learning organisation’. We describe our efforts around building co-design capability as being about ‘learning to work together differently.’ The value of design in these settings is in part that it represents an active, explicit and disciplined learning process. We act, we reflect, we take our next action - often beginning with taking stock, listening exploring and reframing - challenging the initial ‘problem definition’ and creating room for more innovative responses. 

Building people’s understanding and confidence to apply the design process helps people to develop their reflective muscles - which are often undeveloped, a ‘going slow to go fast’ type of approach. Even more enhanced when this is integrated with evaluative practice. Building a ‘learning orientation’ - by which we mean a willingness to test and try things, be flexible, share learning and change direction in response to feedback - has in large part been our measure of success for any capability building programme. However participating in the workshops in Melbourne have helped me to think more deeply about what does it mean to apply learning science and a “learning” lens to this even more intentionally, especially when we experience the understandable resistance, fear and vulnerability in those being asked to act differently. We know that to adopt a designerly way of working means some unlearning, as well as building on existing capacities. But thinking about our fellow practitioners as learners (as well as partners and participants), be they frontline staff, policymakers, ministers or whānau, helps us bring empathy to the learners about what best prepares them for and supports learning, including what engages them and how learning and reflection need to be structured to be effective, as well as how we embed specific considerations from learning science about what works to support learning including spaced learning, pausing, reflection, recall and cognitive load in the process we scaffold. 

Throughout my practice, I have studied and designed tools for fostering empathic connections and facilitating collaboration in and for design. When working on empathic design, it is critical to be aware of one’s own standpoint and experiences and to be humbly aware of the limitations of one’s ability to truly understand another. Empathic design approaches aim to initiate both individual and collective resonance by sensemaking and by relating one’s own experiences, or elements that one is familiar with, in order to understand others and what is meaningful for them. One’s motivation, too, plays a key role in empathic sensemaking.

Since the Monash workshop I have found it useful to return to the learning principles introduced. Learning gave me a new lens to reflect on our design research practice. We have built on playfulness, to support creative thinking and easy collaboration, but had not related that to learning. Underlining the learning perspective in empathic design further highlights, on one hand, the need to further advance our competencies in reflective empathy and critical awareness of our own beliefs, and on the other, the fruitful starting point of ‘beginning with the process of going from the inside out.’ To see learning as being in constant conversations with what we already know shifts the starting place. Working from ‘we have it in us already’ asks design how we can build on that knowledge. The dialogues in our collaborative workshops where we co-create knowledge or design ideas together, need to respect the internal dialogues with our existing knowledge and experiences and external dialogues with other participants (Salmi and Mattelmäki, 2019).

While studying so-called ‘designerly ways of doing’ in empathic design, we explored ways to facilitate non-designers as design partners in collaborative contexts. In this co-design practice, a challenge comes with various domains of knowledge coming together, and moreover, people with different agendas, professional expertise, expectations, competencies, and motivations. These challenges are also reasons why collaboration is needed.

As a participant in the Design Rounds I started to be aware of the conversations happening in my mind when seeking issues from my existing pool of knowing, seeking insights and contributions from others’ experiences, references and repertoires. Having this active inner conversation and seeking process, one cannot be 100% attentive. Hence, the listening and synthesizing skills of the facilitator become extremely important. The facilitator does not have to seek knowledge as much as the participants, but to listen, guide and summarize others’ input, and follow the discussion as it advances. Recognise that the knowledge is within the participants and in the between space that is created in the collaboration. (Salmi and Mattelmäki 2019).

I see ambiguity as allowing sense-making — through making new interpretations and alternative readings for the materials. The field study process for collaborative design does not proceed by documenting, analysing and reporting and proposing design implications, but rather an invitation to a collaborative learning process where “clues are given, but much remains for the interpreters to guess based on their own experiences, imagination and collective sharing, and depending on the design exploration”(Mattelmäki et al 2011). The given clues are ‘handles’ to individual insights and interpretations, the exchange of these insights, and how they gradually relate and build (or not) on each other to become co-created outcomes. As stated by Halse et al. (2010) “both a learning and innovation potential is deconstructing the familiar in order to estrange the familiar. It is through estrangement that existing knowledge is seen in a new light”.

Halse et al. (2010) Rehearsing the future. Danish Design School Press, Copenhagen

Mattelmäki, T., E. Brandt, and K. Vaajakallio. 2011. “On Designing Open-Ended Interpretations for Collaborative Design Exploration.” CoDesign 7 (2): 79–93.

Salmi and Mattelmäki (2019) From within and in between – co-designing organizational change. International Journal of Design. Accessed 28 May 2019 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1080/15710882.2019.1581817?scroll=top

Vaajakallio & Mattelmäki (2014) Design games in codesign: as a tool, a mindset and a structure. CoDesign journal.