Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

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Co-conuts Fresh Views on Co-design

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation

Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design Written, designed and produced by the first year students of Co-design MA, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK), 2016/17.

Published by The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation.

Printed by Christensen Grafisk in Copenhagen, Denmark.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the authors. Š 2017 the authors.

First edition: April 2017.

Drawings, photographs and illustrations by the authors, unless otherwise stated.

Copy-editing and proofreading assistance by Lewis Ashman.

ISBN: 978-87-7830-961-7

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements We would like to thank our teacher Professor Thomas Binder, for keeping us on a steady track and for his support throughout the writing process, through encouraging words and helpful advice.

Shana Agid, Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design, New York, facilitated during the planning and structuring stages, and has also offered indispensable help in the production of this book.

We would also like to thank our other Co-design (MA) teachers: Professor Eva Brandt, Associate Professor Joachim Halse (Course Director until January 2017), and Assistant Professor Sissel Olander. They all guided us patiently, and with great dedication, through the projects explored in this book.

Finally, we thank the stakeholders and participants of our three projects: Tingbjerg FerieCamp, Future Hearings, and GSA Winter School.

The partnerships with stakeholders allowed us to fully experience real issues and develop professional relationships and methods.

The participants in the fieldwork encounters discussed within this book were an essential part of the process, and we are forever grateful and appreciative of their involvement.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents

FOREWORD p.6 INTRODUCTION p.10 A SEMESTER OF CO-DESIGN: PROJECTS TIMELINE p.12

DISCOVERING NEW WAYS

Society as a collective brain p.16 Three designers walk into a bar... p.22 Lion tamer: mama knows best p.28 Child’s play p.34 Beyond what you see: the notebook p.40 Creating circumstances p.50 A co-designers work day in 2020 p.58

COMFORT AND DISCOMFORT Follow your true north Notebook talkback Meeting my insecurities A qualitative study & personal journey Co-design is being naked

p.64 p.66 p.76 p.80 p.94

BRIDGING BORDERS Embracing the inevitable journey to the co-design mindset Making concerts out of clashes No designer is an island This is not an Interview: speech and silence Leaving the ivory tower: the designer as co-designer

p.102 p.110 p.122 p.126 p.132

BEAUTIFUL MESS

When an interview goes wrong When people stop being polite Destination: disruption Getting to know your participants Design is not practical anymore, it’s fluid To see abundance wherever we go

p.140 p.148 p.152 p.158 p.164 p.170

BIBLIOGRAPHY p.172

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FOREWORD

Foreword

Shana Agid Assistant Professor, Arts, Media, and Communication Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

There is no feeling exactly like entering into a new space. No matter what you bring with you, what knowledge you have to draw upon, your openness to the questions, ideas, and concerns of new collaborators, your tools and methods, your agenda and plans, it seems always also to be true that what will happen next is unpredictable, full of the trepidation and wonder of what you can know and what you cannot.

I met the authors of this book, the 2017 firstyear cohort of the Co-design Master’s Programme at KADK, in a space like this, literally and figuratively, on a beautiful, cold late-winter morning in Copenhagen. I brought a three-day plan, typed up with notes for a range of possible contingencies, some sample books, and read up on the students’ work to that point. I trusted that there would be a whiteboard or some big paper to write on, and took comfort in the likelihood that the students, being design students, would not hesitate to draw or make paper models as we wended our way to a book design together.

I also prepared to listen closely, to the students, to their other teachers, and to the context, in hopes of facilitating something useful to them.

In the texts that make up this book, I see a series of critical themes, both drawn from and contributing to key questions in designing with people across design fields. Like practitioners and researchers in Participatory Design, Co-design, and Service Design more broadly, these studentdesigner-writers delve into the ontological and epistemological questions of being a designer working with others (Binder, et. al. 2015; Akama and Young, 2012; Suchman 2002). Through examinations of their own work, both before their enrollment at KADK and in the Co-design Master’s Programme, and the writing of design researchers, the authors consider what role design has to play in a range of contexts. These include and exceed business settings, city planning and organization, and the engagement of community and municipal spaces across global sites.

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

And, they do this by focusing less on the often-idealized outcomes and impacts of co-design, and delving more into the complex questions of process, position, and the challenges and possibilities presented by working in collaboration with people.

The authors introduce the reader to the development of their own, still meaningfully varied, approaches to and “mind-sets” for co-design practice, developed through the projects they examine. One author looks closely at the process of group formation and relationship building that began after the group was invited to rearrange their collective design studio space, reflecting on the unexpectedly difficult work of imagining parameters and requirements of collaboration in making processes. In other essays, students draw on previous experiences from a range of work and learning environments to begin to imagine future roles for co-design, beginning to see prior work through this new lens and developing nascent proposals for new sites of or approaches to collaborative work, from restaurants to urban gardens to global production based in local craft.

Critically, these essays present multiple takes on the authors’ experiences, and critiques, of “parachuting” into design contexts, offering self-reflective shifts in

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their own approaches and sharing ideas for practice, from how to bring oneself into an interview or conversation to how to make space for silence between people.

In examining their processes of developing what they call “mind-sets” for co-design, the authors also build an argument for writing about design through writing about practice, process, and context. In this way, the book presents several, not always aligned, takes on three major projects undertaken through the Master’s Programme. These offer different ideas about and ways of approaching the idea of being a co-designer, from making capacities for conversation or exchange with people, to building tools for communication and observation, to finding one’s way to facilitation, organization, and speculation as sites of design and ways of working.

This book was written iteratively, through both individual reflections on practice and the collaborative design of this visual and physical manifestation in a book of linked texts and images.

The students determined through that process to share experiences and knowing from their specific locations, not only as students, but as designers informed by trans-national and trans-cultural ideas, values, and aims. This pro-

Foreword

cess began long before the group talked about this book, as they navigated the contexts and engagements about which they write here.

The book itself started next, with a series of writing exercises and explorations taken from these experiences, which the authors then honed after our three-day intensive workshop through discussions and debates on relevant themes emerging in their experience and writing. The authors further developed the writing and visualizations in the pages to follow as they designed the book form and content, committing to a collaborative process in which they took turns encouraging everyone else to stay engaged through to the final proofs.

This process, and the authors’ commitment to learning it as they go and to communicating it, demonstrates that the story that these students are showing is the story of their work.

work toward consensus (Björgvinsson, et. al.

2012), it seems critical that we also engage those processes together, across traditional boundaries and roles, as we learn to talk about what we do. In this way, when I stepped off the elevator into the studios of the Co-design Master’s Programme and of the Center for Codesign Research (CODE), I also entered, again, the question-space these students and their teachers and I always already share, as designers seeking to learn with others so that we might build things with meaning together.

By taking the kinds of risks involved in delving into a close examination of what happens when we design with people – whether in collaborative designer-teams, with businesses, or with people in a range of community-based contexts – these students ask us to consider what it means to learn to do this work, as we do it.

As designers continue to learn to build capacities for facilitating generative collaborative spaces that can both hold conflict and

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INTRODUCTION

Introduction

A note from the authors In this book, conflicts are confessed, peacefully-blissful moments validated, and the complexity of the co-designer expressed to the full. Some of the contributions bring you close, into the author’s personal space, with honest and open descriptions of venturing outside of their comfort zones into fieldwork.

Others describe managing situations of friction and confusion during their collaborations, when boundaries are blurred and topics sensitive. Some imagine future scenarios, or share a passionate vision of co-design as a practice and the influence it can have on society and on social innovation.

There is a critical thread running through the contributions, as authors reflect on their roles and positions, not only as co-designers, but as people entering other people’s lives to try to create meaningful collaborative encounters.

This book will take the reader on a journey with nine students on their steep six-month learning curve of co-design methodologies.

The first semester of our two-year Master’s

programme consisted of three ‘real partner’ projects of varying complexities, time-lines, and outcomes, all of which involved implementing newly-learned methods, skills, and collaborative processes. We hope readers find interesting expressions which encourage reflections upon power relations within a field that challenges ‘ways of doing and thinking’.

Co-design requires collaboration on a deeper level, thereby challenging the fundamental views we hold of ourselves as people and as designers, and of our positions within society.

Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design is written, designed, and produced by the proud first-year students of the 2016/17 Co-design Master’s Programme at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK). In creating this book, the authors experienced co-design collaboration amongst themselves. Our teacher, Professor Thomas Binder, has patiently guided us through the craft of writing, and helped us to develop valuable opinions and reflections.

A fruitful moment for everyone was a threeday workshop with Assistant Professor Shana Agid, visiting from Parsons School of Design, who skilfully supported us in structuring both the project and our minds in challenging and fun ways. He also helped ‘uproot’ our insights into our experiences of co-design in practice, allowing them to rise to the surface into four varied - yet nevertheless connected - themes.

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

A semester in co-design Project timeline

Tingbjerg FerieCamp

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September 2016 - October 2016 A ten-week collaboration between the Co-design Master’s Programme, Copenhagen municipality, Skaberværelset at Tingbjerg library and Kultur og Fritid Nord. The students were commissioned to conceptualise, organise, and execute their workshop content at the free holiday camp in Tingbjerg, Copenhagen during a national school holiday in autumn. The collaboration was part of a wider project between Centre for Codesign Research (CODE) and various partners to develop new concepts for the future of local libraries.

Six groups from the Co-design MA programme worked on different activities, which came together during the week-long ‘FerieCamp’.

Project Timeline

Future Hearings

GSA Winter School

October 2016 - January 2017 A partnership between The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) and a Danish hearing aid company (hereafter referred to as HAC). Four teams worked on engaging members of the hard of hearing community in workshops and dialogues in order to gain a deeper understanding of this complex health issue, focusing in on people and their relationships to others and their environments.

Their directive was to develop specific ‘dialogue tools’ to further dialogue between users of HAC’s products and services, and to uncover and describe potential needs and wants for those users in the future.

February 2017 Students of co-design were invited to participate in a ‘winter school’ organized by the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), together with students from Glasgow and Cologne, at the school’s ‘Creative Campus’ in the Scottish Highlands.

During this two-week experience, KADK students were paired with two local organizations and asked to explore the potential inherent in communal traditions and the role of designers as innovators in the service of wider society. The project culminated in an exhibition of ‘proposed innovations’, where students presented their design explorations to the collaborators and community for response and critique.

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THEME 01

DISCOVERING NEW WAYS The co-designer is an explorer, constantly searching for new places and new methods of travel. Tools are the essential equipment they need with them on their adventures, and are a large part of how co-designers communicate with the people they meet out in the field. Tools are not just physical objects, but can be the methods of communication the co-designer employs to extract knowledge and generate understanding with participants. A co-designer’s toolkit is made up every skill and technique they have at their disposal, from their Bachelor’s degree in Design to experiences from everyday life. These tools allow the co-designer to constantly discover new ways of communicating, to innovate, and to develop new design methods.

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

Society as a collective brain

By Naya Choi

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

Not too long ago, designing used to be about being the one who could create the most brilliant product, or any other ‘thing’ that could change the paradigm of a story. It was about creating and dominating your own idea or concept as a designer with pride. However, it is clear that a shift in paradigm has happened within design. As most would already agree, in design there is no place for the personal ego anymore.

If anything, design should be humbling. When practiced thoroughly, it will almost always show us, the designers, that the assumptions we bring with us at the start of a project, while generally well-founded, are wrong. Regardless of how much of an expert you may think you are, you simply can’t represent the collective mass that is a user base. That is why the most compelling design process never comes from within yourself.

Perhaps this is why co-design must be considered in a serious manner. We bring the users into the process of design, and collaborate with them to reduce this gap. A team of co-designers are always bringing together the skillsets and complex perspectives that each individual has. We create synergetic conversation to empower our ideas, to combine and recombine, to produce and reproduce. This essay is about how co-designers’ collaborative design approach fits into a society where personal ego should stay behind, a society where there is more power in being together than being on your own.

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The Millennials The shift in design paradigm can also be seen through the change in generations. Speaking of my own generation, ‘the millennials’, we are the largest generation in history. We are also the most educated in history. We are the most conscious generation when it comes to health, social, economic, and environmental issues. We are the global citizens who respect and value diversity, who are outraged by social injustice, are willing to act to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place, and who take responsibility for their actions (Main, 2013). And most of us now want things done differently. This shift in generation has had a huge impact on the design community, and has therefore changed how we must proceed and perceive design. A great design no longer comes from you; rather, it comes from us.

Collaboration in society In fact, the idea of collaboration has become increasingly important. Individuals need to meet, and their skills must be pooled together, for a more inclusive society to emerge. In Design, When Everybody Designs, Ezio Manzini states that collaboration is ‘an action that takes place when people encounter each other and exchange things in order to receive a benefit and to create a shared value’ (2015, p.93).

This definition suggests to us that when each collaboration takes place, there are always

Discovering New Ways

encounters at its core.

Good encounters give designers deep insights into the subject matter and allow them to empathize with the audience in order to open up more relevant spaces. When encounters happen in the co-design process, there are always dialogues and conversations that take place. This is because true collaboration does not come from a state of passive acceptance of information from one end only.

Define the conversation Collaboration and encounters should revolve around dialogues and conversations, and should never be one-sided. Visible or not, they take place as bridges that connect one being to another. They become engaging when the subject you are interacting with talks back to you. In talking, you can say everything: you can share ideas, you can tell a story, you can joke, and much more. They are an interchange of thoughts and information by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy.

There are slight differences between dialogues and conversations, and as co-designers we endeavor to fuse the two together. As a starter, ‘dialogue’ is between two persons. Most of the dialogue includes questions and answers, requests, and information. Dialogue is a conversational exchange between two people.

Dialogues have a purpose. It is more of an

advanced, but structured, form of conversation that two people could both benefit from after it’s done.

‘Conversation’, on the other hand, is interactive, more-or-less spontaneous communication between two or more people. Interactivity occurs because contributions to a conversation are responsive reactions to what has previously been said. Spontaneity occurs because a conversation must proceed, to some extent and in some way, unpredictably.

Co-designers utilize different tools and methods to foster dialogues and conversations when collaborating during the design process.

We try to merge the perks of both dialogues and conversations into one. Dialogue tools

Discovering New Ways

help to enhance the quality of the collaborative conversation. These tools have the power to change the attitude of the participants of the dialogue from passive to active. When designed correctly, it eases the participants into an atmosphere where they are willing to actively engage.

The conclusion: a synergetic conversation When the above mentioned elements come together - the active conversation, the engaged attitudes, and interactive tools - a synergetic conversation arises, paving the way toward a good start for collaboration. We are now living in a society where collective power is better acknowledged than that of a single entity.

It’s irrelevant how clever the individuals are.

What’s relevant to a society is how well people

are communicating their ideas, and how well they’re cooperating - whether or not the synergetic conversation is present.

We should look at ourselves as one big mass of collective brain. All individuals are the nodes in the network, the neurons in this brain. The shifts in design generation and the design paradigm now demand us to have conversations with each other. It’s the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating between them, that is causing the progress, incrementally, bit by bit. Living in a society which is like a collective brain, it is our job as designers to continue our conversations. We must know that more power comes from within us, and cannot be found on our own.

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Discovering New Ways

Three designers walk into a bar…

By Alice Moynihan

“Well, I’m the wrong scotsman to ask, I don’t drink it - I can’t stand the stuff”, the deep voice of Jock McEwan rung out loudly across the small, cozy pub. A few diners raised their eyes from their evening meals and looked over in our direction, giving us the distinct impression that they were curious about who we were. We had just approached a man standing at the bar, who we found out later was a local resident called Jock. We explained to him that we were co-design students attending the GSA Winter school [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13], and that we were working with a local malt whisky specialist, ‘Gordon & Macphail’. Over the previous week we had been on a mission to find out more about whisky, an iconic Scottish drink with a rich history in the region of Speyside, where we were currently staying.

In order to gain deeper insights into the significance of the drink for local people, we had decided to seek out conversations in different places around the community. Our plan for this particular evening was to visit the local pub, in the seaside village of Findhorn. When we arrived we were greeted by the warmth of an open fire, a welcome relief after the cold and blustery walk along the road from our hostel. With us we carried a bag of objects, which we called ‘The Sensory Kit’. It contained a collection of objects that are all essential components in the production of single malt whisky: a lump of peat, a charred piece of oak from a cask, a container of barley grain, and a

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

small sample of local malt whisky. Our intention was to use these artefacts when approaching and engaging strangers in conversation.

We hoped that the objects would act as conversation starters, as a kind of ‘ice-breaker’ dialogue tool, that we could use as an aid during our interactions with strangers.

So there we stood, at the bar. Tentatively, I took out the piece of cask from within the sensory kit bag. Showing Jock, I asked him, “Can you tell us about this?”

“That’s a piece of a whisky cask”, Jock answered immediately, only briefly glancing at the charred wooden object resting in my hand.

His quick response showed us that perhaps this question was too obvious for him.

“A lot of people think they know a lot about whisky, that they can tell a good one or what is expensive but they don’t”, he stated frankly.

Ignoring the piece of cask he continued to speak, laying out his conviction that malt whisky enthusiasts were, to put it nicely, “storytellers”. In his opinion, the idea that whisky was something complex and unique was, all and all, “a load of rubbish”. This direct response was not what we expected.

In fact, it presented a very different opinion to those which we had heard over the previous days. In these prior conversations, malt whisky was framed as a luxurious, artisanal product; its quality and taste achieved through a fine balance of ingredients, expert craftsmanship, and the fine tuning of time-honoured, traditional processes. We had approached the bar situation somewhat naively, with a belief that local people would echo similarly positive sentiments as those held by the whisky experts and cultural innovators we had met days earlier.

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Discovering New Ways

Despite this awkward discovery we attempted to press on with our conversation, and during the course of an hour several others joined in the discussion around the bar. They informed us of the ‘proper’ way in which whisky should be consumed, and discussed how this had changed over time; often including colourful, humorous anecdotes giving us vivid pictures of particular moments in their lives. It was interesting to hear how they debated the merits of different whiskies, advising us on what was good or bad with unwavering conviction.

As the bar began to empty, we shuffled away to collect our coats from their hooks beside the fireplace. I reached down to collect the sensory kit, which had been discarded under a stool, unused except for that brief moment at the beginning of the evening.

Reflecting Back What did we learn from this?

On a personal level, I enjoyed the experience, however, looking back on that night I realised that in many ways it had been messy and unfocused. Our initial assumptions had caught us off guard, our ‘sensory kit’ items had remained tucked away inside the confines of the bag almost the entire time. We had unintentionally taken off our ‘investigative-design student’ hats, settling for a more ‘native’, conversational approach - a deviation that took us well away from our original plans. This interaction is an example of how challenging it can be to navigate within ambiguous fieldwork scenarios, and displays the disparity that often exists between intention and outcome (Light and Akama, 2010).

As a student of co-design, things ‘not going to plan’ seems to me to be a frequent component of the design enquiries we take part in.

Our aim is not to simply plough through these bumps in the road, but instead to have the agility to navigate within them and find ways to become comfortable in the uncomfortable-ness of it all. This approach is reflected by Halse, et al. (2010) in the insistence that design as an open-ended enquiry must allow for a certain level of discovery and unpredictable learning, elements that are necessary ingredients of any truly innovative process.

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

Throughout this year I have seen my fellow students try out many different ways of engaging in field work interactions and with people in public spaces, often coming up with refreshing and creative ways to approach this.

One student dressed up as an alien in order to communicate with neighbourhood children, turning his lack of a shared language (a disadvantage) into a captivating alien character who was able to try and relate to the children in a new way [see ‘Child’s play’, p.34]. Another group posed as a futuristic hearing aid company in an attempt to invite members of the public to speculate on futuristic scenarios [see ‘Creating cirumstances’, p.51]. In both of these situations their role as co-designers takes on a highly performative nature: they are experimenting with personas as well as with role-play in live situations, and they are testing out new ideas in environments with high levels of innate unpredictability.

In the bar scenario, as well as those examples mentioned above, we are attempting to use co-design methods in an improvisational way, within a public space with random participants who have not previously agreed to participate in any conversation or interaction.

This contrasts with, say, a more controlled environment, such as a workshop, in which people are fully informed before entering into a situation and are agreeing and willing participants in some kind of discussion or generation of ideas or things. Is this experimental

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intervention style of doing co-design a useful and legitimate way to gather insights? Or is it too presumptuous to enter into people’s lives without their prior permission, and should we therefore stick to more openly transparent, organised approaches?

I’m not sure if there is a correct answer here.

However, if we choose to view these interactions from the frame of the student, with a desire to practice and learn, we can embrace these open spaces as rich in opportunities to observe, react, and practice improvisation.

When we enter into these unfamiliar spaces, we often feel a strong sense of awkwardness and discomfort. We may also find that our attempts are somewhat unsuccessful (as in the case of the night at the bar), but we are left with a fresh and clear reminder of the social complexities that exist within any given place.

We experience how a conversational dynamic can quickly change, and how non-human actors (such as those found in a foreign and informal bar setting) can influence our own behaviour and ability to perform as designers.

It is through practicing being and acting within a multitude of different situations, and with a variety of different collaborators, that we as co-designers can attempt to move on from failures and continue to develop and grow in future scenarios.

Discovering New Ways

Lion tamer: mama knows best By Íris-Edda Lappalainen

What do you want to do when you grow up?

This is a question that I have never been quite able to answer, aside from ‘lion tamer’ when I was six years old. I unfortunately didn’t become a lion tamer, but I have tried many other professions in the past 20 years. In this essay, I will tell the story of the journey that brought me to Copenhagen to study Co-design, and how I believe that all the different professions I have studied and worked with have given me useful and significant tools to be a co-designer.

I have always envied people who know what they want to study and work with. This has never been the case for me. I started working in restaurants alongside school when I was 15-years-old. This led to me being a waitress and a bartender until my early twenties. Working a lot, partying hard, not caring, or even thinking about the future for one second. My family was pushing me to apply for university, but since I didn’t know what I wanted to study this seemed useless - although I knew that I didn’t want to be serving drinks for the rest of my life. After several heated conversations, my mother said to just apply to some schools that I thought could possibly be interesting for me. The following autumn I started my studies in Culture Production. In the spring I did my internship at a record company in Helsinki.

With the contacts I made, there I was, hired as an assistant at a live entertainment company, and my studies ended there. I worked there for the next five years, moving up the ladder to a position with big responsibilities and no way

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

of moving higher, since this was the highest position I could be in within the company. I was 28-years-old, stressed, and work seemed to be endless, monotonous, and a waste of my time and energy. I needed a change.

The money-driven and greedy business I was in had been bothering me for some time; all the glamour of ‘sex, drugs and rock ’n roll’ was just an illusion, and had become a joke. I felt as if I needed something completely different.

I longed for something where the motivating factor wasn’t money or big egos. The frustration of spending my days, nights, and weekends doing something that was contrary to my nature led to me applying to the Reykjavik

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University School of Nursing. My Icelandic mother, of course, was the main encouragement for this step. She always says: “When in doubt, jump into the unknown”. So I jumped.

I moved to Reykjavik and started school. Life was good, life was new, and the future seemed bright and full of possibilities. That was, until I started questioning it all once again. I worked as a practical nurse during evenings and weekends. The work felt meaningful, but also a bit boring for my restless mind. I had started art classes again for the first time since my teenage years, and they felt like the only thing that inspired me. When I was younger, my parents had pushed me toward art schools but, like most, I didn’t want to listen or do

Discovering New Ways

what my parents said. I felt trapped inside my indecisiveness again. I had taken ceramic classes, and during my Christmas holiday back home in Helsinki, I received a phone call from the head of the school who had learned from my teachers that I was talented in ceramics, asking me to join the full-time Ceramics and Forming course. So, it was time to change my direction completely - once again. Studying to become a ceramicist brought me to the island of Bornholm, Denmark where I finally finished my Bachelor’s in Arts and Design.

During these studies, I kept on wondering if this was something I saw myself practicing for life. Although I enjoyed working with ceramics, with its challenges, and the many variations

and working methods, I did not see myself working alone making the same cups and pots over and over again. For me, clay wasn’t a passion; rather, a material and a challenge. I also found myself longing to have people around me, to work with others rather than alone.

I had several conversations about this with my teachers and friends and I was told about the Co-design programme at KADK. I told my parents that this made more sense to me for my Master’s than ceramics did, and they were not pleased. “Changing your mind again?” they asked, behind a mocking smile. It wasn’t until I explained that co-design, for me, was the only logical choice, since I felt that it brought together all the things I had practiced earlier in

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life. They agreed and started to see co-design as a possibility, rather than yet another total switch of direction.

To be totally honest, my understanding of what co-design was was quite limited and vague. It wasn’t until I started my studies at KADK that the meaning of co-design began to take form. During the past two semesters I have begun to see how my previous experiences could support me in co-designing. I am almost 10 years older than most of my fellow

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classmates, which I find to have its pros and cons. For example, I have no illusions of how companies, restaurants, different institutions, as well as independent workshops, are all dependent on money and efficiency. This I find both a pro and a con. I sometimes miss the optimistic side of me that has unfortunately faded to some extent; but it keeps me grounded and safe from disappointment. This side of me, however, does not necessarily have to keep on fading until it disappears, but could grow back again with co-design. Co-design, as well as my previous praxis, is human-centered. It is a trans-disciplinary education, and, I dare say, so is my past. I find co-design fascinating because of its honest intentions and vast possibilities. Co-designers have to learn how to be unbiased and how to put themselves in other people’s shoes - this could help me to put my pessimism aside and see the hope and opportunities that I see in my younger peers.

While learning more and more of the vast possibilities co-design has, I see it as a helping hand everywhere; and I see how a co-designer could find interesting problems to solve in all the fields I have participated in.

People need people Understanding the everyday life of a restaurant, nursing home, concert producer, and a designer helps me see the problems within the process. Putting on the glasses of a co-designer helps me see solutions objectively.

It also makes me look at these things and their

Discovering New Ways

problems as a whole; how all of these practices are human-centered, and how none of them would function, or even have a function, without people existing in them.

Out of the four quite different areas I have worked in, being a practical nurse was probably the most rewarding for me as a human being. Ironically, it also stands out from the others by probably being the least sexy and glamorous. From a co-design perspective, I also see it as the most challenging. I think that everyone enjoys music, food, and art on some level, but no one hopes to end up in a nursing home. After working in a nursing home one learns also to see the positive sides, that it is not only a hopeless place that people end up, but it is a place where people live their lives, it is a home. However, I feel that when being put in a home, most isolate themselves from society, becoming a patient for life, making the home the only place to exist. A co-designer could design solutions in collaboration with a restaurant, festival/concert, or a designer where either the people are brought out of their homes or the restaurant, festival/concert, or design is brought to them. I want to believe that all human beings, at least in the cultural scene, want to help the less fortunate, regarding health or wealth, but often just lack the tools to do it, or a place to start. A co-designer could be the practical nurse on a larger scale in this combo of professions, helping people to help each other.

To conclude, being a peripatetic person like I am, someone who moves around a lot and has a lot of interests, has made me someone who knows at least a little of many very different things and ways of working. I used to feel that this would be seen as a flaw, but now I am beginning to see it as a positive thing. Having been a part of so many different processes has given me a whole new set of tools that can be useful in a profession where one has to continuously put oneself respectfully, and effectively, in new situations.

I didn’t become a lion tamer, but, as my mother says, there is still time.

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Discovering New Ways

Child’s play

By Andrea Østmo da Costa

I’d like to share a story. A story about a team of sensational aliens, and the children of the Danish neighbourhood of Tingbjerg, who came to aid us, the aliens, in our mission to collect the essence of the place they called home and create a valuable holiday experience for all.

The ‘alien sensation agency’, Aliensensation, is visiting Tingbjerg from the planet Dumdum, from a faraway galaxy. The holiday market on the planet Dumdum has collapsed creating a 3.4 km long waiting list for much-valued spaceships.

Thousands of aliens are impatiently waiting to travel into space for a unique holiday experience beyond their galaxy. To tackle the travel pressure from Dumdum citizens, the ministry of culture has hired a professional bureau, Aliensensation, on a mission to collect the essence of several places on planet Earth with the purpose of providing an alternative ‘travel experience’ to the Dumdums. The agency has now arrived in Tingbjerg, where they are in need of the local population’s assistance during their visit to collecting the local ‘essence’: the objects, colours, textures, faces, and places that make up Tingbjerg. Aliensensation would like to return to their planet

with a much awaited ‘earth-like’ travel experience, which can satisfy the curious and impatient people of Dumdum whilst they are queuing up for their spaceship.’

A young girl is standing with her two brothers outside the school gates. We approach them and share our story: Giuliodum is visiting from a faraway galaxy called Dumdum, and is curious to learn about Tingbjerg and the people that live there. He has never seen anything like Tingbjerg, and would be incredibly happy to learn from a local like herself.

We ask whether it would be possible for her to show us around and explain to Giuliodum what all the different objects inside the school yard are used for. We explain that Giuliodum doesn’t speak Danish, but his own local language, therefore we will assist and translate the dialogue between them. The girl appears excited, and smiles eagerly at us. One of the group members, Maria, begins facilitating ‘the translation’ to the girl with a question from Giuliodum (the brave group member enacting the role of a Dumdum citizen):

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“He is asking what kind of place this is”.

The girl replies, looking curiously at Giuliodum, “it’s Tingbjerg School”. “… And what is a school?”, Giuliodum replies, looking at the girl.

Which Maria then translates into Danish: “he is asking what a school is”.

“A school is a place where you get smarter”, the girl replies confidently.

With an improvised tight yellow jumper, a cardboard and silver foil headpiece, and other DIY ‘exploration tools’, meant to function as Dumdum ‘essence collection tools’, Giuliodum is a complete alien character. He is a naturally playful person, and maintains the narrative of the character skilfully throughout the encounter.

The little girl and her brother appear visibly amused by this strange character, fascinated by their everyday life and happy to follow and join in their play.

Giuliodum, the girl, and her younger brother are now participating in the show-around inside the school yard. Whatever the girl and the brother do, Giuliodum attentively follows.

When she jumps onto the climbing net, Giuliodum unhesitatingly does the same. When she swings herself onto another play facility,

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Giuliodum swings with just as much eagerness.

The narrative is unfolding in front of us. We, the remaining three group members, are acting as facilitators, translators, and documenters of the encounter. Sometimes, the girl looks at us to check whether Giuliodum understands her, and appears to find comfort in our presence, the ’non aliens’.

We continue to translate Giulio’s questions, but the more they engage with one another the less translation is needed. The little girl and her brother appear visibly amused by this strange character, fascinated by their everyday life and happy to follow and join in their play. The narrative is becoming an opportunity to incentivise an explorers’ mindset in the children, including them in the narrative of ‘alienating’ a familiar space. She gets it. Just show him how to play. The narrative, the character and the props are serving their purpose, creating a connection and a shared feeling of curiosity and play - on the children’s terms.

Place, people, product, position This was our second field encounter as part of the Tingbjerg FerieCamp project [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.12]. We had only just begun making sense of the place, and how to approach the young people we’d like to invite to the holiday camp we were planning. Figuring out what a holiday camp meant for the children

Discovering New Ways

became the main focus of the field work through a process of ‘participatory prototyping’ (Brodersen, et al., 2008, p. 21). This process consisted of various considerations, such as: the place (making use of a given space to work in); the people (in this case the field work participants, the children); the final product (in this case the content of the holiday camp itself, prototyped collaboratively with the children); and lastly, our position in the social context (who were we to enter their space?).

Place The holiday camp was to be set in a specific location inside the local library. This meant that we could not travel anywhere with the children, such as taking them on an excursion or an adventure outside the boundaries of their familiar space. We therefore began questioning ourselves on how to create the sensation of exploration and adventure within their own space, within Tingbjerg.

We wanted to trigger their creativity and interest regarding their neighbourhood, especially considering Tingbjerg is slightly isolated from the city, and a place many residents of Copenhagen might only associate with crime and gang culture. This association with Tingbjerg had been mentioned to us by a local librarian, as well as our teachers, when we began the project. We were aware that, by appearing to take part in a charitable cause or project, that

we could be labeled, to a certain extent, as ‘outsiders’, and that the local community had not always had positive experiences with this.

Importantly, with this awareness of location specificity and the constraints this could bring, the challenge was to create an ‘opportunity space’ for building our own relationship with the place and the people.

The narrative was created with a similar notion as that mentioned in ‘Staging imaginative places for participatory prototyping’ (Brodersen, et al., 2008, p. 21), being “designed to deliberately move the participants far away from current practice through narratives, props and physical space.” The emphasis here, in line with our galactic narrative, is “an imaginative place that is radically different than current practice as a vehicle for transcendence”.

Using performance and role play was an opportunity and a reminder to leave behind assumptions, allowing the fieldwork to try and create a new cultural and social identity for Tingbjerg.

With this in mind, we started to formulate ‘what if’ questions: - What if we encouraged an ‘explorer’s mindset’ that could enable children to point out and reflect upon the qualities of Tingbjerg?

- What if we achieved engagement with the children by playing the role of newcomers curious to discover their local area?

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- What if we acted out a narrative as a way to create a space for creative expression, re-discovery, and estrangement?

greater empathy for the users and the contexts of use” (Brodersen, et al., 2008, p.20).

What if there was an ‘Alien Invasion’ of Tingbjerg?

Every field encounter became an opportunity to share the narrative, which allowed it to evolve organically with the feedback we received from the children. Giuliodum became an increasingly familiar character to the children.

Over a period of a few weeks, walking down the streets of Tingbjerg, we would hear occasional shouts from children acknowledging Giuliodum’s presence, laughing at his odd walk and funny attire. Increasingly, the other group members would begin dressing up alongside the main character, Giuliodum.

People - invading through ‘child’s play’

Product - collaborative prototyping

The Aliensensation agency regularly visited Tingbjerg on a mission to ‘collect the essence’, and engaged in exploration of the local children’s neighbourhood. As all field encounters would begin with us taking to the streets to engage spontaneously with children after the school day was over, we were acutely aware of the issues around approaching children dressed like aliens from another planet. This uncertainty, in fact, spurred the idea of using performance as a way of drawing attention to ourselves, and, in that way, triggering curiosity.

Therefore, we armed ourselves with our props of “things to act with” and “things to think with” in order to help ourselves “achieve a

For the next encounters leading up to the holiday camp, we all took part in the play and became aliens once a week. With each encounter we developed ‘explorer’s props’, or lab tools, that belonged to the Aliensensation agency. The tools consisted of ‘smell extractors’, ‘essence pickers’, and other made-up gadgets to be used to extract and collect the essence of Tingbjerg in a convincingly alien fashion. By the time we reached the week of the holiday camp, the characters and narrative were fully shaped, and we could invite the children into an Aliensensation open lab, where they could participate in alien explorations, prop-making and DIY alien gadget-making. The play was on.

- What if, by giving the children the role of ‘specialists’ and unique citizens of Tingbjerg, we could create a sense of pride in the community?

- What if we were aliens visiting Tingbjerg, and the children our guides into their world?

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Position - the uncertainty of our relationship “Several participatory design techniques and approaches express fundamental hybridity in that they unfold in circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain, neither belonging to the everyday domain of the designers or the domain of the users.” (Brodersen, et al., 2008, p. 21).

Our field work methodology led to insights not only into the participants but into ourselves as designers, people, and collaborators.

Our field work methodology led to insights not only into the participants but into ourselves as designers, people, and collaborators. The specificity of the communication tools, as ‘participatory prototypes’ - in that they were specially formed for the purpose of this project - forced us to immerse ourselves further, and consider how we were being viewed from the outside.

Performance and role play allowed us to create alternative personas, of imagined characters with a specific purpose and role, a new position within society.

The experience of not necessarily being ‘an expert’ in the project you are involved in, was to many of the students a novel experience.

However, the uncertainty and ambiguous circumstances created room for experimentation, trial, and error in the building of various human relationships. Establishing relationships in order to carry out valuable participatory field work also caused us to consider our position in the context of, not only the project, but society. As co-designers, it is likely that we will enter and exit projects of varying complexity. Every project can be an opportunity to critically asses your role and behaviour within a specific context.

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Discovering New Ways

Beyond what you see: the notebook

By Naomi Aholou

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Room for improvement My notebook is an object that I use before, during, and after an event. This event could be an interview, a conference, making a prototype, or ideation. My experience of the design process is that, whatever you are doing, some elements need to be continuously improved. Sometimes the part which needs correcting is obvious.

But sometimes it feels wrong, and it is hard to determine why. In such a situation, I will use my sketchbook as a companion to search for a solution.

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Once I made a presentation of a team project in front of a company, and I was quite disappointed by what we did in terms of originality and form. Our presentation was insipid, and did not have enough personality. I felt that the company would not be willing to go along with our proposal. Therefore, after the meeting I started to listen to the presentations of other students and took notes of all the things that were capturing the audience’s attention. At the same time, I started reflecting on how to prepare a better presentation and make it successful.

Discovering New Ways

The notebook: my memory As a designer, I have a very visual memory and I really like drawing. Sketching is a way to remember what has happened. In this way, my notebook becomes an archive of my thoughts, that can be consulted without any moderation.

The figure above represents a sketch that I

completed after a lettering workshop. What is important in these drawings is that I tried to capture the order and movements of the brush with some notes and drawings. These pages are really valuable, particularly as I can look back at them months later, and, when viewing the drawings, can remember exactly how to do it again.

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The exploration of unknown territories While using my notebook, I have observed that visualising my thoughts is a way to explore unknown fields. When I start drawing sketches next to my notes, I have much more freedom: there are no constraints and no limits of exploration. Drawing allows me to navigate through metaphorical stories toward an object or idea, giving them more sense and meaning.

In this way, I can easily express a message, and enable a potential reader to understand.

I would say sketches are like poetry: they convey, by metaphors and pictures, what words alone cannot.

When I started to write this essay, I searched for a provocative, unexpected hook. I wanted to create a comparison of the notebook with something in everyday life which everyone could refer to. I started drawing a character which represented the designer. The head of the designer made me think of a plant. Yes, it sounds unexpected, but in France “being a plant� means observing and feeling your environment, without doing anything. I thought that the plant could have its notebook allowing it to reflect on what it sees.

I ended up thinking that this was too complicated. Therefore, I started looking for another story. I thought about transforming the notebook into a mirror, something that reflects your thoughts, and then a family picture ...

In the end I came up with the designer who is transformed into an investigator with their notebook.

All these ideas appeared from making sketches. I stimulated my brain to visualise my ideas, and created stories that could be used to explain a concept to someone foreign to it.

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A communication tool Visualising ideas can be a real brain exercise… as I need to find a way to represent what I think, have seen, or experienced, and make it understandable to the reader.

When my notes need to be shared, because I work in a team, I have to get rid of this fuzzy way of sketching-taking-notes and opt for a clearer structure. Setting up the structure and doing the layout is the key to success. This procedure is also very useful and necessary for clarifying and sorting my ideas.

The sketch ‘Customer Journey’ was for a project where I had to create packaging for a board game. I had no clue what it should look like, so I started to figure out what the interaction of a player with the game might be, and what would be the content of the game. This exercise was useful to get an idea of what the different steps of interaction with a game box were, and consequently what kind of ergonomics it should have. I had to share this information with my other team members, and clear communication was crucial.

Later on we used the pages of my notebook to show the client our design approach. So, if I had to give you some advice, it would be that sometimes, even if you are not thinking of showing your work, it is always better to do your design research in a proper way, because you can then reuse them.

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The notebook transforms me into an investigator When my thoughts are transferred onto the pages of the notebook I behave as an investigator. My notebook becomes a tool which allows me to take a step back on my raw ideas and actions, and start analysing and reflecting on them.

First of all, I start gathering all the facts - in other words, the things that I know and have seen. After putting all these elements together, I can start questioning myself about what happened: what was the context; who were the actors; which elements were linked? The final step is making conclusions from my observations and building upon them.

The first time that I led an interview, I had to ask kids about their interests. It went totally wrong. Once I got back home I started to draw all the scenes of the encounter with the interviewees in order to understand what could be improved. This memory exercise forced me to analyse our posture, our setting in the space, some details of the interview, the body language, and even the clothes. After that, I was able to start making conclusions about what made it go so wrong.

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Conclusion As a designer I cannot be limited to what I see or experience. I need to discover new possibilities, stay open, explore unexpected territories, and come back to my project with a new vision which will improve my work.

My notebook is a powerful tool to consider all of my research and explorations, by taking notes, drawing sketches, and elaborating new and unforeseen quests.

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Discovering New Ways

Creating circumstances

By Maria Mietke Rasmussen

In every situation, there is a ‘best way’ to approach the people you want to talk too. It depends on various factors. What do we want the outcome to be?

What do we want to know? Who are we talking to, and where is the conversation taking place? These variables need to be uncovered to get a sense of what the ‘best way’ is.

It can be hard to be fully aware of all these things.

Sometimes you don’t even know what it is exactly you are looking for. And then it can be hard creating the right circumstances. How do we create a certain way/circumstance/atmosphere for people to engage in and share themselves?

This essay will explore an encounter in a specific project. We created a professional persona, which helped us to ask different questions and get a different outcome than what we might have received as students in the eyes of the public.

In pretending to be white collar workers - from the firm, ‘Decibel Future Lab’ - we sought to be playful and have fun, at the same time as getting the information the way we thought would have the biggest effect on the participants.

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Decibel Future Lab In this project, we collaborated with a hearing aid company, about Future Hearings [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13] and this example is one of many encounters for the project. The example is, as I mentioned above, one where there is a specific set of questions we wanted to explore. We wanted to meet people in public, people who were not related to the project, through the company, and who hopefully had less expectations and ideas about what we were doing.

We wanted the encounter to take place in a place we could meet a lot of different people and get as much variation as possible.

The company we were working with had provided us with contacts of hearing aid users, but we wanted a broader perspective. We also wanted the people to think we were professionals, so they would take us seriously and really consider our questions.

The subjects we were exploring were future technology and hearing aids. These subjects were chosen partly to help us be perceived as professionals. We needed people to believe in our knowledge. Therefore, we created what we called ‘Decibel Future Lab’, a lab that aimed to develop future technology in hearing aids that could help people in their everyday life.

The Lab gave us an identity. We were explorers developing new technology for hearing aids.

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Discovering New Ways

And not just technology that had been seen before - no: scary, crazy, different, technology that would really change things. We were helping people. In this identity we could be sure of our selves, because we were professionals and we decided what was real or not. It did not matter that we had no idea what could be real or not, because the people we talked to didn’t know either. We decided the limit of what was possible.

The purpose of the encounter was to learn about people’s thoughts on technology and hearing aids. What did they think of the possible future scenarios we made up, and what were their relationships or encounters with hearing aid users? Our made-up identity was a way for us to explore and speculate in a fictional place and through this generate new ideas.

To show we were the professional team we wanted to be, we dressed the same. We wore black pants, white shirts, and a lanyard containing a business card, with our names printed on it. The look, and our posters, got us a lot of attention, as did the way we presented ourselves.

A lot of older people thought we were there to help them find the arthritis meeting they were attending, which at the time gave the team confidence. They saw us as people who knew the workings of the place and had authority.

We had set up a base in the middle of a big room, so everybody could see us. We placed our props we had with us on a table in the middle of the room, from which we could start

a conversation. We made future scenarios on how technology could help or affect people’s everyday lives. The future scenarios were illustrated with a picture of that future, and the scenario was written underneath the picture too, so people could read it themselves. We had two big posters and smaller cards which could be written on. The two posters illustrated future scenarios and the smaller cards had questions about experiences and prejudice. The future scenarios were very difficult for people to have a long talk about. People mostly were only able to say that they did or did not like a scenario, but could not elaborate on their reasons.The smaller cards were much easier. Many knew people with hearing aids, or hearing problems, or had these problems themselves.

The whole encounter took place in different locations in Nørrebro: the shopping mall and the culture house. The shopping mall was a brief experience, because we did not have permission to be there. The culture house was different. Here we were welcome and we ended up staying there for an hour or more. You would think that we would need more time, but we got to talk to a lot of different people who contributed in many different ways.

The most prominent figure was probably Peter, who had a hearing aid himself. He was there with his wife, and talked a lot with us.

He had a lot of information and experience he wanted to share. The wife was also a contributor of the knowledge we got from them.

The other conversations we had were quicker

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Discovering New Ways

or smaller, and none of them had a hearing problem, though they knew someone who had.

The encounter was productive in some ways, but we did not get all the answers we wanted.

We got to talk to people and play the role we wanted to, and it became clear to us that people believed in us. We were not so successful in discussing the future scenarios, which was important to us because it was part of the dialogue tool we were going to make. However, we still felt that it gave us some knowledge we could use, as we learned more about people’s thoughts about technology, and therefore we got a better feeling of what we had to do to start a conversation about these subjects.

The benefits of pretending In creating this identity for ourselves, we got to interact with people on a different level. We felt very professional during the encounter.

When talking to people, we felt they had a very positive attitude and trusted our knowledge about the subject. One of the participants that we talked to had a lot to say about hearing aid problems, and he eagerly asked us different questions and shared with us what he knew, while he was seeking confirmation that his knowledge was correct.

if we were the professionals and had all the answers. Of course it can become a problem in some instances, when you are pretending you are something you are not. So it would probably be best to take the pretending no further than is possible, so you don’t disappoint or bring mistrust to the people you are working with. I think it worked out well for us, because the subject we focused a lot on was future technology, which most people don’t know a lot about. We also talked to people about hearing aids, but because we already had a lot of conversations with the hearing aid company and users of hearing aids, we had knowledge that could back up our identity.

The result would probably have been different if the identity we displayed was that of students on a project. I think in both good and bad ways. Maybe they would not have been so intimidated or shy to talk to us if we had revealed that we were students. In presenting it as a serious project, we suggested that their opinions were going to be used and documented. That could probably frighten some people off.

When we pretend to be someone we are not, there can be different benefits. We saw in our project that the participants acted differently in the way that they talked to us, as

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Team spirit The professional look helped. Not just because the people we were talking to saw us differently than if we had approached as students, but also because it made us feel more like experts.

It gave us the confidence we actually knew more about the subject than we did. Of course, we had done a lot of research, but for me it also helped realize what I had learned, and realize that I was, in a way, becoming a kind of expert.

Apart from being something that helped us approach people, it was also very good for the team atmosphere and morale. Getting to play a role and play professionals was a fun thing, and I felt it inspired us and got us in a good mood, which carried us further in the project.

I think we also got a lot of confidence because the professional aspect went so well, and we therefore suddenly felt professional. It gave us the confidence that we could get something going so quickly and successfully. It was fun and helped build the team’s energy and appetite to keep on going.

Engaging people Getting people to come and participate in public can be difficult because there is not a lot of time to create trust, and make them care and take ownership of whatever you are doing.

Maybe everything would have worked out better if there was some kind of

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‘gift’ value they could take away with them. Something that could show them that their opinion had value to us.

I think it is also about stakes. We talked with one that had a hearing aid, and he talked a lot. He had something to give to us because the subject concerned him. Maybe in the future he would even benefit from it. The difficult part is getting people which do not have a stake to care and participate. It could have been done by preparing people via an event website, or something that created a connection and gave information to them.

To take Decibel Future Lab further, we could have created a website and products that would manifest our professional identity even more. Showing products people could buy and other technology that could give a better insight into what we were about to do.

Having products that don’t exist being sold on a website could be used to see if people like the product or not, which is also a method to see if people like an idea. We talked about creating a website but did not have the time. And, as a reflection on this, we talked about how a price of some kind could give them joy and make them not feel cheated.

I think it can be difficult to get the atmosphere/circumstances right in order to extract exactly what information you are looking for.

Almost impossible. When working on projects where time is short, it is important to

Discovering New Ways

work quickly, and not waste the little time you have. But at the same time it is a balancing act, because uncertainty can be a downfall.

There are always good and bad outcomes with how you approach people, especially if you don’t know much about them. The challenge is to get it as right as possible.

This way of approaching people, pretending to be professionals, can work out, if it is someone you are not creating a relationship with. So it needs to be in public and with people you don’t know, where the ‘lies’ don’t have the same consequences. I think that this method should only be used when you are trying to get people to answer your questions without the prejudice of seeing you as a student, or something else.

The teachers in our Master’s programme very much insist that in co-design you should try out tools so you know if they will work. And that you should do it from the get go, so you do not have the ‘normal’ design research phase, and so on. It is more ‘mushed’ together. I do agree that to be able to get a project going we need to try and test our methods and dialogue tools as quickly as possible. However, I also think that there is a fine line that can be difficult to pinpoint, because it is based on how much time is available. This ability is based on having experienced a project where the tools have not worked that well, or could have been better if we approached it differently and not been too hasty.

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A co-designer’s work day in 2020

By Rikke Gjerulff

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I’m on my way to work, on my bike, listening to the most recent podcast from Harvard Business Review. A series of management gurus are advocating that the initial merits claimed by big data analysis in guiding business strategies is increasingly being challenged by more qualitative trend-analysis through the use of in-depth user interviews and observations. The key point being that statistical data cannot forecast the trend that is coming the day after tomorrow - big data is not sufficient for knowledge-based industries that are eager to stay ahead of the curve. I find that point somewhat appealing, and relevant to what I do for a living.

The podcast finishes as I arrive at work. It’s been less than three months since I started working at ‘Comprehensive Design’, the first Copenhagen-based agency that has embraced a broader use of design methods and incorporated them into more classical disciplines such as anthropological research, corporate strategy development, strategic communication, and project management.

I enter the lobby and pass through an open work space where two of my colleagues are preparing a workshop facilitation using a giant clipboard with attached postcards. Like me, they have been hired as co-designers based on their master’s degrees in Co-design.

In addition to my co-design qualifications, I also landed this job based on my previous pro-

fessional work experience as a graphic designer with various design agencies, as well as my own start-up. Utilizing my experience working with visual identities, brand strategy, and communication, I find it fairly easy to interact with colleagues with a more business-minded background from the Copenhagen School of Business (CBS). This corresponds very well with the way tasks are organized functionally at Comprehensive Design, specifically through the creation of ad hoc teams, which bring various skill sets into play. The working method

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is very much collaborative, recognizing that an optimal solution cannot be found without everybody’s participation.

The first order of business today is a meeting of my team. We are currently doing a project for the Danish Ministry of Education, and after last week’s initial brief, followed by some traditional desk-based research, we are meeting to discuss which stakeholders to engage in further dialogue with, in order to gain that deeper understanding of the issue which is characteristic of our work. While the anthropologist in the team is very strong on some of the methodological considerations in constructing a qualitative research design, my core added value is to incorporate alternative forms of dialogue tools to facilitate a more dynamic and insightful interaction with the users or stakeholders. I have been playing around with an idea to design a probe-kit in the shape of a school bag for kids to take home.

The company is simultaneously undertaking two other projects, one for the Capital Region of Denmark regarding working processes in emergency rooms, and one for a major Danish shipping company (standard liability clauses prevent me from naming them). It is quite characteristic of our client portfolio that it reaches across the corporate sector as well as the public sector. Common with these projects is our ambition to create design-facilitated solutions within fields of work and industries that have not normally been associated with

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the work of designers. When pitching ideas to potential clients, we always stress that we use designers, but not necessarily to produce a final product. Rather, the designers are instrumental in designing the process that leads to the innovation tools we use to interact with users. The focus of our work is focused more towards processes, facilitation and tools that can help clients in their search for a better understanding, and a stronger contact with their target group (their users).

After the team-meeting, I am back at my desk to follow-up on another project. I need to compile and analyze the information we derived from the last couple of weeks’ so-called ‘field encounters’. My overview list is quite long: - field research - observation of users - persona development - workshops held with users Specifically, my task is to utilize all this indepth information and try to create a prototype that we will then test over and over during the course of a week. This process is very much inspired by Jake Knapp’s (2016) famous Sprint method which is being used, for example, at Google Ventures. Generally, we develop many prototypes, out of which many are discarded, while some will make the cut for further elaboration and analysis. Prototypes are, of course, ‘tested, redesigned, retested’ in close cooperation with the users.

Discovering New Ways

As is typical with most of our work, the client is somewhat unspecific about what they are requesting. The end goal is very ‘fluffy’, though this is a requirement for our agency if we are to take on a project. Our working method is very much exploratory and inductive. We prefer to go out to the user in their everyday context to try and see what the reality looks like. Based on that, we design and test various interaction models to facilitate a deepened understanding of the users’ desires, wants, and needs. So you don’t always know where you are going to end up, and you need to have a mindset that allows for extreme adaptability to where the process might take you.

My last meeting of the day is a routine evaluation report with the company’s CEO, my boss, Thomas B. Being very interested in how co-designers can provide added value to his firm, Thomas is very eager to have an ongoing dialogue about progress and challenges. He starts off by repeating why he thinks it is a good thing to hire co-designers:

- Co-designers perform research while they design – the co-designer is familiar with iterative processes that are often nonlinear.

- Co-designers can quickly materialize an idea in the form of a prototype, and thus allow for rapid sprint-testing.

Today is somewhat out of the ordinary as I am spending most of the day at the office.

Normally, I would be in-and-out during the day facilitating workshops with the client or conducting field research with the users.

After a good day at work, I am back home.

To keep me updated on emerging trends, I read the magazine Scenario, published by the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, while I enjoy a cup of coffee. I’m already looking forward to another day of work again tomorrow.

- Co-designers interact closely with the client and particularly the user.

- The co-designer possesses practical knowledge about anthropological research-based interaction and how to conduct these interactions in real life.

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THEME 02

COMFORT AND DISCOMFORT This book explores the visceral feelings of unease, nakedness, confusion, and fear as they are manifested in a series of personal reflections. The writers describe an interplay of emotions that have emerged during their recent encounters with co-design. As they approach unfamiliar people and new spaces they are challenged to find comfort in the discomfort, and confidence in their own abilities to navigate potential collaborative futures.

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

Follow your true north

By Giulio Ceste

A designer’s guide to open-endedness Starting a collaborative process is like walking for the first time into a place you don’t know: you can’t tell in advance which paths to take, nor can you predict where such paths will lead you. By bringing other people into your journey, you unveil so many unexpected directions that you could get lost. But as a designer, you are not just a wanderer: you know where you want to go and you can glimpse that destination from every new place you walk to. You ask locals because they know the best way to get to there, and because you believe it’s possible to get there together.

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1. Don’t mistake open-ended for aimless

3. Ask others for directions

Letting other people speak does not mean falling silent. Consider yourself as the explorer who unveils new ways and confronts collaborators with new possibilities: any new opportunity you bring to the table is nothing but what you can see through your telescope, it’s what you are curious about. So don’t try to be neutral. And don’t hide behind your methods, since co-design is not your goal, it’s the tool you use to reach your destinations. It’s the compass that helps you move forward into the unknown.

Every project is an opportunity to see how your values take shape in a real context, with a real issue, which affects real people.

It’s your chance to learn from others how your ideal and preferable world could work in reality. However, even if you know where you want to go, you are also ready to change your plans if people teach you something new and enrich your perspective. Every new encounter perfects your vision, by adding new details, and by overwriting less accurate ones.

It makes you more sensitive.

2. Know where you want to go

4. Be curious about the world around you

A compass can work only if there is a north.

What is your north? Remember that knowing where you want to go does not mean knowing what you will design. Rather, it’s being aware of what preferable future you want to foster with your design, whatever that might be. Your work has the power of affecting the world around you - so how do you want to affect it? What values, what meanings, and what behaviours characterize this preferable future which you are glimpsing from where you stand?

In order to know how you want to change your surroundings, you also need to know them as they are right now. Of course you are aware that your design can affect them, but you should also consider how they affect your design. What are the biggest changes happening out there? How can you use them? Shall you enhance them, or counteract them? Now, take a look around you and see if you can find any small traces of that future you want to reach. Start from what there is, let those traces lead you.

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Comfort and Discomfort

Notebook talkback

By Alice Moynihan

As indicated by its name, the ‘notebook’ is an object or thing that will at some point or another come into the possession of a human counterpart: one who will most probably use it as a tool through which to inscribe thoughts, ideas, sketches, and other musings rendered in pencil or ink. The particular notebook around which this essay centers happened to belong to a girl who was on a journey to learn something ‘new’ in the field of design - and, specifically, co-design.

In this tell-all account, he (the notebook) recollects his observations of the girl during a transitional period, from her being a mostly ‘desk-dwelling’ designer to the kind of designer who orientates more towards the outside world, and the people and places which inhabit it.

Later, the girl joins the conversation, telling her side of the story. It has not been an easy time for the pair of them, and by no means a fluid transition. In this account we will hear about the many struggles and deliberations they have encountered along the way, with a particular focus on how they engaged in fieldwork, attempted harmonious team collaboration and tackled new, and open-ended, processes.

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Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

Notebook Writes Notebook: I can’t say it’s an easy business being the companion of a co-designer. Gone are the days when I would sit peacefully at her desk, cosied up beside the warmth of her other good friend, Coffee, while she calmly chipped away at designerly tasks - creating infographics, wireframe layouts, and editorial illustrations under the synthetic, radiant gaze of the most prestigious member of our desk community, Mr Mac Apple. Today, I’m more likely to be found amidst a chaotic pile of scraps of paper, my own bookish thoughts interrupted by the constant chatter of her newfound collaborators as they discuss, and often disagree, about how to proceed, in what seems like a high-spirited, but incredibly confusing, and often messy, process. On other days I find myself plunged into darkness, only to re-emerge in the outside world: in unfamiliar places, amongst the chaos of strangers, where I become the carrier of their nuanced thoughts and perspectives.

The First Encounter Notebook: I remember the day vividly. After being jostled around on the back of a bicycle for what felt like forever, I arrived in front of a building which read: “Tingbjerg Biblioteket”. It was a pleasantly sunny Saturday morning, and the atmosphere was relaxed as the locals went about their regular weekend activities. However, she (my designer companion) was not so

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relaxed. I could tell by the way she gripped me tightly in her hand that she was more than a little nervous. They (her and her other, more experienced, human team member) had some kind of ‘ethnographic encounter’ planned, judging by the list of interview-style questions she had scribbled on me the night before.

I watched as they approached a young girl who sat alone in a playground, swinging back and forth on a bright yellow swing set. They introduced themselves and spent a few minutes asking her various questions, to which the young girl responded with short and nondescript answers. Their awkward smiles and fidgety gestures made me distinctly aware that they had no real clue what they were doing.

However they persisted down this track, improvising small talk for several minutes, until eventually the young Tingbjerg local, Sarah, offered to show them around the small neighbourhood, pointing out the school, the places where her friends lived, and the football field where she liked to play.

After the tour, Sarah (who had now seemed to gain complete control over these adults, almost 20 years her superior) began instructing them to take out their phones and join her in an impromptu dance choreography session, which would be filmed for her social media followers. Honestly, they looked ridiculous, and I felt a deep sense of embarrassment on behalf of my companion. If I had hands (or arms, for that matter), I would have used them to cover

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my field of vision rather than bear witness to this peculiar situation. Why were they allowing themselves to be bossed around by an, albeit assertive, 8-year-old? Had they completely forgotten that they were trying to be expert designers? It seemed they had become actors in their own ethnographic field show - quite literally, dancing puppets.

Girl: I need to interrupt here for a moment.

You are not being a very fair, Notebook, and could you for one minute tone down your condescension and entertain the possibility that there is more than one way to be a designer?

Just because we let the girl take the lead in the interaction doesn’t mean we weren’t doing our jobs as designers. We wanted to build some sense of trust with her. After all, we were the ones who entered her neighbourhood. Would you walk into someone’s house and start rearranging the furniture without asking them first? The problem with you, Notebook, is that you’re too attached to being in command. Sometimes you need to accept that there is space to share decision-making with others. Not all interactions should be one-sided, but instead they can be a conversation, an exchange of some kind; be that as ideas, dialogue, or, as in this case, a choreographed dance.

Notebook: I cannot possibly agree with you, dearest girl. Your sentiments are charming, but naively optimistic. And, can I ask you exactly what was going on in the following week when you returned once more to Tingbjerg? In case you have forgotten that little episode, I will remind you: you had gone to the local after-school activity centre with the intention of meeting up with Sarah and her friends to carry out a collaborative mapping workshop. I remember thinking to myself: “alright I’ll give this a chance, it doesn’t sound half bad, right?” Wrong! The mapping workshop consisted of a large group of hyperactive children flocking to a table laden with various crafting materials. Glue, modelling clay, and cardboard erupted into the air, and crayons travelled at high speeds in every direction across the table as words and pictures were hastily scribbled across a large scale map of their village.

I took refuge under the table, and from my safe vantage point. I watched as you engaged in what you called a ‘generative participatory exercise’. I had quite a headache after this extravaganza, and to make it worse, several of my once smooth pages were now stuck together with sticky clumps of glue, a lasting reminder of this turbulent event. It is a messy business this “co-design” - messy, chaotic and unruly, and I really can’t for the life of me understand why any designer would want to partake in it.

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Comfort and Discomfort

Girl: I’m sorry about the glue and the chaos, I’ll admit there was plenty of both. Remember we are all new to this, and we haven’t worked out the best way to do things - yet. I realise now that details like numbers of participants and choice of materials are decisions that need to be carefully considered. And that they can have a big impact on our ability to facilitate a productive workshop, especially with kids where things, as you put it - can “erupt”.

It may have been messy, but isn’t a little mess worth it in order to include the children in a conversation? We wanted their input in deciding what their holiday camp should be and we needed a way to try and activate them hence, the workshop. The goal in this exercise was to get the children involved in thinking and imagining possible activities and spaces in and around their community. We chose to give them physical materials to try and engage them in making their ideas more concrete, in three-dimensional form, and then to relate these forms back to the physical space, the map of their village. An attempt at what Sanders and Stappers (2008) refer to when they talk about giving non-designers generative tools to imagine and express how they might want to live, work, or play in the future.

So you may continue to mock our collaborative efforts, Notebook, but, surely, even you can see the logic in involving citizens in design work, rather than isolating them from the process and basing our decisions purely on our own ‘expert’ assumptions.

Notebook: Okay, okay I take your point, the chaos out there is necessary. But that doesn’t account for the chaos in the studio. There have been days when you have appeared to be doing nothing other than having hours upon hours of disagreements - or, as you like to phrase it, “discussions”. It’s so noisy in there, don’t you miss the quiet?

Girl: Yes, it’s true, Notebook, we do spend a lot of time discussing. I didn’t really understand until now how difficult collaboration could be.

We have to contend with a mixture of personalities, perspectives, and agendas, and we have to somehow find a way to reach agreement around how to take further action. I believe the potential for conflict in opinion is higher within a co-design studio, due to the interdisciplinary makeup of the people in here. We come from different fields - some of them not even design-based - and, so, naturally there is a wider gap between our personal expectations and our individual methods of working.

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You glorify the old days because we were more quickly able to reach a consensus then. But do not forget that back then the scope of possible deliverables was far smaller, and that, as a collective group of mostly ‘visual communication designers’, our ideas and assumptions of what constitutes ‘good’ design were more closely aligned. On the other hand, within this ‘old’ space there wasn’t a lot of latitude for disagreement. It might help you, Notebook, to question the premise of whether something is necessarily better because it is smoother?

Or, whether a certain amount of friction is a necessary and even healthy part of any design process?

Notebook: Ok, sure - then you can have your discussions. But if you spend all your time discussing aren’t you at risk of forgetting that you have a duty as a designer to make either pixels or material manifestations of these ideas - you know, actual good quality things? All you seem to do now is make Post-it note collages all over the walls. When you finally do get around to creating things, it’s usually these ugly, poorly-constructed prototypes. Objects that are made as quickly as possible and with no consideration of whether they are technically and aesthetically worthy to leave the confines of the studio. You’ve seemed content to take these monstrosities out into the world to be let loose on citizens, which is quite unlike you, dear girl.

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What would Mr Mac and the rest of our old friends back at the desk design community think if they saw this? Do you really think that prioritizing such a fuzzy kind of collaboration above fine-tuned finesse will bode well for you in the future? Especially when you emerge back out into the professional world, where the clock is always ticking and the coins are being counted.

Girl: I’m disappointed in your pessimism, Notebook, and I don’t disagree with everything you say. As for the Post-it notes, the reason we use them is simply because they are brightly coloured and sticky, and that happens to make them a very convenient tool through which to display collectively-generated ideas. But you are right, they have become far too ubiquitous, and we would most likely benefit from trying out a less clichéd way to share ideas and document our process.

As for your other quandary, I think you’re being too harsh on the prototypes. It makes me wonder if you misunderstand what their intended purpose is. They are definitely not supposed to be iterations on the way to a finished product (as in the more traditional and ‘modern’ sense of the prototype), but rather they are another tool to help in the decision making process. As alluded to by Eva Brandt and colleagues (2012), when prototypes are used in the emerging design space, the focus is on using making activities to help ‘make sense of the future’.

Comfort and Discomfort

The way I see it, we do not set out to discriminate against designing “good quality things” (to use your words), but that the shift into making design more democratic results in a rearrangement of the traditional design process.

We no longer put the bulk of our energy into seeking and producing a beautifully-rendered final product. Instead, we reorientate to a more open-ended, iterative, and transparent way of working (Halse, et al., 2010).

Three Months Later Notebook: I truly miss our old life together.

A life where things were simple, rather than complex. A time when we followed the rules, when you recorded “yes” and “no” answers within my pages, instead of more questions.

The days when people told us what they wanted and we followed a well-trodden path toward the final point of delivery. Back then we had a sense of control: we had expertise, knowledge, and power. Now you insist that my pages must remain open, to be shared with anybody and everybody. The ideas I once guarded for you inside my cover are offered up to others in the outside world to be interfered with and, most irritatingly, to those with no formal creative training.

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Personally, I find this deeply troubling. I worry that when one becomes a completely open (note)book, one exposes himself to the world.

When he gives away his secrets, his knowledge, and his position as expert, his power is by consequence diffused. He can never really go back to being the creative, all-knowing (note) book that he once was. If all of his innovations are to be shared, broken down, distributed, and adapted, nothing will truly belong to him and him alone.

Girl: Really, Notebook, what is it about being open that still seems to frighten you so much?

I understand things have changed and it’s normal to have reservations - I know I have certainly had my own fair share of doubts over the last six months. It’s not easy transitioning into a new field, practicing what it means to be a ‘co-designer’, and learning how to navigate within a space where design is a rampantly explorative activity. Although it sounds like a sexy prospect, in reality it has been a lot more unsettling.

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The feeling is similar to that of being in a large and unfamiliar city without a map. You spend time walking around - sampling the local food, observing the people - and eventually you get a little lost out there. You take turns at random, following street signs in the hope that they will lead you towards somewhere that seems familiar. If you are unlucky, you might just end up back where you started - or, at worst, a dead end. But if you are willing to come along with me, Notebook, there is a chance that, freed from the restrictions and assumptions that are inherent in any map, we might now be able to discover a new place. Somewhere exciting and unexpected; maybe something even better than before!

Comfort and Discomfort

Notebook: You paint a lovely picture, dear girl, but I think you are getting carried away, and I no longer want to continue on this mapless, and indeed hapless, journey with you any longer. It’s a cliché to say it, but we really did just grow apart. I need to find a companion with more drive. The kind of designer who dreams of inventing new things, an innovator whose ambition matches my own. Someone with whom I can spend my days within the confines of a well-lit studio space creating wonderful, beautiful, and clever things. To tell you the truth, I have become acquainted with a well-informed Pencil and she tells me that there are plenty of top-notch furniture designers around these parts just waiting for a notebook like me.

Girl: Well, Notebook, I’m sad to see you go but I won’t try to stop you. However, I think you are wrong about us co-designers not having ambition. I think it’s just an ambition that is evolving in a different direction to the kind that you cling to so tightly. I hope in time you will come to realise that to innovate does not only mean to make something entirely new.

And that you will gradually let go of your traditional ideals and understand that design today is just as much about observing what is already here, and rearranging the pieces of an increasingly complex puzzle. I believe there is great value in having the opportunity to ‘walk into people’s lives’, as Signe Louise Yndigegn (2010) once described it so nicely. So, I’m going to stay here for the time being, and see what I can learn, making and sharing within this kaleidoscopic space of other people’s perspectives and ideas.

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Comfort and Discomfort

Meeting my insecurities

By Maria Mietke Rasmussen

We were standing in the middle of a huge room with a high ceiling. People were walking around, going to the different activities that were being offered somewhere else in the building. It felt more like a mall where everybody had somewhere else to be, not looking about and seeing what was around them.

To our left, a big cafĂŠ was set up and people were sitting and drinking coffee and talking.

As time went by, more and more people came into the big room. People were apparently coming for a cheap dinner there. We were kind of in the way for some - or that was what it felt like. Some people were making small glances our way, but not staring, which was a relief for me. I don’t particularly like people staring at me, even when there is a good reason for it.

We were wearing our official professional outfits, so we were standing out. Black pants, white shirt, and a name tag to top it off. Some did not want to talk with us and just kept walking past when we tried to engage them in a conversation, which was very discouraging, but at the same time became something that did not feel as bad the longer we did it. Others found us very interesting and loved to talk with us. Unfortunately most just kept on walking. A weird thing was, that even though we wanted people to talk with us, and we would feel discounted if they didn’t, it also felt a little frightening when they actually did. I have never been a salesperson - or, not a salesperson that approaches people on the street. However, I feel that this experience was probably

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A lot of older people were coming over to our table. Finally, someone to ask! They were even in the right age group to have hearing aids. This was the perfect spot for us. I had been a little unsure about whether or not this was the right place to meet participants. We had only talked with one so far, and people either had other things to do or just did not want to talk with us. Unfortunately, they were asking if we were the people officially responsible for helping, and knowing where they should go to, so they could attend a meeting on arthritis. No, but do you want to talk with us about hearing aids? No, they were busy and late for the arthritis meeting! No time.

what most salespeople have experienced. Even though it is a job and not a reflection on your person, it can feel like that, because you are putting yourself in a vulnerable position. I did feel pretty confident in my outfit. I guess it was the professional look, and the fact that the others in my group looked the same. We belonged in the same team and I was not alone standing there in the middle of the room looking weird. In some way, I could hide behind the outfit and the persona I was playing, and therefore not feel as frightened as if it had just been me.

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That was kind of a let down. We finally thought we could get more people to talk to. At the same time, it was a confidence booster. They thought we looked professional! And we could not help smiling, because it was also quite funny. This went on for maybe half an hour. We got some more curious looks from people sitting around. Now we really looked like people who had something exciting going on. I think it was that whole ‘nudging’ thing. When people see other people gathering around a table they become curious and want to be a part of it too.

We were talking with one lady with her son on her arm. She was the first one that had something to say about the future scenarios we had made up. The people we talked with up to that point had chosen to ignore them and just focus on hearing aids. “I don’t like

Comfort and Discomfort

the future scenarios”, she said. Too scary!

Technology can be very invasive. It is easier to relate to something you already know.

And then we talked about hearing aids again.

The people that stopped were mostly very engaging and talkative. I myself sometimes had problems getting a chance to say something.

But mostly the problem was that we were three people talking and asking questions, and that was too much. For me, at least. I was standing there and feeling a little bit lost. You know those situations where you are standing and talking with other people, and two or three others are talking, and you are just standing there nodding your head, because every time you think, “now I can add something”, someone else starts talking, or the subject suddenly changes? It was one of those situations. I really wanted to talk, to ask questions, but it just seemed unprofessional interrupting each other. And the others were asking good, relevant questions! No need for me to get involved. Well, that was the easy way out. And I took it, for the most part, unfortunately. I did get to ask a couple of questions. Maybe it is more about me having certain expectations for myself than me failing to do a good job?

We were packing up. The table we had put our stuff on was beginning to get a little crowded, because more and more people were showing up for the dinner. We got what we came for; no reason to stick around. It was nice. It felt like a job well done. We could move on with the

project based on a lot of good input from tonight. I felt almost light walking to my bicycle.

Happy that it was over and done with. But also because I felt like I learned something, and had a new experience that could help me in future projects. Now I was meeting my friend for a crocheting night.

Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

A qualitative study & personal journey

By RenĂŠ Winther

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Whether you are a first time reader, or a novice to the field of co-design, like myself, please take a moment to read this section. Who knows, something useful might come out of our reflections.

Hi there, I’m René, and in this section I will briefly talk about how my curiosity towards co-design popped up as a reflective phase at the end of my Bachelor’s’s programme in 2015.

As a result of my project experience, I decided to switch from Furniture & Spatial design to the Co-design Master’s Programme at KADK. Throughout my Bachelor’s, I was very much focused on designing products from an ego-centric point of view, which had always given me a sense of emptiness, and which always raised the question who am I designing for, and why?

These were questions I could never answer, until I started working on my final Bachelor’s project. After a long talk with my professor, I decided that I wanted to create an urban gardening project which focused on social interaction, and that could potentially encourage people to participate socially in green activities, and social traditions of shared gardening.

One might say that I got a provocative urge to develop my social skills as a designer. What I came to realize throughout this somewhat social journey of activity and reflection, was that by designing for people, and analyzing people’s needs instead of my own, a sense of caring,

identity, and meaningful purpose arose alongside the design process. Not only for myself, but for every actor involved in the process. It suddenly made sense in a new and interesting way.

My skepticism towards co-design I have to admit that I’m still a bit skeptical of social innovation, as the full potential of co-design is not obvious in regard to its outcomes.

Moreover, it has not been explored as much in comparison to other areas in the design field.

For instance, our school, KADK, agrees that every study area could probably use a bit of co-design methodology and social innovation, but because of recent cut-backs, they have decided to terminate the Co-design Master’s programme.

This is important for me to point out, because it raises an important question: to what extent am I able to implement co-design as a process in my career after my graduation? One might ask, that if a prominent school such as KADK does not believe co-design to be important in regards to its future, why should I believe it could be?

However, instead of stepping back, I’m going to step forward and see this as an opportunity, by challenging myself to overcome my skepticism and explore this innovative field with fresh eyes. I’m also hoping that this book project is going be the first stepping stone in regards to becoming a better designer.

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My first encounter with the field of co-design Before jumping into the deep end of this qualitative study, I’m going to allow myself to describe my first encounter with the field of co-design; which, for me, was a little bit different to that of my fellow co-designers, as I joined the Co-design Master’s Programme recently, in February 2017, after a long-term sickness period. When I joined the team, they already had completed two extensive projects over a period of approximately five months, in close collaboration with a library in the area of Tingbjerg, located in Copenhagen, and a hearing aid company (HAC), which in this study will remain anonymous because of a non-disclosure agreement.

This makes me both ‘wet behind the ears’ and extremely curious about how to gain a better understanding of the different stages one might encounter in the field of social innovation - hence, this qualitative study.

I remember the first day I attended the Master’s programme. I said to myself, “what is co-design?”. My stomach felt like a washing machine coming up those final steps before meeting my fellow students on the first floor.

I was afraid of not being able to participate constructively. But what I soon came to realize was, our professor, Thomas Binder, and the unique group of both domestic and interna-

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tional students, quickly saw me as an opportunity, instead of seeing me as an obstacle. What caught my attention, was that they analyzed me as a user almost instantly. This was indeed interesting.

A question quickly arose: how do we, as a group, integrate this unknown character (me), in regards to getting familiar with the foundations of co-design? And, how do we position this character in terms of contributing to the upcoming book project (which you, dear reader, are currently in the process of reading)?

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There could be a few bumps in the road Since this is going to be my first qualitative dialogue and interview, and since I don’t have any previous experience in the field of social innovation, there is a possibility that these interviews will not assume the expected effect or outcomes. So bear with me.

The following problems might undermine the effect or expected result of my reflective dialogues and interviews:

A. As a result of the non-disclosure agreement with HAC it will be difficult for all participants to describe details about the final deliverable or methods used in their projects.

B. The questions may be too narrow for me to gain detailed and elaborate responses to key questions.

C. Lack of experience in terms of creating an interview structure that navigates the participants through my questions.

D. The use of email correspondence, which could undermine the candour, spontaneity, and natural dialogue that develops engaging conversations and compelling feedback.

E. Some of the participants in the HAC project are not participating in this book project. Which, as a result, could disclude some of the group members from participating.

F. Unknown factors.

Co-conuts: Fresh Views on Co-design

Let’s get started!

Approach

The Brief From HAC:

Instead of my initial approach, and as a result of previous failure, I’m going to try and analyze the HAC projects looking from the outside in, creating a personal and reflective process to get behind the curtain of the co-designers and their unique projects. I will do this in relation to my own empirical reflections upon the different methods used and, in addition, I will create a dialogue about the central phenomenons of the design process in general, that the participants may or may not have used actively in their human-centered experiences.

However, the main purpose of this qualitative research method is to examine another level of personal reflection that may or may not have been revealed in previous forms of reflective methods (e.g. methodology, analysis, journals, diaries, etc.). It is also an opportunity to ‘confront’ my fellow co-designers with a mission: to formulate and identify as many factors in the success or failure of specific situations surrounding the collaboration with HAC and the stakeholders involved as possible.

Partnership between KADK & HAC, under the working title ‘Future Hearings’. Four to five teams with students from Co-design at KADK, will engage in design dialogues with the hearing impaired and develop generic dialogue tools to further the dialogue between the actual personal user of the products and services and uncover and describe possible needs and wants in the future.

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Talkit The first project I want to create a dialogue about is Talkit, which had a unique - and, from my perspective, somewhat complex - assignment, compared to the other groups.

Project statement: How can we design a visually and contextually coherent frame that unites all the groups’ projects and creates extra value holistically?

The group was asked to create a bridge between the four other dialogue tools, by identifying four frameworks (theoretical, conceptual, visual, physical) in regard to the final deliverable (a mobile bag, and a totem to display the bags containing the projects - as they called it). In other words, they needed to formulate an overall structure that had a linking effect, connecting the co-design studio, the four other projects, and HAC.

period between when the initial idea, concept, and product are first considered and when the overall product idea, for instance, is evaluated and ready for further development. Not to mention that they had to develop an overall visualization, a bag, and a totem to display everything. In addition, they also needed to test and redesign the solution alongside the collaboration.

The nature of this project indicates that designers are able to take on many different and shifting roles in order to solve a problem, or innovate a solution. Roles which are highly focused on the needs of the users. This leads me toward my first questions: “Which situations put the project at risk, and how can you prevent them in the future? What were the main factors that made the project successful: both personal and professional?�

My initial thought upon reading this pamphlet (every group created a project pamphlet) was that it must have been challenging to create an overall system that could effectively navigate each stakeholder through the interdisciplinary processes of collaboration. Moreover, they also needed to figure out how to handle all the different data from the stakeholders by developing a communicative mapping tool in the fuzzy front-end of the project. This is the

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Giulio Ceste: “Your question touches upon a topic that we are very concerned about. Both Íris and I have already discussed throughout this book the risks and difficulties we encountered during the project; so let’s try to reflect here on our work from new angles. One thing we haven’t yet shared with the reader was our continuous struggle at making our brief stimulating for ourselves.

participants, while we had been working almost all the time from our studio. These critiques dragged us down, but they also made us aware of the risks we were running into.

Hence, we decided it was time for us to have fun as well. Naya, for example, focused on the physical deliverable that we had to design, and started experimenting with textiles, while I went crazy for data visualization.

“Let me explain it better. When dealing with a new project, designers need to find a way to express their interests and be passionate about the work they are doing. If they don’t commit to the cause, there is no way they can achieve good outcomes. Such passion can be triggered in many ways, for example, by taking on a brief that you are really concerned about, by bringing in your personal skills, or by trying out things that are new to you and that you are curious to explore.

“Thanks to this project, we learned that the designer’s professional fulfillment is the hidden part of every design brief. If you don’t find your challenge stimulating, it’s your job to make it more interesting.”

“In the co-deliverable group, this space for personal fulfillment was challenged in many ways. For example, something we all suffered was giving up the field work. The absence of this was particularly evident, and painful, during critiques with the rest of the studio.

On these occasions we were confronted with the vivacity of other groups’ work, and we couldn’t help comparing it with the boredom of our own job. In other teams’ presentations we could watch videos of students pretending to be representatives of a tech company or improvising role-playing games with their

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Hear me out Project Statement: Hearing loss can be hard on relationships, affecting not only the one impaired but also the people around them. The ‘Hear me out’ kit takes departure in such close relationships by involving relatives in the adaptation process.

What fascinates me in regard to the project is that the group developed several interesting dialogue tools that could help reduce the stigma of hearing loss.

Comfort and Discomfort

The kit was also a dialogue tool that could formulate new conversations between close relatives and friends. The idea of an aesthetic and personal communication kit at home is, for me, extremely attractive. However, I would imagine that skydiving into people’s lives like that can be a very scary experience for every person involved. Standing on the sidelines, just thinking about getting personal with strangers like that, scares the bejesus out of me. Moreover, talking about difficult or serious issues like hearing loss in order to collect the right data scares me even more! I’m seriously curious about how my classmates did it. So here are a couple of questions: “What co-design tools did you use to figure out the actual needs of your end-users?”

Melanie Povlitzki: “We used probes, dialogue tools, performance, and interviews. We started with interviews and dialogue tools, and then used the knowledge we gained from those encounters to develop probes that went home with the participants, where they could do the activities we designed and then report on their experiences.

“Towards the end we hosted a performance where we rehearsed some of our ideas together with the participants.”

“What was the most meaningful aspect of this activity?”

Andrea Østmo da Costa: “To me, I very much appreciated the opportunity to work on a topic that dealt with care and family relations. The hearing loss person and their relatives was a topic we chose as a group to focus on as we were all interested in exploring how relationships are affected by difficulties with hearing within, for example, a family. In probing into this topic, we learned much about human behaviour and about how the sensitivity of the topic influenced communication and life quality. Many habits would have accumulated over time due to increasingly worsened hearing by one member of the family. Requiring a hearing aid in itself was not a solution to improved communication in the home, as family members’ awareness and knowledge of the topic would be limited.

The knowledge would be limited, because the topic was not as openly discussed. It was therefore valuable to learn and support in the process of facilitating communication in ways that did not relate to the hearing aid, but, rather, we needed active involvement and participation of all members involved.

Facilitating conversation and dialogue on a sensitive topic became a meaningful challenge.”

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Listen up Project Statement: By utilizing the playful and tangible format of a game, ‘Listen up’ intends to make hearing loss understandable, palpable, and memorable.

Do I think about my future ears? Not nearly as much as I perhaps should! Only, really, when it comes to extremely loud sounds like sirens and heavy machinery. So, in this area, I’m probably less thoughtful when it comes to myself and my surroundings. This points me in the direction of the project ‘Listen up’.

A lot of designers state, “design is problem solving”, with a good intention, and then rephrases that something like, “design is improving people’s everyday lives”. But how do we really know if there is a problem, or if we really do change people’s everyday lives?

Co-designers talk about it all the time, in books, on-line, in articles, etc. They often state that social innovation is a real lifesaver.

This book talks about it too, but if co-design indeed was a unique method, which changed peoples lives on a daily basis, wouldn’t the world look a lot different? The truth is, that we as designers can’t solve everything; but perhaps by thinking innovatively and working with an interdisciplinary mindset - in the fuzzy front-end of every project - we might just be able to effect some people’s lives (small-scale

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or large-scale) just enough for them to feel a positive change.

‘Listen up’ bravely took up such a challenge, by thinking about how their design could be implemented on a larger scale by researching future hearing loss issues in children. In addition, they considered why it can be difficult for grandparents to communicate health problems to young children, and tried to figure out where the problem was, on a much smaller scale. Which makes me very curious to know if any specific tools were used in their process: “What co-design methods did you use to collect user-centered information at the beginning of your project?”

Alice Moynihan: “From the outset of this project we approached the topic of hearing and hearing loss using a very broad and open-ended framework, we did not enter with a defined focus of improving an aspect of the hearing aid as a product. Rather than collecting ‘user insights’, we were interested to gain a holistic understanding of this complex health issue, focusing in on people, and their relationships to others, and their environments.

Comfort and Discomfort

“The methods we used in interacting with people included interviews, conversations, collaborative journey mapping, and a ‘probe kit’ (basically a package we gave to participants with various self-documentation tasks). When we entered the generation phase of the project and began creating a game, we then carried out testing and feedback sessions with participants.”

“What other methods of collecting information could you have used?”

Naomi Aholou-Komedza: “No other methods could have been used because at that time we didn’t have enough knowledge about other kinds of dialogue tools or probes. But our approach to them could have been different.

For example, making fewer assumptions about our collaborators in order to create a more open dialogue tool.”

“Should you use any different methods the next time you evaluate a human-centered project?”

Rikke Gjerulff: “I think we would have started out in a slightly different way if the process had been longer. We would probably have also made the methods a little different if we had known to test subjects in advance, and made the probe kit more open-ended. But overall, I think we are very satisfied with the methods we used in the task.”

Complice Project Statement: How might a nuanced understanding of a particular individual’s hearing situation improve empathy and thus the social experience?

The advance of technology has brought with it huge impacts throughout human history, but technology also comes with its own unique challenges, such as figuring out how to implement and develop these advances into properly sustainable ideas, concepts or solutions which help solve problems rather than adding to them.

Complice took up such a challenge of social sensitivity by experimenting on how technology can be implemented as a social dialogue tool in regard to the process of users adapting to a new life, with new and weird sounds on a daily basis. Furthermore, they experimented with how to convey that experience, or challenge, to the user’s surroundings. The group explains it like this: “Complice fills in this gap by doing some of the audiologists legwork. It establishes stronger connections between the audiologist, the user, and, just as importantly, their relatives, who often have their own frustrations with the transition.”

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What caught my full attention in this project was how the Complice design group was able to come up with a technological concept of a “treasure hunt for sounds”, which not only solved a problem for the end-user but also reflected light on other problems. Which in this case, was the transition between relatives, audiologists, and the end-user. This leads me toward my questions: “What did you learn from your experience?”

Tyler Powel: “One thing we found very useful is to be very structured with our time. Sarah made sure that we made a calendar right from the get-go; we laid out all of our deadlines and meetings and somewhat arbitrarily broke our work into phases such as exploration, prototyping, development, etc. This helped keep us focused and on schedule throughout the process and gave us continuous milestones to work towards. This was useful because it can be easy to get lost in a project with a vague brief and an unclear frame.

“Secondly, we used a three-person structure for most of our workshops which we found very useful: lead interviewer, dedicated notetaker, and documenter. Having one person lead the interview lent itself to a comfortable environment for dialogue. When I was lead interviewer, I could focus on having a conversation and really tune into what my interlocutor was saying – I didn’t have to fuss with a notebook or fiddle with equipment, I

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could be totally present. I believe this also made our participants feel at-ease and trustful with me, because they knew I was deeply engaged. As a result our conversations often felt natural and candid.

“Having a notetaker was useful because they could pick up on themes and take timecoded notes. So, for example, if a participant said something particularly poignant, we could quickly find it again on the audio or video record. Though it wasn’t her main role, the notetaker would be free to chime in if she noticed something, or discovered a curiosity. This was helpful because it invited another vantage point into the dialogue, and sometimes it worked to simply take the pressure off the lead interviewer.

“Lastly, it was a dream to have a trusted documenter being sure to gather all the necessary sound and images. Someone to be a fly on the wall and be free to notice small details of what was happening around us.

Following each workshop we would hold a short synthesis session in which we shared what we saw or heard, pointed out what we found interesting or important, and gave a general sense of what we believed it to be about.

Mess Comfort andBeautiful Discomfort

“Since our group was four, the absent person was charged with transcribing the interview.

The interest in this was twofold – first it allowed the last member to be privy to what took place at the workshop, and secondly it provided them with an objective, somewhat removed perspective on what happened. When transcribing, this member would categorize quotes and findings and place them with the transcription itself.

“We found this method to be very trustworthy and I believe it helped us to continually have strong, meaningful interviews yielding rich material.”

“What have you learned about yourself, your skills, your attitudes, and so on?”

Tyler Powell: “I wouldn’t attribute this to this project in particular, but I’ve found I have a general ease and interest in speaking with people which has proven to be something of a skill; previously I’d have never considered this as a useful competence.”

“What might you do differently in the future as a result of your experiences?”

Tyler Powell: “Though I felt satisfied with our final outcome, I would have liked to have had more time to refine the aesthetic, to make it more cohesive across the different aspects.

However, as what we were proposing was conceptual, this is but a minor detail.”

Decibel Future Lab Project Statement: How might we create a dialogue tool that facilitates speculative and unexpected visions and conversations about possible futures within the scope of hearing and technology?

What caught my attention with this project was the project statement rather than the final design solutions. After reading the pamphlet I figured out that constructing a design scenario like this can be a very effective tool with regard to the innovation of a company, concept, or product. It is also a unique tool in which creative brainstorms can evolve into new ideas. Moreover, it is a tool that is able to formulate, communicate, or map out the who, what, when, where, why, and how as possible user scenarios, in terms of the user’s wants and needs.

‘Decibel Future Lab’ has indeed done so by developing a toolkit that seeks to get people to generate new ideas, think differently, and move outside of their comfort zones - just to use some of their own words. Which in every case, can help designers explore unforeseen possibilities in regard to the innovative processes of ideation, iteration, and usability.

Furthermore, by creating a fictional company (Decibel Future Lab), I also think that the group discovered that by looking at the

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assignment from a start-up point of view it was feasible for them to first and foremost approach the public differently. In this case, the public they sought to talk to was people in a shopping mall in Nørrebro, Copenhagen.

They presented various questions as possible futures, collecting data on hearing in general, and issues related to hearing loss.

It was also a possibility for them to gain new insight into humorous and technological scenarios aimed at the end-users. You might say that they looked at the assignment objectively by saying, “Hey, we are a hearing company, not design students.”

Combining marketing and design methodology might have allowed the group to develop a hybrid approach of sorts. A hybrid approach refers to having two kinds of ‘ingredients’ that produce the same, or similar, data coming up with a stronger strategy for your company to implement in the future. There are many ways to build or mix-up different methods and scenarios, but I think it is important to reflect upon projects like this, in order for us as designers to improve our futuristic design thinking.

Which leads me to my final interview questions:

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“How do you feel about your project?”

Maria Mietke Rasmussen: “I am very happy with it, and on different levels. I think we accomplished what we set out to do, and with a product I myself have never seen before, which is nice. It is different, and the overall project has shown me how things can be done in different ways. The group work in itself was also very positive because we had so much fun together. I also learned a lot about co-design in this project, which makes it feel like we did something good.

“I did not dislike anything in particular, but I did find some things difficult because it was new to me. Having a variety of conversations with participants is something that, in the beginning, felt a little awkward for me.

Working in groups can at times also be trying because you have different ways of doing things - but even though it was hard, it was working very well.”

“What would you change if you had a chance to do this project over again?”

Maria Mietke Rasmussen: “Not much, because I see it as a successful project, but I think what we always could use more of is time. I would like to have had more encounters with participants, which I also think would have made the final product sharper.”

Comfort and Discomfort

Is co-design a social product experiment?

There is a deeply reflective and magnetic discussion to be had on how designers are able to effectively work with users within their process, if, in essence, several stakeholders or actors are involved. Collecting data on human needs can be a very tangled affair, as we have discovered in these reflective dialogues and interviews. Especially if a project is surrounded by complex issues, such as losing your ability to hear sounds in everyday life.

Reviewing some of the projects made me realize that we as designers have to adapt to a lot of different positions in order to figure out what the problem is, and then to formulate an effective solution to that problem. And it then formulates a general forum for a further discussion in regard to the field of social innovation.

I would like to thank all the participants in this interview for their time and reflections.

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Co-design is being naked

By Naomi Aholou

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Comfort and Discomfort

Co-Design, as we know, is about creating a product – which can be a physical product, a service, an experience, etc – in collaboration with people. However, the point that you might ignore, if you are not a co-designer, is that it is about taking your clothes off and being naked.

Since the Industrial Revolution, design has been about creative people working in an office, and having brilliant ideas on their own.

They make prototypes to see if something is feasible without really trying to understand if society wants it. They stay in their bubble...

pretty bubbles flying around... where they can dream and ask themselves what to do to make the world pretty and great again. In other words, they stay in their warm, cosy, comfortable zone. Why do they like this comfortable zone? Because they do not want to take risks.

They prefer to be close to what they know: their office, their workshop, their tools, their MacBook... and from time to time they have a discussion with their client to put them on the right track before the final delivery – which can sometimes be somewhat challenging.

Co-design is different. Co-design is about

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creating a product in collaboration with the users, clients, and stakeholders, a human-centered approach. Co-designers do not work in a bubble; they are down to earth. Down to earth does not mean that they are not taking risks when they are designing. They are taking risks… because they are naked.

Being naked is being without your clothes.

Your clothes make you protected. So being in a naked position is being without protection.

Co-designers are naked because they are collaborating with people. They are not staying in their cosy offices, creating products which are chimeras. They are stepping out into a foreign field in order to understand what the real issue of a project is, and to finally produce something that fits with reality. In other words, they are leaving the classic designer’s comfort zone.

At the beginning of the design process, when they go to the field, they have nothing to reassure them, but they do have to find a way to make it reassuring. They are starting the design process as if they were going out naked: with fear, hesitation, clumsiness, reticence, enthusiasm, and excitement. Deeper into this process they will find clothes – one by one, step by step – giving them confidence, and the keys for a successful design project. These clothes will make the co-designer feel less and less naked:

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- The dialogue tool adapted to the situation that will give them knowledge.

- The insight that will be transformed into knowledge.

- The knowledge that will give them expertise.

- The expertise that will give them their confidence.

- The confidence that will not make them feel naked anymore, and prepare them to succeed in their co-design project.

The dialogue tool: It is a creative tool that provides unexpected insights during an encounter between designer(s) and collaborator(s). When an exchange occurs between them, the designer offers the collaborator an experience by using the tool, and, on the other hand, and the collaborator provides information. Dialogue tools are tools that avoid the traditional schema of interviews, which is based on open questions and boring answers. They are based on interaction, playfulness, reflection, construction, and discussion with the collaborator and the designer. They need to be open-ended to create space for the collaborator’s interpretation.

To go through all these steps, an encounter needs to occur between the co-designer and the collaborator. During this encounter, an exchange will happen. The co-designer will offer an experience to the user, thanks to their dialogue tool; in return, the collaborator will give the co-designer clothes by giving them insights. The more insights the co-designer receives, the more knowledgeable they will become. This can happen in two different ways:

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- Case one: the collaborator chooses to stay in their comfort zone by sharing simple insights with the co-designer, making them less naked, wiser, and confident.

- Case two: the collaborator chooses to be naked as well, by giving personal information insights, fragments of their life, feelings, etc.

In this case, the co-designer gets essential insights that they can re-use as quotes and that will have a crucial impact on their work.

In some cases, the co-designer manages the encounter with their dialogue tool so well that the encounter goes beyond a simple exchange,

Comfort and Discomfort

becoming a naked dance between the protagonists. They first undress and start dancing together. At the end, they pick up all the clothes lying on the floor, without a care to whom each belongs. In other terms, the collaborators have a great experience dancing, and they have a great time together; somehow, they are building something together.

Co-designers are naked, because they have to be naked. The best way to start a project is to get rid of all your clothes: all the assumptions, presumptions, and prejudices about the topic of the project - all the things that the designer thinks they know. There is nothing worse than a designer thinking they know what is

better for the users than the users themselves.

Indeed, as a newborn, the designer is going to see the world with fresh eyes. They will start learning directly from the source, from their collaborators. Thus, they will be able to point out with efficiency what they need.

Naked means that the designer is ready to receive information, they are a tabula rasa. They are open. It’s not always easy to be naked; it also means that they are vulnerable to others and to critics’ judgement and rejection. But the co-designer needs to keep in mind that getting reactions during an encounter with the collaborator is what will permit them to move forward. They should not take critics personally, but as a tool to improve their work.

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THEME 03

BRIDGING BORDERS The aim of the co-designer is to create deeper connections, both between themselves and the participants they are working with, and between themselves and other designers in the field. What are the building blocks required to create these deeper connections? Where do the boundaries lie? How can ‘blurred boundaries’ between professional and personal behaviours be distinguished in an environment where ‘close and intimate encounters’ are a crucial aspect of the collaborative process? The following contributions bring the lens both close up, to specific moments of ‘bridge building’, and further away, allowing a broader view of where the map of collaboration and collaborators unfolds.

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Embracing the inevitable journey to the co-design mindset: a student’s perspective

By Naya Choi

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Bridging Borders

Being a student in co-design doesn’t always mean happily collaborating with unicorns, rainbows, and cotton candy. The co-design journey is very complex, and made up of many fragments, which are sometimes cloudy, and emotional parts, which are simply inevitable. Truthfully, I have learned that co-design cannot be considered as simple as just tools or methods that can be exploited in any design process - it is much more than that. As a student in practice, I have learned that we must embrace the sensation of dynamic changes in emotion that co-design brings. When embraced fully, the mindset and attitude of co-design will increasingly and continuously help you to shape your own definition, and to experience your own role among others’.

These are many steps and levels of encounter that we experience in co-design: walking into a community as outsiders, making small and careful steps in to an understanding of them, finally gaining their trust, all leading to deeper insights for your design. During these activities we spend time, energy, emotion, brain power, body, mind, and more. It is like taking off and giving out pieces of yourself with the hope of gaining something along the way.

When encounters occur in many layers, we are bound to give many pieces of ourselves.

This is a story about positioning the shape of co-design in my life, and the changes in emotion that came with that. It is also about embracing the co-design mindset as a student,

which I increasingly adapted throughout the semester. To present these changes in emotion, I will be providing several examples of projects that happened chronologically throughout my time spent in the Co-design MA. My story may not provide concrete answers which can solve any problems. However, it is aimed at raising questions through the perspective of a student in practice of the growing field of co-design.

Coming into a programme with pre-conceptions By the end of the summer of 2016, in August, an airplane from Toronto landed in the land of the Danes, Copenhagen. I was in that airplane.

I have always believed that true learning doesn’t come when you are fixed in one place, in a state of passive acceptance. This belief fueled me into making a decision to take an exchange semester in Denmark. I chose to step outside of my boundaries and see how others approach their lives.

That was it. As for how anybody’s journey begins, mine was also full of confidence, joy, and excitement, before diving into a new environment with so much to learn. Copenhagen was a perfect place to kick off my journey. The city is surrounded by water, and beautiful architecture and people; there was nothing else I could have asked for. It seemed like a place where things just work out harmoniously, and that everything makes sense. Perhaps, back then, I

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didn’t see what an immersive experience this would be.

surface level. And so, by the end of the week we co-design-ed our new space.

Nonetheless, after every nice bike ride to school, there was the co-design studio, on top of a white building at the corner of the campus of the Royal Danish Academy. All by the water, with that stunning view of the Opera House from the balcony. The programme was made up of a small group of 20 students from many different backgrounds, both in terms of culture and their design studies. While all the other students from the faculty had their own individual work space, our studio space was just one big corner of the top floor. As the first baby step towards a productive collaborative process, we were told to recreate the space that fits what the semester might look like.

Through this mini-co-design project, the concept of an interpersonal encounter was introduced. By slowly being introduced to each others’ stories, the process involved feelings and emotions at a reflective level. It was obvious that there are some emotional experiences which are very intimately connected with, for instance, language, histories of personal relations, bodily experiences, memories, and acculturated perceptions - the roots of which may go back to one’s own story. This co-design-ing space wasn’t just a mini-project that we had to get done with, it was an intimate and necessary introduction to collaboration in co-design.

An intimate introduction to collaboration in co-design

The notion of simple collaboration in co-design came back to us many times during the semester. It came at different points in each of the projects, on many different levels, and at various complexities. The collaboration can be performed in many different forms and shapes.

As we got deeper and deeper into projects, as more and more layers appeared in the process of collaboration, I increasingly felt a blurring of the boundary between my personal life and my life as a student in co-design. More and more I felt the mindset and attitude of co-design become deeply rooted into my life.

For the next few days, 20 of us discussed, negotiated, and delegated tasks to each other in order to recreate the space by relocating pieces of furniture, even building new ones.

We were put in a situation where we had to create something communal without knowing so much about each other. This shared activity acted as a bridge connecting 20 individuals and creating an atmosphere for sharing more personal stories of who we are and where we come from, despite the fact that it was only yet on

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Exhausting process of collaboration From the very beginning, we were told to design with the audience, not for. We were taught to make personal encounters, to make in-depth dialogues through tools, to stimulate their interest. All to uncover deep insights and truly empathize with the audience on a personal level. The audience that we might be designing with could be a client, various stakeholders, or the users who are in the service’s network. They may also be the team of designers you are a part of, and with whom you might spend the most time. The process of truly understanding these various stakeholders is a very complex one, especially when you must understand and locate your position as a co-design student coming from the outside. As a part of our role, it is certainly necessary for us to be always engaging in all situations; we need to have the attitude of being actively participating and actively listening. In the book, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998, p. 55-56), Etienne Wenger says:

Participation refers to a process of taking part and also to the relations with others that reflects this process. It suggests both action and connection (...) [It] is the complex process that combines doing, talking, thinking, feeling, and belonging.

It involves our whole person, including our bodies, minds, emotions, and social relations.

It is exactly this notion of participation that repeats, one after the other, in many layers, through the process of co-design, and this can be very exhausting. It is especially draining because the process involves participation of not only the complex entity with is yourself but the complex entities which are the others with whom you collaborate. It often came to me as one big blob of uncomfortable mess. Looking back over the semester, its climax came when I was a part of a self-organized group, called a ‘co-deliverable’ group [see ‘A qualitative study

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& personal journey’, p.80, ‘Making concerts out of clashes’, p.110, and ‘When people stop being polite’, p.148]. Unlike the previous projects, the group was created for a project that required different levels of responsibility and expectation, since we were in partnership with a big hearing-aid production company as part of the Future Hearings project [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13].

Among the other four groups who were mainly focused on the encounters with the future users of the company, the co-deliverable group’s duty was to bring all their outcomes into one coherent format. Our group’s role was never very clear from the beginning, and perhaps this is where the messiness that got carried through the project in different forms of participation started out. What was clear though, is that our group’s encounters required participations not with the future users of the hearing-aid product, but the company itself, and the other four groups. Having different guidelines and uncertain roles as a group was uncomfortable for all of us. Before learning co-design’s different tools and methods in the design process, our group was put in a situation where the attitude and mindset had to be reformed. As a part of that, there was the challenge of mediating what was happening simultaneously through different layers of collaboration: that within the group, with the other groups, and with the company.

The journey as a co-deliverable group wasn’t

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the smoothest. Perhaps it was the collision of different comprehensions of the co-design attitude that escalated through different layers of participation which might have made things so challenging. We didn’t know how to collaborate in a healthy manner. The definition of participation given by Wenger above became intensified as this collision materialised. We thought each and every decision that came along the road had to be made after a debate with all five of us involved. Each layer of participation with the stakeholders became a place for disagreements that led to arguments. As more unnecessary time and energy was spent on the project, it came to a point where no decisions were made for a very long time. It was often very confusing as, by the end of it, we would get lost on what it is that we were even arguing about. There were endless amounts of both emotional and physical energy wasted in the process; and, oftentimes, it wasn’t just wasteful of energy but damaging to the next step in the process. And those energies could often not be regenerated so rapidly.

Boundaries and professionalism “I just wanted to do my part!”

It was in making the final presentation for the project that this person from the co-deliverable group finally exploded. It was a shock for all of us seeing her emotional outburst. Up

Bridging Borders

until that point, though going through many arguments and heated debates together, no one had ever shed tears. The incident was fuelled by layers of emotional debate that had got built up. When walking through many layers of collaboration with the same group of people, very intimate interpersonal encounters are created. In the case of the co-deliverable group, we were put in many situations where it was hard to declare boundaries between the personal and the professional.

In creating the group environment where everyone was free to engage with each other, we gradually started to share personal stories and emotions. However, when it reached a certain point, it became clear that a certain level of professionalism had blurred and was causing problems. This notion of an unclear boundary often came to me in the form of confusions, provoking a lot of fuzziness and irritation in the process of teamwork. Thinking back to all these confusions, I can absolutely understand how she might have felt at the moment of crisis. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, but an inevitable part of an emotional journey as co-design students, as collaborators.

As we went through more ups and downs as a co-deliverable group, as more layers of, and changes in, emotions struck through, more and more did our co-design mindsets start coming through. The attitude slowly but surely came to us by the end of the semester-long journey, as we took control and embraced the changes. It felt good to feel the co-design mindset slowly soaking into our bodies and minds, but

I think we can all agree that we were, at that point, very worn out.

When the mindset comes together At about the time we started to feel the exhaustion of the co-design process, we were invited to GSA Winter School [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13]. As much vacation time was needed after an intense semester in co-design, the winter school came to us as a getaway from the city. It was a trip where everything was organized and paid for, from flights and food to accommodation, which made it much easier to slip into the environment.

The research centre is located in a beautiful rural area of Speyside, Scotland, surrounded by nature which forms a stunning pallet in different shades of greens and browns. Coming straight from a commercial project, it felt like the environment was extra slow and calm.

Unlike the previous projects, where we had to organize every appointment that was needed in the day ourselves, there were no stresses involved for us with processing the programme in the winter school. We had absolute freedom to make mistakes.

With all that in mind, this short project in Scotland came to us as a huge opportunity that we could exploit and have fun with to experiment with everything we had learned from the first semester of Co-design. As a result, an 107

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extraordinarily strong synergy was born, securely tying together five co-design students that had never worked with one another before. There were days full of constant creation, as if we were small individual cogs in a big system - but somehow they all came together in one final outcome that we were all satisfied with. The process was smooth and effortless; the final outcome was satisfying in an unexpected way. What oiled the cogs into working so fluently and coherently? I think it was the co-design mindset and attitude, shaped within all of us throughout the semester which tied us together.

After going through this emotional journey, from the beginning of the semester until

Scotland, we have achieved a certain level of understanding between each other and within ourselves. Most importantly, the mindset that we have all developed over the semester kept us connected, and in a good place. A semester spent in co-design has not been an easy journey, but it has certainly been an emotional one. It wasn’t necessarily what I was prepared for beforehand, but the dynamics in the journey were inevitable. Through an eventful semester spent in co-design, I have now acknowledged that it cannot be considered as simply as just tools and methods that apply in every circumstance. It is about the mindset and attitude that has to be gained only through an inevitable journey of complexity and emotion.

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Making concerts out of clashes

By Giulio Ceste

In the neverland dreamed of by every co-designer, people would happily gather around a shared goal and actively collaborate in reaching it together. But what happens when that goal is not shared at all? What happens when the people you invite pursue agendas that conflict with yours? Is it still possible to make a concert out of the noise produced by these clashes?

Over the course of my short career as a designer, I have more than once happened to be in the crossfire between conflicting points of view.

And I usually failed to mediate. Many of these collaborative failures occurred well before I joined the Co-design Master’s programme; in fact, they are what brought me here to KADK. After almost a year of study, and with the experience of two collaborative projects, I finally have some time to reflect on why my first passionate endeavors were not always successful.

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Hence, in the following pages I will investigate what constitutes the grounding of a peaceful collaborative process, and what holds together divergent views into the future. In support of my reflections, I will first introduce two projects I was part of, one from before, the other from after, I joined the Co-design programme.

Gardeners versus dogs The first experience I will bring in draws from my Bachelor’s thesis, Participatory design of public spaces, defended in 2015 at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. My brief was to accompany the environmental association, Movimento per la Decrescita Felice (MDF), in the construction of a community garden inside a public park, in a residential district of Turin. The group aimed at co-producing the garden together with the inhabitants of the neighborhood, and intended the space to become a community center where sustainable practices would be developed along with the local residents. In accordance with these principles, the project had been named, Morvillo Community Garden.

However, despite such a collaborative ambition, when I stepped in I realised that volunteers from the association already had a too-welldefined idea of how the future garden should be. They didn’t know the neighborhood; the park had been chosen after a negotiation with the municipality. However, they had already discussed a plan with local administrators, without prior consultation with residents.

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As a result, once MDF’s proposal was officially approved, rumors about the initiative had spread throughout the neighborhood, and a small group of dog owners had gathered around a petition to prevent the association from launching the project.

Mobilizing (some) citizens In order to resolve the quarrel, we organized a public meeting with the petitioners. We learned from them that in the past they had asked the municipality for the construction of an off-leash dog park, without success. Hence they now perceived the new project as unfair, and to some extent as a threat to their use of the park as dog owners. Even if their concerns were temporarily soothed, the episode had highlighted a contradiction between the goals of MDF and the strategy that had been adopted to pursue them. If the garden was to be built and used by the inhabitants, it was vital that it should also be designed by them. Therefore, the first phase of my intervention developed along two complementary axes: on one side, I worked at breaking down volunteers’ expectations into a set of shared values that could be pursued in a more open and flexible way; on the other side, I mapped the neighborhood in the quest for local groups of citizens that could collaborate at Morvillo Community Garden and advocate the project in their communities.

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As spring began, we started building the first portion of the garden as a way to make the project more tangible and understandable to other citizens. Along with the construction, a series of public events and cultural activities were launched inside the park, with the aim of gathering around the project a community of interested citizens. Participants responded positively to our initiatives, so we started exploring what to build next together with them. Even if many of the dog owners who had previously drafted the petition did not take part in our public meetings, I repeatedly invited MDF to take into account their desire for an area dedicated to dogs. However, despite the public park being wide enough to host both a vegetable garden and a dog park, the organization found this instance in contrast with its own mission, and decided not to help this other group of citizens.

Chickens come home to roost As Morvillo Community Garden started to take shape and the community around it grew bigger, the dispute with dog owners gradually re-emerged. Participants reported some citizens repeatedly unleashing their dogs inside the cultivated area with the purpose of ruining the plants; on some occasions, we witnessed firsthand some quarrels between the inhabitants who supported the garden and those who didn’t. Frictions grew to the extent that during

a public event a police patrol came for an inspection after they had received an anonymous call. Again, dog owners were publicly expressing their discontent: they had perceived the new garden as an invasion of a place they would have instead dedicated to their pets - thus, they were fighting the initiative. Given such a loud manifestation of divergent visions, MDF could have welcomed the opposed viewpoint into the project and helped this group of citizens obtain their dog park. On the contrary, after these episodes the group of gardeners decided to build a hedge in order to protect the area from ‘dog attacks’.

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An initiative that aimed at uniting citizens around a shared endeavor had ended up reinforcing two opposed factions in the neighborhood, who are still in dispute after two years.

Even if this quarrel is just a small part of an overall successful project, it provides a good example of what might occur when promoters of a collaborative process encounter participants who advocate a conflicting agenda. In this case, instead of taking on the role of mediator between the opposing instances, MDF had joined the side of gardeners and the conflict has been left unresolved. However, as I will later discuss in this essay, in such situations the goal of designers should be to bring these contrasts to the core of the process harmoniously in order to fuel participation. With this in mind, let’s now move from the open and public

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space of the garden to the intimate dimension of the design studio. From there, I will explore how co-designers themselves might struggle at negotiating their agendas, sometimes before they even engage with other participants.

Co-designing with co-designers During the Future Hearings project [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13], I was part of the so called ‘co-deliverable group’, the team in charge of coordinating the other four squads of co-designers. Our task was challenging in itself and an interesting insight into our struggle as a group is already provided in this book by my fellow students Íris [see ‘When people stop being

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polite’, p.148], René [see ‘A qualitative study & personal journey’, p. 80], and Naya [see ‘Embracing the inevitable journey to the co-design mindset’, p.102]. While the other contributions focus on the dynamics internal to our team throughout the design process, here I will instead reflect on how we interacted with the rest of the studio in an attempt to match our different agendas. We were to keep an up-todate overview of the advancement of the entire project and drive it toward a coherent set of deliverables. Because of this unusual brief, we had to give up field research and focus on the work of our fellow co-designers. Such a position offered us an interesting point of observation on all movements happening in the studio during the project: what we discovered is that anytime we tried to alter these movements, frictions occurred.

Matching conflicting agendas Difficulty syncing our goals with those of the other teams emerged quite early in the process, and were mainly due to the way we organized the entire project into different subbriefs. After two weeks of free field investigations, and two workshops with guest teachers from other schools (Brendon Clark and Janet Kelly), we had come up with four design challenges and were to form four different working groups around them. In addition, teachers had asked us to include a fifth team that would wrap together the four projects. Here is when

our collaborative attitude first wavered: we were 22 co-designers to be spread among five briefs, which meant having at least four students per team. Given the educational purpose of our participation in the project, we all wanted to ensure we had the best environment for learning. Which meant that we all wanted to work on a design challenge we felt confident with, along with fellow students we could trust. As a consequence, we ended up having eight co-designers trying to get into the same group, and two briefs out of five being completely uncovered. Worst of all, one of the two ‘unwanted’ tasks was the co-deliverable group, a crucial one.

Despite our teachers’ call for collaboration, we couldn’t make this simple math operation work. In order to move forward, we resolved the impasse by giving up one of the four design challenges, and by forcing slightly the creation of the coordinating group, which was formed out of two volunteers and three students who were absent that day. It was indeed a bad start for a team that had to organize the work of others. The fact that no one wanted to take on this task meant that, to some extent, the usefulness of such a role was not widely understood. Hence, when we started our work as the co-deliverable group, we also had to work to gain the trust of our fellow students.

In order to have a constant overview on the advancement of the project, we set up a series of weekly meetings where representatives

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from the groups would inform each other of the progress of their work. However, we soon realized that such a mode of interaction was perceived as time-consuming and not so useful by the rest of the studio. Moreover, as teams began to prototype their ideas, a new type of friction between agendas came into play - that is, the negotiation around the final deliverable.

Given our different position, we could noticeoverlaps and sometimes incoherence among the four sub-projects. Thus, we were trying to report these instances to the concerned groups. Such editorial endeavors addressed conceptual aspects, such as themes tackled, or actors involved, as well as more art direction-like concerns, like establishing a common naming system or designing a common visual

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identity. Both tasks required a high degree of negotiation, which was not always possible due to the lack of time. If taken in isolation, each micro-project made perfect sense; however, we were to combine these separate, perfect worlds into a common system which called for coherence.

Meeting halfway Everything that our fellow students had designed of course had a precise reason to be there, so anytime we tried to push for small corrections or set guidelines, we encountered strong resistance. However, with negotiation after negotiation our coherent system started to take shape, and the rest of the studio began to recognize its value. We abandoned

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the weekly consultations, and in their place we started to meet each group individually. This new mode of operation made our interactions with them quicker and more flexible. We also learned how to soften our approach: instead of calling for homogeneity across the micro-projects, we started working at preserving their diversity and constructing good arguments to motivate the discrepancies that we had previously sought to avoid. We developed a series of graphic visualizations of the four proposals, which presented them in a coherent way and mapped their peculiarities. As our role became more tangible and discernible to other students, their willingness to collaborate with us increased. The maps we had designed became an effective tool to ease communication among groups and helped us make the overall project clear to our client as well.

We had finally found a way to make our differences come together smoothly. By understanding each others’ needs, and by trying to meet them, we had managed to preserve the peculiarities of each micro-project without compromising the coherence of the final deliverable as a whole. If we look back at the experience of Morvillo Community Garden, this complementary example shows how frictions between conflicting agendas can eventually be resolved into good collaboration, as long as the opposing sides manage to agree on a broader goal to be reached together. In this case, the shared objective was nothing but the final deliverable that we were to jointly create. In the quarrel

between gardeners and dog owners, on the other hand, a common goal could not be established. This failure was not due by any means to the incompatibility between the two agendas, as MDF believed; rather, it occurred because of the lack of a platform to facilitate the coming together of these opposing viewpoints.

In the following section I will investigate what constitutes such a platform, and what other factors might contribute to a constructive encounter between divergent matters of concern.

A polyphony of voices In the examples described above, the collaborative process was not always smooth or harmonious: as conflicting views were brought into play by different actors, thorough negotiations often became necessary. However, if we take a look at the literature around the topic, an alternative to negotiation as a way of resolving conflict has been provided by Erling Björgvinsson and his colleagues of Malmö University. In their work, they introduce the notion of ‘agonistic participatory design’ as a shift ‘from conflict between enemies to constructive controversies among adversaries’ (Björgvinsson, et al., 2012).

According to their view, the participatory process should be seen as a ‘polyphony of voices’ which recognize each other as legitimate, and are supported by ‘constitutions that help to transform antagonism into agonism’. That is, instead of trying to resolve rational conflicts between right points of view and wrong ones,

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designers could work at creating the conditions for a simultaneous enactment of all matters of concern, aimed at revealing and enabling differences among participants through their passionate engagement.

If we examine the experience of Morvillo Community Garden through this lens, the petition drafted by dog owners does not constitute an obstacle to the co-creation of the communal garden; rather, it represents the passionate manifestation of a further opportunity to be welcomed into the project. According to this view, the transformation of the park is not the

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result of the isolated initiative of gardeners – which Björgvinsson, et al. would call ‘the dominant group’ (Ibid., p 129) – rather, it becomes the opportunity for all minorities to bring their voices into the project. Hence, what should be built collaboratively is not just the vegetable garden of MDF, but a ‘polyphony of gardens’ which incorporates the needs and wishes of all citizens concerned. To generalize, whenever collaborative creation is enacted, the public space stops being a monotone identity and becomes a constellation of different interpretations, held together by the shared eagerness of participants to support each other’s concerns.

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In order to better describe this change of perspective, the team at Malmö has suggested a shift from the notion of ‘public’ toward the one of ‘publics’, in the plural form to reinforce its inherent heterogeneity. (Ibid., p 127)

of the common meetings – we tried to refit it.

As we can see here, infrastructures are flexible and evolve together with the discussion that they make possible: the act of infrastructuring is an ongoing process.

Providing a flexible frame

Making disputes tangible

Conceiving the garden as a plurality of publics, however, would not be enough to make this plurality truly emerge. As we have seen, gardeners and dog owners alone could not succeed in uniting their different concerns; what’s missing in their coming together is a set of shared rules and tools to ease their encounter and propel their different agendas. Björgvinsson, et al. would refer to this enabling platform as infrastructure (Ibid., p 130). To better understand this concept, let’s take the experience of the Future Hearings project. In this case, the ensemble of common meetings, individual consultations, and graphic visualizations that we adopted throughout the project could be seen as the small scale infrastructure that allowed collaboration within the studio. In particular, the maps we designed made diversities among the four micro-projects visible, and enabled a discussion around them. We provided a frame that could at the same time welcome and display the different content provided by each group. However, anytime such frame proved to be ineffective or uncomfortable for our fellow students – as occurred in the case

Another concept very close to that of infrastructure is the notion of design:lab, as used by our teacher Thomas Binder and his colleagues from KADK. In the article ‘Living the (co-design) lab’ (Binder, et al., 2011), they define the laboratory as the ‘framework in which envisioning new things and improvising new practices become closely intertwined’. Such a definition stresses in particular the role of prototyping as a trigger for the collaborative encounter: when different visions for the future are enacted in the real world, the discussion around these visions is made possible. Hence, defining the co-design project as a laboratory means conceiving prototyping as the lab experiment that grounds the scientific debate around future possibilities.

In the view of Binder, et al., any context where change is staged and discussed could be considered as a laboratory (Ibid., p 7). Accordingly, I will define both the Future Hearings project and Morvillo Community Garden as laboratories. In the particular case of the garden, for example, when volunteers from MDF started cultivating the first portion of land, they were actually

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prototyping their particular vision for the future of the park. By doing so, they were implicitly inviting other participants to join the new lab and express other points of view. Hence, the quarrel with dog owners that originated could be seen as a passionate response to this invitation and a sign that the lab had been successfully established. It follows that the persisting of the conflict between supporters of the vegetable garden and its opposers were not due to the unwillingness of the latter to take part in the process, but rather to the incapability of the former in handling the unexpected result of their first lab experiment.

Both projects described in this text bring out a certain degree of incoherence between the will to establish a collaborative process and the difficulty in recognizing other contributions as part of it. As we have seen, volunteers from MDF had invited local citizens to bring their diversity into the construction of a communal space. However, when such diversity arose they somewhat withdrew their invitation. Analogously, our studio had decided to collaboratively explore the domain of hearing loss, but the contribution of the ‘co-deliverable’ group was not commonly recognized as part of such an exploration. In the case of each laboratory, the role of dog owners and the one of our team were perceived as obstacles to the ongoing experimentations. Yet, in light of what I previously discussed, such discordant voices were legitimate participations in the debate around the experiments carried out in the two labs.

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Reinforcing each other’s voices The difficulty to recognize other points of view as legitimate, and the consequent reluctance to contribute to each other’s agendas, is what I would like to discuss in our last round of reflections. According to Ezio Manzini (2015), such difficulty is widespread in our present society and the rediscovery of collaboration is part of the cultural change that we need to push as designers. In the book, Design, When Everybody Designs, Manzini dedicates an entire chapter to this particular issue and asks himself what actually motivates people to collaborate. In order to construct his answer, he argues that the way our culture stresses individual needs has inhibited our natural capability to look at each other as collaborators.

That is, by conceiving personal fulfillment in its mere materialistic dimension, society has become a series of isolated individuals who buy services from each other. Despite this cynical take, the analysis of Manzini introduces the useful concept of ‘disabling well-being’: well-being that works by making people unable to do things (Ibid., p 95).

However, the co-design practice inherently challenges this disabling culture: the way we conceive participants as the experts of their everyday forces them out of this dynamic and gives them back their responsibilities. Whenever they agree to join the collaborative process,

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they agree to gift their own time and make their personal experience available: they fully commit to the cause. As designers, we need to recognize this effort. In the Future Hearings project, the co-deliverable group offered the studio an opportunity to experience what it means to be on the side of participants; what we learned is that being in a collaborative process requires continuous effort and engagement. Participation is a deliberate choice, so we need to reward it by truly committing to the cause of participants, as much as they commit to ours. As Binder, et al. argue in relation to their past experience, ‘living labs are recruited to our design laboratory, but in many ways we could just as well say that we were recruited to become part of their endeavors’ (2011, p 8).

What we need to acknowledge, as they state, is that collaboration is a ‘lab of labs’.

happen, along with tools to help collaborators give shape to their proposals. In these environments, participants are not only expressing their opinion: they commit to the common cause and enrich it with their own agendas. As designers, we need to protect this diversity and push it forward.

Conclusions We have seen how the collaborative process is the ground where divergent points of view and different wishes for the future meet others. If not properly mediated, such encounters might even develop into disputes between the concerned actors. In order to avoid these clashes, the role of designers is not to clear difference; rather, it is to make diversity visible and to enact it in a ‘polyphony of voices’ which recognize and reinforce each other. However, collaboration challenges our habits, so we need to build favorable infrastructures to make it

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No designer is an island By Ă?ris-Edda Lappalainen

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I am a third-semester MA student in the KADK Co-design programme. During the two previous semesters we have worked on two quite different projects: the first one a co-operation with a local library; the second with a major hearing aid company. In the first project, Tingbjerg FerieCamp [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.12], we were to design activities in the library for local children to participate in during their autumn break. In the second project, Future Hearings [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13], we were to make dialogue tools to fight the stigma of hearing loss and to educate people with hearing loss to get help earlier. In the following essay, I will look at these projects from a project-management point of view, and relate how, in my opinion, co-designers could act as co-managers in all design projects where there are more than one designer involved.

Like most of us know, designers are a species of their own. I dare say that every designer has a ‘designer-ego’, they believe their own design to be state-of-the-art and unique. I believe that co-designers could be an exception to this rule, since in co-design there is little room for only one designer-ego. My peers at KADK come from very different backgrounds from my own, as well as from each others’. As we work together in groups, we all have different agendas and take on how and where the project should go. In the Tingbjerg FerieCamp project, we were divided into five groups, and the second-year students of the groups acted as the project managers, meeting once a week(ish).

From what I have understood, these meetings weren’t as successful as expected, and this of course brought confusion and frustration within the management group as well as within the individual groups. I suspect that the problem lay in the vague assignments given to the group, as well as to the equality they shared with other members while also having responsibility for the work of the individual groups.

The problems with the Tingbjerg FerieCamp project management group led the teachers to assign one group of the five to solely take this ‘management’ role in the next project Future Hearings with hearing aid company, “HAC”.

As it happened, I was in this group. Looking back, I see important value in our role as the ‘management’ group. We were given the role of being the contact between the company and the other groups, finding the right contacts for the other groups to develop their own projects, and making the whole project come together without interfering in the group’s own design process, or final outcome. This type of management role made me think about how co-design could be useful in projects where designers from different fields come together to design. In bigger developments, with designers and professionals from various fields, the designer-egos often clash due to everyone considering their own work as the most important, placing themselves at the top of the hierarchy.

I see co-design as a possible solution to this problem.

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In a scenario like this, a co-designer would have to gain a deeper knowledge of the project and processes beforehand, and make a plan for everyone to follow; keeping all parties up-to-date about possible and likely changes, keeping communication open, and acting as an unbiased intermediary to make sure that the project proceeds smoothly without misunderstandings and miscommunication. And, most importantly, to do all this without hurting all the design-egos involved. This could prevent delays, budget overruns, and a lot of frustration. Also, when a co-designer acts successfully as the channel for communication, treating all parties as equals, misunderstandings and misinterpretations can be cut to a minimum with equal respect to all involved.

Let’s take a building development for instance: where architects, light engineers, HVAC engineers, interior, and furniture designers, as well as landscape designers and city planners, work and interact together simultaneously.

The development itself is dependent on all the designers mentioned, as well as the client, be it a municipal body or private organization.

The chain is crucial, and, I presume, involves many instances and a lot of politics. While consultants do exist, I understand that a ‘translator’ between the different professions is what’s missing. Consultants concentrate on the finances, they make sure that the development stays within the budget, but they leave the planning work to others. The co-designers could be the translators between the different

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designers, understanding the whole process from the beginning to end, leaving the specific details to each designer. Co-design could be used to oversee, ensuring all information sent from one stakeholder to the other is gained on time, and that one party doesn’t design too far ahead while the others are still working on something else important. By doing this, everyone avoids double work, and the frustration between different parties which results.

A co-designer would, in other words, design the infrastructure for the whole process, and oversee the process as it moves forward from beginning to end.

In co-design, the emphasis is always on the process rather than the final product or outcome. In these kinds of project scenarios, I can see that co-design could bring a new and different approach in itself, educating all parties involved about how co-design opens doors to new areas within the design world, using its trans-disciplinary methods in trans-disciplinary projects; making co-design a part of the bigger picture, not only a participant in one aspect of the process. Of course design within design already exists in many forms, be it ‘metadesign’, ‘design thinking’, or ‘participatory design’. I feel, however that the co-designer in the building development scenario could/would concentrate more on the designer, not the design. In design, people are seen and valued through their design but, nevertheless, designers are human too. As the evolution in human beings is seen and documented, so

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should the evolution in design. As Elisa Giaccardi (2005, p.347) describes in Metadesign as an emergent design culture:

Keeping the system open to participation and evolution at use time is meant to join social and technical systems, not only to make them optimized and efďŹ cient, but also to let new conditions, interactions and relationships emerge. In this way—by sustaining emergence and evolution—new forms of sociability and creativity can develop and innovation can be fostered.

longer would need time and patience from the co-designer. And a great deal of reassurance, firstly that the design itself will stay in the hands of the appointed designer; and secondly that the co-designer will not only take part in the design process, but in the process as a whole.

I see opportunities for a better and more humane process in this, if the focus on the designer is considered equal to the focus on the design. Respecting all people involved equally, overlooking the hierarchy, and seeing the bigger picture of how a development is dependent on everyone, gives all parties equal importance, despite the fact that on a personal or a professional level some might consider themselves more or less important than others.

Realistically, I see that what I see as an opportunity might be seen as a threat by others, especially within processes that have followed a certain pattern and workflow for centuries.

To generalise, I see that people can often be resistant to change. I presume designers are no exception. Allowing co-designers to enter into systems that have been ongoing for decades or

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This is not an interview: speech and silence

By Andrea Østmo da Costa

“Hmmm, I don’t know if I comprehend fully, Andrea. I understand what I associate when seeing the pictures. That is, what I associate with the birds, sounds from the notepad, keyboard, the apple that is being chewed into, and on those bottles I can see they’ve been sort of ‘sound proofed’ with the rubber... ”

Picture perfect The pictures did not make immediate sense, or so it appeared. They were photographs of us (the group members of the Future Hearings project) [see ‘Project timelines’, p.13] expressing our own understandings and assumptions of what hearing loss might feel and look like.

We had agreed to express, in a ‘designerly’ way, what was initially going on inside our heads when we first came to know of the topic we would be exploring with this project. The photos consisted of ourselves posing with different objects, combined in ‘unusual and usual’ ways. They were our reinterpretation of the sensation of sound and the discomfort it can create for people of different hearing abilities. The photos had been laid out after

some time conversing naturally and openly with the interviewee, Trond, about his history, thoughts, and concerns regarding hearing loss, and hearing aid usage. We initiated a conversation in, what Danes would consider, a hyggelig and relaxed manner, an informal ‘round table’ conversation over chocolate cake and coffee.

Trond had invited us into his home, and created a friendly atmosphere for us to begin the fieldwork in. I found myself in both a familiar and unfamiliar scenario, where the participant of the encounter was both a relative and a field work participant. This familiarity created a more comfortable and convivial atmosphere.

However, I was aware of maintaining a balance between the visit and the field work.

Eager to include newly-learned methods, we had prepared the photographs to share during the encounter, expecting and hoping that in a natural and relevant manner we’d manage to bring our personalised ‘visual prompts’ into the dialogue without causing much disruption to the movement of the conversation. The pictures had been intended for us, as designers, as a method of immersing ourselves into the sub-

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ject, entering into the space of the topic, and allowing ourselves to freely visualise our interpretations. Later arose the thought of these visuals being used as a ‘prompting tool’, or a bridge between us and the participant; a bridge for open conversation, where our immediate responses could be challenged or discussed.

Silence for dialogue Trond asked what they were. Already the question implied that it was not clear. I explained how they were our interpretations of sound and hearing, and that we’d like Trond to think of associations when observing the visuals.

The light of our conversation slightly dimmed, and more of a silence appeared. It took a little while before Trond said anything about the pictures, yet from his facial expression we could tell he was trying - though perhaps too hard, like it was a task we had assigned him.

I found myself warily attempting to maintain the silence, and in silence trying to invite Trond into the conversation, whilst aware of the possible disruption the presentation of these pictures might have just caused. It turns out, although sometimes challenging, a bit of silence doesn’t do any harm. The silence and the disruption appeared to make room for a gentler pace of conversation. Trond began speaking slowly as he was, it appeared, processing in his mind the visuals alongside other thoughts.

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He pointed at a photograph of one person shouting through a megaphone into another person’s ear. I said: “In this picture someone might be speaking loudly to you because they think that you are not wearing the hearing aid; perhaps they are not being considerate in not asking you whether you in fact are wearing the aid or not. And, in this picture [showing a nail about to pierce a balloon] we spoke about how we, the design team, would try not to ‘burst your bubble’… so it’s an attempt at a wordplay in these photos.

You can, for example, suggest phrases to combine with this picture.”

I found myself explaining our point of view for what felt like too long. Overtime. “Remember that word”, I told myself. “Make space, slow the pace, listen, then interact”.

It’s my handicap Trond is looking at the photographs carefully, creating the impression that he would like to formulate a considered response. “It is difficult for me in these situations”, he said, pointing to a photograph of someone shouting into a megaphone. A bit of silence returned before Trond continued: “Hmm… the notion that the other person should be considerate… it lies deep within me that it is me who should make the other

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person aware, about my challenge, my handicap. I understand that your exercise is about how we shall make the other participant of the conversation understand that I have a problem - but it is not how my brain is wired.”

This was the sort of response and insight that brought about a fruitful change in the conversation, and I found myself wanting to engage further in this conflict. I shared my thoughts with Trond, and attempted to encourage his point of not expecting the other to adapt to his challenges, which he felt it necessary to think of as his responsibility, his handicap: “your response is welcome… this might not be the best way to approach the subject, it doesn’t have to be this way, your interpretation is your own.”

... it lies deep within me that it is me who should make the other person aware, about my challenge, my handicap.

“This is, in a sense, about the way people are together, the way people engage, and whether a person is capable of saying ‘stop’,” Trond replied. Ingeborg, my fellow co-designer and interviewer, entered the conversation with a question to help direct us further into the exploration of these associations: “are there any of these pictures where you think the sound is particularly annoying or bothersome for you?”

Trond again had a face expressing deep introspection. “No... not really, but I can certainly relate to some of the images, if this and that happened.” He points at two images, the nail

piercing the ballon, and another showing a balloon being pierced by the point of a high heel: “if this occurred repeatedly, then I would be very annoyed.” He added, “depending on the type of flooring..that would be an annoying situation.” The element of the mundane was apparent. Some visuals expressed an obvious, maybe oversimplified, hearing issue. However, those photographs became in themselves a way for us to openly demonstrate our ignorance, acknowledging the naivety our visualisations might present of a more complex experience.

A ‘balanced engagement’ Trond continued, carefully including us in his understanding and perception of the topic and the photographs: “It is about having a perspective on the situation that we are in. When we are caught in a situation or a moment, it is very hard to react immediately. The art might be to be more conscious of what is going on, and explain to the other person that if we are going to have a fruitful conversation we will have to go elsewhere or speak again another time. I think that is one way to deal with that situation.”

The value of people consistently being conscious and responsive to making the necessary adjustments towards each other, regardless of their particular handicap or issues, emerged

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as a topic for discussion. The conversation had returned to a ‘balanced engagement’ between three people - one of laughter, silence, questions, and contemplations. In a sense, we were almost mirroring the topic itself, engaging in a valuable conversation between people.

This is quite interesting... we are moving into a territory concerning people and games…

I offered, “maybe it is also about a form of discretion… you shouldn’t have to tell me every time [that I should be considerate] but you can mention it… so that I am aware that this is something of importance and recurrence in your life, in a sense acknowledging more that the situation is of importance in your life.”

“This is quite interesting... we are moving into a territory concerning people and games…”, Trond replied. “That is also a way to discuss design language… language games. That humans have different ways of engaging in different circumstances, like a basketball game vs being at home over dinner.” I shared this with Trond, finding it interesting how his remarks resonated with this particular idea of describing human communication in different contexts.

“Yes, and that brings us to the difficulty of communicating when we are talking past each other 100%.”, Trond replied. While holding up a photograph of ‘sound proofed’ beers, with rubber around the neck, I asked:

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“Our games in life… what if this was representing a game for example? And for one full day we had to be considerate in a somewhat exaggerated way… what would we do then?

When you then return to a normal situation it is not so much an exaggeration to simply move location in order to converse more easily... because this is an exaggeration compared to that of soundproofing a beer bottle.”

Pointing the photograph, I suggested, “imagine, if in a bar for the entire evening everyone had to cover their bottles with rubber, a sort of ‘silent day in the pub’.” We all smiled and laughed at this notion. The image was comical to us all, and that moment briefly created a bridge between us, and we returned to a more open-ended conversation.

Quality of life “I don’t think it is necessarily about sound…”, Trond expresses whilst pointing at a photograph of hands typing on a keyboard. “I, as a receiver of that sound, feel provoked, and then I am the one with the issue, or the problem. I have a challenge in accepting what is going on around me, I might be having a bad morning, or I might just have a bad quality of life. What do I know…? But, that is what I mean, this is a broad issue. It is one’s personal preference and involvement that influences these situations.”

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I asked if the phrase ‘quality of life’ resonates here. Trond pointed at the photographs again… “all these sounds you can also be provoked by”, he said while looking at us and continued,“so maybe the scenarios have to be turned on their heads a little… is it me who is experiencing this because I am stressed? Or is it due to bad hearing?”

This experience shared by Trond highlighted to me the complexity and sensitivity of the topic. Both me and Ingeborg continued trying to retain the ‘balance of engagement’ for the next hour of the encounter. At the time, our focus was on the insights the participant shared, and how to further adapt ideas and methods accordingly.

I shared with him further thoughts about his idea of people and their environment, their quality of life influencing their experiences of different situations:

In stepping back and observing this as a human interaction it is also possible to assess my own engagement with the participant. The encounter was not only a lesson in how to engage in valuable conversation, but an insight into the balancing act between speech and silence.

In contemplating this encounter months after having finished the project, a very different insight can now be appreciated. This encounter was also the moment of becoming ‘acquainted’ with the participant, inviting him into the project, and making sense of the engagement as a human interaction. The experience was a reminder of the importance of setting aside space and time for ‘bridge building’, and acknowledging the participant’s indispensable role in a co-design project.

“I wonder if it is possible to think of it in regards to quality of life being something of importance for all people… when something in your life occurs, which effects your quality of life, and how you deal with that, has an impact.

For everyone there is value in spending time thinking about how we communicate with people, and what considerations we can take... it might not be just one challenge or handicap; for example, what do these issues do to us physically?”

The table was slightly more quiet again. We waited and Trond re-entered the conversation: “physical pain can diminish the quality of your experiences… after the surgery on my arm, my doctor told me that I might possibly experience increased hearing loss due to the pain in my shoulder, so there is something there. Perhaps because we focus on a certain pain, we thereby slightly diminish other sensations of pain.”

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Leaving the ivory tower: the designer as co-designer

By Rikke Gjerulff

Traditionally, the designer has been associated with a relatively limited field of design professions – all of them to some extent permeated by aesthetic considerations. In these professional fields, the designer would usually be seen as a super expert whose opinions hold extra power.

This has been the case for furniture designers, graphic designers and product designers.

In this essay, I argue that this ‘compartmentalization’ of the designer and the design process is rapidly becoming outdated. The role of designers has to adapt to major societal and technological changes such as the continued expansion of a complex welfare state system or the advent of social media applications, just to mention a couple. Generally, the increased complexity in world affairs, business life, community-based interactions, etc., makes it impossible for the designer to remain as this sort of superhero standing somewhat distanced from the users, citizens, clients, and customers that are ultimately the target group for the

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designer’s work. If designers are to become relevant in other professional areas beyond the traditional design fields, a whole new mindset and approach is needed. And this is where the concept of co-design comes into play!

My point of departure for writing this essay is a formal educational background as a graphic designer, combined with extensive working experience in developing corporate identities and branding strategies. Several years of professional experience with identity design has convinced me that the mindset of designers holds tremendous potential for creating innovative solutions beyond the traditional narrow field of design. But this potential can only be unfolded if the designer’s mindset is combined with fundamental concepts and tools of user interaction, and with ways to facilitate research and communication.

Basically (running the risk of over-simplification), what makes the designer leave their

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ivory tower and become a co-designer is by the embracing of much more rigorous processes for examining needs, wants, and desires in the real lives of the members of the target group. The designer is thus far more embedded within the target group by using a design-anthropological approach. This is not to say that designers have never interacted with the world around them - of course they have. But, I would argue, not to the same extent or with the same rigorous methodological approach that new and upcoming co-designers are doing today.

To exemplify what a co-design process could look like, this essay will draw reference to a project delivered to a hearing company. The Future Hearings project [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13] centered around exploring how the company could get a better understanding of the people using their products, and how best to engage in dialogue with these users.

It’s all about the process One of the fundamentals of the co-design process is collaboration. The co-designer needs to become embedded within the project’s target group. Similarly, it is important that the co-designer recognizes their role vis-à-vis other stakeholders. The co-designer will often not be the expert, rather there will be a wide range of other experts that the co-designer relies on for critical information and insights. With the Future Hearings project, these experts could include:

- People living with a hearing problem - Technical engineers developing hearing aid devices - A doctor specializing in hearing loss - The senior management of the hearing aid company The role of the co-designer thus becomes one of facilitating ways to ‘extract’ relevant information and insights from these other experts.

The core job for the co-designer is to develop research tools to acquire insights, ideas, and conceptual thinking, to develop the overall structure of workshops, and maybe a final product. The principal mind-set of co-designing is that the best solution is found together with the users, and that the co-designer is adding their design knowledge to the process, and not necessarily to the product.

A major characteristic of the co-design process is also the iterative and non-linear nature of the work. The point of a co-design process is to ‘research-learn-work-maketest’, and continuously repeat this while you are doing the project. In the project for the hearing-aid company, the ‘final product’ consisted of a board game intended for interaction between both hearing-aid users and non-users (further details below). The board game was tested and developed over the course of four meetings to improve the game’s functionality. A co-designer thus also needs to be patient!

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Another characteristic of the co-design process is that it is somewhat open-ended - you don’t always know where you are going to end up. In methodological terms the co-design process is very much inductive (as opposed to deductive), i.e. the co-designer goes out and explores the world through observation and interaction without theoretically-derived hypotheses or assumptions.

Finally, when highlighting the importance of the co-design process, it is also important to recognize that there does not always have to be a final product. Actually, in many cases the co-design process will not materialize in a physical product that you can feel and touch.

The result of a co-design process can also be, for example, a corporate strategy, a set of working tools, or a box of insight materials for target group interaction. In the Future Hearings project, the final product consisted of a dialogue tool in the shape of a board game. For the client – HAC – this was thus not a product to sell to their customers, but rather an instrument to engage with society on how hearing problems, and thus the use of hearing-aids, are perceived. The board game could potentially provide helpful information that could inform and shape the company’s strategic decisions on how to market their products, develop their corporate social responsibility strategy, etc.

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Okay… but how does it work?

When using the Future Hearings project to outline an example of a co-design process, the initial phase will involve typical deskbased research about the company’s products and general statistics about hearing-aid users.

At this stage, the process is somewhat similar to a traditional consultancy-based design process.

However, the next stage involves a more in-depth understanding of the target group through field-encounters. In the Future Hearings project, a so-called ‘user journey’ experience was created. An interview was conducted with two hearing-aid users, and a visualization of a timeline was used to engage them in a dialogue on how and when they had started to become users of hearing-aids, and what their experiences with hearing-aids had been over time.

Prefabricated drawings of simulated episodes helped facilitate the dialogue. Examples included: “who was the first person I talked to about my hearing problem?” and “when did I see my doctor?”. The basic idea was that the user took charge, through the use of the timeline, explaining the whole sequence of their hearing-aid experience, with interviewers only adding supplementary questions.

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The timeline is instrumental in facilitating a dialogue on explicit events and episodes.

Compared to a traditional interview, the use of a timeline where the target audience could engage in a more ‘equal’ dialogue with the interviewers helps reveal more hands-on information from the users’ perspective. Furthermore, the interview becomes much more vivid and dynamic

The information gained from the ‘timeline interview’ was subsequently used to develop a tool kit for another field encounter, a so-called probe kit. The probe kit consisted of various tools and exercises intended to go beyond the limitations of a formal interview setting, and thus to capture further insight from the daily lives of the users, including attitudes, habits, and values. We were partly inspired to make this probe kit by an EU-funded research project called ‘Cultural probes’, which focused on examining how elderly people behave in their local communities

(Gaver, Dunne & Pacenti, 1999). In our case, the probe kit included a disposable camera that the users used to document certain situations from their social lives, and how their use of a hearing aid had unfolded during those experiences.

Furthermore, the probe kit included prefabricated postcards from different ‘destinations/situations’ (at a restaurant, talking on the phone, being at home, etc.). An example of a prefabricated text was: “Imagine dining at a restaurant with your wife and a couple of friends. You’re having a great time with pleasant conversation and lots of laughs. Write a postcard on your experience from the restaurant in the same way that you would write a postcard from a vacation. Ideally, you should express your observations and reflections on your friend’s hearing problem”.

The idea was that the users’ close relatives and friends should write the postcards in order to get a deeper understanding of the users’ hearing problem. Finally, the probe kit contained a prefabricated comic strip where the users were instructed to fill out the last sentence in the blank balloon. This method was intended to get some insight from the hearing-aid user about what they wanted their doctor to ask or say the first time they went to them with their hearing problem.

The probe kit was handed out during an interview along with a few basic instructions. Four weeks later, the users handed back the probe-

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kit with photos, postcards, and comic strips also produced during an interview, which enabled a further clarifying dialogue. Characteristic of the co-design process, the information gained through the probe-kit was in many ways unexpected, revealing new aspects that required further research work. The users had used the probe kit according to their own understanding, thus taking the interviewers somewhat by surprise. However, the insights were crucial as they truly originated from the users’ own thinking, rather than from a tightly-controlled qualitative interview.

The facilitation of the field encounter with the use of visual dialogue tools, such as a timeline and probe kit, is thus a very good example of a co-design process. The insights gained from

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the field encounters subsequently directed the development of the overall concept of a dialogue tool to foster interaction between either hearing-aid users or non-users (or a mix). As mentioned above, the dialogue tool ended up being a board game with various elements related to having a hearing problem. The overall objective with the board game was to challenge and further develop the hearing-aid company’s own thinking about their target group (the hearing-aid users).

Very much in line with the co-design mantra, “it’s all about the process”, this essay will not elaborate on describing the details of the board game. The final product is not the important part of co-designing. The important part is the road that you have taken to get there: the process.

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What the future holds for co-design As it is hopefully evident for the reader, based on the above examples, the co-designer utilizes a unique combination of anthropological concepts about user interaction and design-developed facilitation tools. While unique in its combination of these two paradigms, the co-design method is a generic one, and is thus applicable across a wide field of industries and businesses. An almost universal fact is that you need to unde-

stand your users, your clients, your patients, or your citizens in order to provide the best answers to their problems, wants, or desires. This holds true across public and private domains, across profit and non-profit domains, and many others.

In my view, the co-design method will be relevant for the health care sector, for government, and for larger corporations. The future is bright for co-design, but it will require some work from co-designers themselves to realize their full potential.

THEME 04

BEAUTIFUL MESS Collaboration is a journey colored by mistakes, achievements, random encounters, and sudden changes in direction. It’s a learning process that feeds our growth as individuals and as collaborators. It is messy, but we don’t fear it: we call for chaos as we believe in its power to resolve and to challenge. The following contributions explore the coming together of people and things, the unstable dialogue of opposing forces, and the ever-changing roles and positions we take on as we walk in each others’ directions. Welcome to the backstage of collaboration; welcome to the Beautiful Mess.

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When an interview goes wrong

By Naomi Aholou

Beautiful Mess

Living in Tingbjerg People living in Tingbjerg are mainly immigrants. They are all living together in an area surrounded by big parks. Only one road leads to Tingbjerg, isolating the town from the city center of Copenhagen. There is nothing around to do: no fitness center, no cinema, no shopping malls, no cultural center – only a few shops settle on the main road. From my outsider view (French/Luxembourg/Togolese living in Copenhagen), it seems like these people are kept away from the center of Copenhagen, as if there is no space for them in the city. So they put all of them in the middle of nowhere, where no one sees them. When I told some Danish students from Copenhagen, and some friends, that I was working in Tingbjerg, the words that kept being repeated were: “it is a ghetto”, “there are many immigrants”, or “it is a dangerous place”.

From these assumptions and prejudices, I started to have one concern: that it would be hard to gain people’s trust in Tingbjerg, and to collaborate with them.

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Sketch of the initial situation when we were introduced to Tingbjerg : we were working with the library but we did not have direct contact with people living in Tingbjerg.

The first encounter between the KADK students and the people of Tingbjerg. Depending on how the encounter occurs, the students will be allowed to enter into this “trust zone�. This encounter is accompanied by curiosity but also mistrust, misunderstanding, or a stronger rejection.

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This represents the trust zone of people living in Tingbjerg. It is the zone where people trust you as a foreigner, where they do not express discomfort toward you working with them.

The social, cultural, and ethical barrier separating the citizens of Tingbjerg from people outside.

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Parachuting into this context We had to create a summer camp for the kids in the area, in partnership with Tingbjerg’s local library. This was clearly an advantage for us, because the library was a part of the life of the locals. Consequently, it had already created a climate of trust.

So, being established in the local library facilitated our airdrop into Tingbjerg. We were strangers to that community but not completely, because we were working with the library. A local institute that people knew.

As students from KADK, we were sent into an area which was totally unknown to us, Tingbjerg. We were literally dropped in. Thankfully, we first landed in the local library, a settled zone which was in contact with the citizens.

So, in the end, we were not defined as random students from a design school making a random project, but as students from KADK working with the local library on a project.

Consequently, we had one thing in common with the locals: the library.

When we arrived at the library we met two former students of KADK, who had already worked on projects between the school and the library. The first was organising workshops to repair broken goods every week. The second was a permanent employee at the library. This man had a lot of contact with the population, and was used to giving advice when asked.

Somehow, neither of them proposed that we meet the kids. They said “you can meet them at the library, or at their school”, but they didn’t facilitate the contact. We had to do it alone.

The first approach: the interview To start the project, we needed to get a sense of Tingbjerg and the life of the kids living there. At this time, no kids were at the library, and school had just finished, so we went out into the main street to interview them in front

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of their school. We started by interviewing two sisters, of 13- and 14-years-old, who lived in Tingbjerg.

These are the notes of my first impressions of this encounter:

We catch up two sisters coming out of school. The way that we catch them was not the most comfortable. It was under the trees on the grass. It was a bit as if we had cut them the road.

We briefly presented ourselves, and told them that we were working with the library to set up a summer camp. Then we asked them if they were willing to respond to our questions, and we started our interview: What do you do when it is holiday?

We travel.

Where do you travel?

France, England or Spain.

What do you do when you are out travelling?

We visit family or just go to different places to experience them.

What do you do during your travels when you are not visiting family?

We stay at a hotel, and our parents decide what we are going to see.

Do you like that your parents decide?

Yes. What do you do in Tingbjerg when the weather is bad and you cannot go outside?

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Hang out with friends and have fun.

How do you have fun with your friends?

Watch movies and talk with each other.

What is it you enjoy about that?

It is just fun.

What could there be missing in Tingbjerg, if something is missing?

Nothing is missing.

What do you do with your time when the weather is good?

We grill a lot.

Do you have any siblings?

Yes, we do.

What do your smaller siblings do when they have free time?

They stay at the after-school care.

What do they do when it is holiday and nothing is open?

Then they sometimes do the vacation camp.

They like that.

What is it like to grow up in Tingbjerg?

It is good. Everybody knows each other.

Do you hang out with children from other areas that are not from Tingbjerg?

Yes, we know them from school. Not everybody at Tingbjerg School is from Tingbjerg. We all know other kids.

During this interview, our interviewees were not really at ease with us. In my notes, I described the body language showing their discomfort:

Beautiful Mess

The fact that we were superior in number didn’t make them really feel at ease because they kept a good distance between us and them. They were constantly fidgeting and playing with their earphones. They were also always looking at each other while responding, as to have an approval from each other.

It felt as if we did the wrong things during the interview. Their discomfort made us uncomfortable as well. This situation put breaks on our enthusiasm to doing a new interview.

A sketch made the same day of the interview, thanks to my visual memory. On the left I am recording, Maria is in the middle, and Xenia on the right. Maria was the one asking questions. Both of the sisters were answering the questions at the same time, or alternately.

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What did not work After the interview, we were a bit frustrated about how things had gone. We did not collect all the information that we expected. We only got a little material for the next step of the project. Therefore, we started to create a report of what didn’t work, and we debriefed on what had happened. These were the main points that were put forward: - We were leading a police interview, and not a discussion. It was not necessary, and it was not really pleasant for any of us.

- We needed to have much more open questions, not yes and no questions.

- We could have avoided leading questions and assumptions like, ”how is it to grow up here”, assuming that the area is probably not the best place to spend your childhood. We were clearly influenced by all the prejudices from people outside of Tingbjerg thinking that it was a ghetto.

And this played a role in the way we asked questions.

- It would have helped if someone responsible at the school or the library had introduced us, and our project. Our interview would have felt less intrusive and sudden.

Also, the fact that we were waiting in front of the school was somewhat strange.

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Another thing that was not in the report, but that we had a lot of arguing about, concerned our way of dressing and our attitude when we interviewed the two sisters. One of our teammates was giving a bad image of us as collaborative designers, as she had not adapted to the local situation. The sketch “The look and attitude matters” [p. 147] summarises very well what we mentioned during this conversation.

Beautiful Mess

When people stop being polite By Íris-Edda Lappalainen Thinking back to our Future Hearings project last semester makes me smile [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.13]. The frustration in the beginning seemed never-ending, yet turned into an outcome that we can all be proud of, leaving us with a certain kind of sadness as the project finished and we went our separate ways.

I guess it is safe to say that no-one wanted to be in our group; we were the leftovers of the whole class. The group was to oversee the other groups and make a frame that brought together the other projects as a whole. We were the first ones in the Co-Design programme’s history to be appointed this task, an exercise which felt very challenging and wide open.

Ironically, in the beginning we were only four first-semester students with only one project in co-design to reflect upon, and later in the project one third-semester student joined.

They had done the first two semesters before maternity leave, and most of it from home, putting her more or less on the same lines with the rest of us.

In the beginning we were quite clueless about what our roles were within and outside the group. In hindsight, it felt like we were running around like headless chickens with difficulties communicating with each other. The lack of communication turned from polite and light conversation to fairly heated discussions, frustration, and arguments quite early on in the process. As we were five designers with different backgrounds, views, and life experience, we did not agree on much. Looking back, what started as an exercise in design thinking soon transformed into a very different process, and a valuable one: how to build a team.

As time remaining grew shorter, the never-ending fights over minor details transformed into encouraging conversations where things said were not taken personally but as healthy critique. The dynamic in the group changed into one that could be related to in a ‘family’ setting. This change also meant that the focus shifted from frustrating group work to the actual work at hand, and all the honesty and bluntness turned into something positive and valuable. For me personally, the most

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interesting lesson was exactly this hidden one, a lesson in group dynamics and trust, and the final deliverable naturally found its course when we first looked deeper into our group interaction - something that we could all be proud of.

In Katja Tschimmel’s article, ‘Design thinking as an effective toolkit for innovation’ (2012, p.1), she states that ‘Design Thinking’ is a way of thinking which leads to “transformation, evolution and innovation”. If I could start this project all over again with the knowledge I have today, I would first evaluate what each team member has to bring to the table and what they could learn from each other. I would understand the fact that one might be better in doing one thing than others, and also know when is the time to step back and when to make your voice heard. Looking back, I feel that the mistake of jumping straight into the process, before evaluating the dynamics of the group, highlighted the importance of what it means to work and design as a group. I would join the group as a member, not as a designer.

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Destination: disruption

The first co-designers in my life

By Andrea Østmo da Costa So here is an admission: my first teachers of co-design and social innovation were a group of nine strong-willed artisans from the Andean mountains of Peru. The experience demanded unexpected contributions from me. It was in an environment where, out of necessity, things are done differently. The artisans created discontinuity in my life by giving me a profound introduction to new ways of living and doing, closely familiar to what I later came to learn was a growing field of design for social innovation, co-design.

Designing disruption What does it mean to have a ‘disruption’ or ‘discontinuity’ in our lives?

Ezio Manzini (2015, p. 14) describes ‘local discontinuity’ as creating, “something that breaks the routine by proposing ways of behaving that are radically new”. What is common in one place, might be strange and possibly outrageous in another. His definition is related to a formula for ‘social innovation’, where he also points out that what is considered radically

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new, “cannot be defined in general terms, because the same idea and the same organisations are not new to the same degree in different contexts” (Manzini, 2015, p. 14). Can we create ‘discontinuity’ by exploring other ways of living through collaborative encounters, where our beliefs and assumptions will be challenged within radically new contexts?

This essay reacts to the increasing demand for designers (and professional creatives) to participate in unexpected, varying, and complex collaborations. As Manzini (2015, p. 29) discusses more broadly in the book, Design When Everybody Designs: “In recent years the term ‘design’ and ‘designer’ have been successfully applied to notions, activities, and people well beyond those found in the community traditionally acknowledged by these terms. The result is that today design is recognised by an increasing number of people as a way of thinking and behaving that is applicable to many situations. On the other hand, for this very reason, its meaning has become less clear than it seemed (to those in the field) to be in the past. So nowadays, to this increase in the numbers of those who talk about it, and to the wide range of activities it is used in, there corresponds an equally wide spectrum of meanings and potential misunderstandings.”

These ‘meanings and potential misunderstandings’ can occur when a designer takes on mul-

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tiple roles and has to re-evaluate and assess the varying social and cultural contexts they are operating within. The aim of this essay is to explore and reflect on how we as people, not only designers, seek to create and collaborate in the shaping of our lives, and what we can learn from intentionally ‘disrupting’ our usual ways of doing and thinking. Through sharing a specific collaborative experience with an NGO on a social development project, I reflect on the ever-changing nature of collaborative design, and how ‘discontinuity’ can contribute to this process, shaping new attitudes and actions.

On the mission to disrupt Before joining the Co-design MA programme at KADK, I studied Textile Design. As a textile designer, I sensed a disconnection, a distance, between myself and the people in my field.

This led me on a mission to better understand where I fitted into the relationship between objects, materials, and people. I became involved in a social development project, with the NGO Heifer Perú, where I could take part in a ‘capacity-building project’, which aimed to support and empower artisans in the Puno region of the Peruvian Andes. It soon became apparent to me how much I had to learn about working with people, and about social issues.

The disruption I felt upon embarking on this adventure was considerable: I accepted the position of ‘technical design consultant’ and soon found myself in the role of: teacher,

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mediator, investigator, observer, influencer, motivator, and watch dog.

I was based in London, and the people I was to collaborate with were far away (and very high up) in the Peruvian Andes At the beginning of the project, it became clear to me that I was in need of a considerable amount of information to move forward with even the smallest of ideas. I was based in London, and the people I was to collaborate with were far away (and very high up) in the Peruvian Andes. The immediate tasks at hand were to design a garment collection and consult on the design development process in general. The work was focused on the ‘commercialization process’ of the artisan’s products, and was part of a large-scale social project to strengthen the ‘value chain’ of alpaca production: from the raw materials, such as breeding conditions for the llamas, to the final stage of creating viable products for sale in a global market.

My involvement in this project began with various conversations, via Skype, with a project manager, also based in London, who attempted to provide support for the practical aspects of communication. After a period of long-distance designing and consulting, much confusion arose, regarding everything from whether the artisans actually had a ‘quality control’ process for the yarns they used, to identifying who had produced what garments, in order to give feedback and recommendations to the right people.

The Andean visits soon began. A main concern of the team that came along from London was to ensure that the artisans would be going through a learning process in parallel to the creation of a garment collection. Ensuring the artisans felt they were not being designed for, but with, was also a priority, prompting plans to organise workshops where a collaborative design process could be conducted. After two short visits in the space of a year, a third visit, this time of three months, was arranged.

The value of collaboration “... facilitators create an impact whether they consciously recognise it or not.” (Akama and Young, 2012, p. 65) One of the many difficulties of taking part in a ‘development’ project is negotiating the differing goals, intentions, and values that come between people occupying very different positions within society. Relocating myself to the mountains, to their space, I could truly enter their sphere. This challenged my previous perceptions about the issues hindering the efficiency of the project, and I was able to focus on creating consensus and handling the subtleties of cross-cultural human interaction.

The workshops brought intimate moments of conversation with individual artisans about their personal expectations and experiences, as well as the practical hands-on skills sharing and design development I had been expecting.

I was able to fully immerse myself, becoming

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less of an outsider, and to acquaint myself with the people I was to work with.

I was astonished at how they would always show up and never let each other down, despite having to travel vast distances on foot.

Facilitating the artisans’ creative development, and attempting to build confidence in them as designers in their own right, went handin-hand. As both collaborator and facilitator, establishing a deeper human connection was crucial for me in the development of the workshops. Through conversation I gained insight into their daily struggles and logistical challenges, which helped create awareness for both myself and the NGO, directly affecting the production strategy of the collection. From such insights also arose new ideas and plans for how to create guidelines, such as identifying the people who were willing and able to take on other responsibilities due to advantages of mobility or leadership skills.

In the end, what was radical and disruptive, for me, was the experience of becoming involved with these people in such an intimate way, and creating more mind-space for taking in what collaboration could really mean to its participants.

The exchange of insights, skills, and resources was, however, not a new or ‘radical’ concept to the artisans, who have always depended on

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each others’ willingness to collaborate and to trade resources and skills. Often I would discover two identical garments had been created simultaneously in two different places, by two different women who ‘naturally collaborated’ for efficiency and comradeship. Therefore, developing new links and collaborative relationships was an agreeable process, and they appreciated my efforts in visiting their chakras (sacred land).

What became increasingly clear to me during this period was the importance of actions over words. I was astonished at how they would always show up and never let each other down, despite having to travel vast distances on foot.

It inspired in me a great deal of trust, and a strong feeling of respect. The mind-set of the artisans is one of determination and strength.

Used to dealing with harsh climates, they have fostered such a strong and intimate connection to their surroundings, and have developed an extraordinary capacity to support themselves and their families.

In the end, what was radical and disruptive, for me, was the experience of becoming involved with these people in such an intimate way, and creating more mind-space for taking in what collaboration could really mean to its participants. It created in me an increased appreciation of the level of engagement that is necessary for a collaborative exchange to be valuable for everyone.

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Prepare for landing “…collaboration takes place when people encounter each other and exchange something (time, care, experience, expertise, etc.) in order to receive a benefit; in other words, they create a shared value. This definition also tells us that each collaboration has a core, and this core is an encounter: the collaborative encounter in which two or more people meet and interact in order to do something they all recognise as a value.” (Manzini, 2015, p. 93) Changing your style of living, or entering an unfamiliar environment, even if only temporarily, can spark unexpected insights. The ‘disrupted’ person is someone experiencing a change in their ordinary everyday activity and their personal outlook. Collaborations, such as the experience I have recounted above, are, in themselves, opportunities to ‘disrupt’. Stepping into a new and unfamiliar environment demands of us an assessment of the roles and positions we come to adopt in this strange, new context; and, by extension, those which we occupied before. We can’t always make a radical change in our lifestyle, but we can consider the next best thing: travelling beyond your ‘comfort zone’, and forcing yourself to become the outsider.

sign. The urge I had as a textile designer, to move closer to the people behind familiar processes, took me on a long journey - taking in some stunning mountaintop views along the way. This disruption in my life was healthy, altering my course toward a place more in line with my needs. As designers, we must embrace the potential of disruption and discontinuity, not just in our lives and practice, but in the lives of those we design for. Collaboration can be the key to this disruption. It might be a bumpy ride - and you may experience some turbulence - but when you land, you’ll know that you’ve arrived in the right place.

By becoming the outsider, I was able to fully appreciate the value of collaboration. It is no surprise to me that I am now pursuing co-de-

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Getting to know your participants

By Maria Mietke Rasmussen

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We have to know who we are designing for, so we can make the best possible product.

Knowing the people you are designing for, however, can be difficult. It is like any new relationship you form with another human being. There is maybe some prejudice that needs to be overcome, and a bit of awkwardness in the first interactions. You need to inspire trust, so they can open up and you can learn from one another. But this is, of course, very hard to do. You just don’t connect with everyone. We all have different ways of communicating and understanding things - so how can we possibly do this?

Connecting with the people you work with How do we get to know other people? Usually it is through talking to them, and engaging with them, in certain situations. In co-design we try to be visual in the way we communicate with people, and also have them be visual in their explanations to us. Understanding and not misunderstanding can be hard if you only talk about it with words. An important component to connecting to the participants is giving them recognition for their problems and showing you understand. So what is the proper way of doing this? And how can we create a good relationship with participants?

In my experience there are different aspects of the relationship that need to be considered, and what is most important needs to be found. Through each project the participants have been very different, and needed to be approached in different ways. The people that usually are very helpful and participatory have some kind of stake in the project. It is about their community, or they will maybe benefit from the project in the future. The people that don’t have any stake can be hard to reach, but it is not impossible. We can help this along by creating meaning for them so that they begin to care. Sometimes, it can be free food or other things that act as a reward, so even though they are a little unsure about why, they get something tangible out of it. Hopefully we can give them more meaning as they participate.

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Being very open about what they are about to be a part of, and telling them beforehand, can, for some, be motivating. I have experienced a participant feeling a little hesitant because we did not want to disclose too much of what was going to happen. He also gave us the feedback that he wanted to know more before participating. Something like an event website, or an invitation with an explanation, can be a good way to communicate what it is beforehand. Nevertheless, an invitation at least shows you care. Just show the participants that you appreciate them, and their ‘work’.

It can be a difficult thing to balance your own agendas, and to be aware that these agendas are not necessarily the same as the people with whom you work. Sometimes a dialogue tool to figure out what the participant’s feeling or experience of a subject is can lead to this discovery. So the dialogue tools can be a great way of seeing what the participants’ stakes are in the projects, and therefore finding how to make meaning for them in the future. In our first project, working with kids, we found that giving them some kind of ownership will make them care more and give meaning for them [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.12].

Another important factor for building relationships is time. In my experience, working with people takes time. It doesn’t matter if the people are collaborators or the people you are doing the projects with, or if it is a participant or a person you have recruited to design too. I

have found that it is important to be patient, especially with the participants that are doing everything with you in their free time. You have to plan encounters and make sure that participants are available. This is, of course, not always the case. Sometimes it can be quicker having an encounter in public where you talk with the people available, or just invite a lot of people to a specific place and hope some turn up. However, those are probably more risky because nobody might want to talk to you or come.

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Empathy and prejudice Empathy is an important quality to have when getting to know others. To have empathy you have to put your own judgment and prejudice behind you and try to appreciate the feelings of others. In a way, you have to be selective in what part of your own experience you can use or not use. This is, of course, not always easy.

It is not hard to find some kind of meaning for ourselves when working on a project. We often have strong opinions about what is most important and what has meaning. However, we also have to create meaning for the people we are designing for. So, how do we accomplish this?

Co-design is an answer for how this could be accomplished. By working very closely with the people you are designing for, you will get

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to know what they find meaning in and what is most important to them. The problematic, or difficult, job is how to extract knowledge.

Everyone has prejudice and think they know what the answer is going to be. We judge other people all the time, and have expectations for what will happen when we meet them and what the situation will bring. Nevertheless, if you really want to know, you have to leave all of that behind. I think most people are not able to completely free their minds from preconceived ideas. Therefore, the next best thing is to know and be aware of that problem, and to go into a dialogue with the knowledge that you have this tendency, and to therefore not ask leading questions.

Having prejudice and not being aware of it, or counting on the knowledge you have without

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being critical, can lead to a failed, or mostly failed, encounter. When this happens, the knowledge that is usually extracted is that the prejudice you had was wrong. What happens when we are wrong? Having preconceived opinions and going straight forward without questioning if they are even valid, or are dead wrong, can be a setback for the project and the relationships you are trying to build.

In our first project, Tingbjerg FerieCamp, we had this happen to us. We asked many of the wrong questions, and did not go deep enough with them, so we learned almost nothing.

Because it was our first project it was also hard to figure out what the right way was, because we had not experienced that yet. Even though we later tried much more successful ways of

talking with people, it was still hard to get it totally right. But maybe it is not as important as long as we leave as much of the prejudice behind as we can. We designers usually have very strong opinions, which is a reason why it can be hard working together sometimes. But it is something that can be both good and bad, in my opinion. As with many things, it is about finding a balance. Especially so as co-designers. We have to be able to see what will have meaning to the people we are working with, and at the same time pull from our background and still trust that our professional opinion matters. The project has to keep on giving meaning to us, so we don’t lose interest and energy; and, at the same time, we don’t want to overdo it, so the participants lose theirs.

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Design is not practical anymore, it’s fluid

By René Winther

If you take a quick and dirty overview of the world today, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that our daily lives are shaping themselves into an interdisciplinary, sociological and fluent system, with a variety of complex activities floating across time, location, work, and culture.

For us to explore and reflect upon this statement of mine, the title of my essay, we need to dig a little bit deeper into the overall transformation of the designer’s role from the early days of design up until now. This is, in my opinion, essential to somehow understand our present and future role as designers and, most importantly, understand why it is critical that we prepare ourselves for a complex and fluid future. I will not be able to pinpoint

all the historical factors to support this brief manifesto. However, I’m going to support my argument with citations from the book, Design when everybody designs by Ezio Manzini (2015).

Which have been a huge inspiration for me getting started with the study of co-design, writing this manifesto, and to some extent developing a better understanding of what might have had, or might still, play a big role in shaping our profession in the future. The big questions are: what is our role as upcoming designers, and how do we connect this fluid reality to the future design process?

At a highly postulated level, Ezio Manzini (2015, p.1) formulates “that we are in fact ‘all’ designers; individuals, but also organizations, businesses, public entities, voluntary associations, and cities, regions, and states”. Which, to some extent, is very true, since form and structure (design, architecture) have been with Homo sapiens since the beginning:

“Design, in the most generic sense of the word, began over 2.5 million years ago when Homo habilis manufactured the first tools. Human beings were designing well before we began to walk upright.

Four hundred thousand years ago, we began to manufacture spears. By forty thousand years ago, we had moved up to specialized tools. Urban design and architecture came along ten thousand

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years ago in Mesopotamia. Interior architecture and furniture design probably emerged with them. It was another five thousand years before graphic design and typography got their start in Sumeria with the development of cuneiform.

After that, things picked up speed.”

Let’s fast forward from the past to the 1750s Human society was transformed in the eighteenth century, from a pre-industrial age to an industrial society (second industrial revolution) of neo-liberalism. A politico-economic order that endorsed capitalism and the free market in terms of free trade, production, and the consumption of goods. It was also a period that laid out the foundations of modern technology, social innovation, and our contemporary life of connectivity, which Manzini (2015, p.9) refers to as: “Innovation, toward a New Civilization”.

Manzini (2015, p. 33) also postulates that agricultural and industrial societies of the past were in an almost solid time, with solid frameworks, because limited communication tools (low connectivity) kept the general flow of ideas restricted. Furthermore, and as a result of communicative limitations, I think that it must have been very difficult for organizations and various professions, such as the field of

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design, to change, redefine and transform an almost viscous self-centered vision of consumer gods toward a human-centered vision of usability and sustainability. This also explains, to some extent, why architects, designers, etc., kept playing their roles for so long, in an almost rigid manner: “Let’s build a four legged chair; let’s design a square building with ten windows; let’s make that spoon look shiny, or the kicker; let’s just use plastic!”

A fluid and connective explosion of social innovation We are rapidly moving away from a society of limited communication to an explosion of connectivity (i.e., the diffusion of networks and digital media) where everything is in movement, and traditional ways of thinking and doing things, along with traditional organizations, are melting away. This revolution, or transformation, is also what I would call the ‘The Big Connection’ that developed our contemporary life into a sociocultural-, socioeconomics-, technological-, and design-driven society with no communicative limits; thus allowing all fields, at all levels of human activity, to become an interdisciplinary, sociological, and fluent system of complex activities floating across time, location, work and culture (Manzini 2015, p.32).

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In fact, it is also evident that our present and future roles as designers have changed forever; and to such a degree, that it is critical to prepare ourselves for a complex and fluid future in the years to come:

“Fifty years ago, a sole practitioner, and an assistant or two, might have solved most design problems; today, we need groups of people with skills across several disciplines, and the additional skills that enable professionals to work with, listen to, and learn from each other as they solve problems.” (Manzini, p. 3)

Let’s continue...

The life of the designer, has indeed become a multicultural occupation; a web of intertwined strings, with no obvious or practical approaches to solve future problems. Instead, we are expected to develop customized skill-sets and solutions for a variety of different fields and disciplines such as: industrial design, graphic design, textile design, furniture design, information design, process design, product design, interaction design, transportation design, educational design, systems design, urban design, design leadership, and design management - as well as architecture, engineering, information technology, and computer science. (Manzini, 2015, p. 2) ... Just to mention a ‘few’ areas of expertise to which designers potentially end

up working throughout their careers. In addition, the role of the designer has also become an undefined function with a variety of hands (due to the revolution of an interdisciplinary-, sociocultural-, socioeconomics-, technological- and design-driven society). Thus, as a consequence of fluent connectivity, the designer has become the inventor, manufacture, technologist, strategist, nurse, judge, jury, and executioner. Not just on a micro-scale, but at all levels from everyday life to a global scale.

Interesting as this may be, it also raises some critical issues as to how we are able to develop all of these ‘super abilities’, and if it’s even possible to gain so much knowledge without frying our sensitive brains!

The problems we are facing as upcoming designers We see it, we hear about it, and now our subconscious also knows it: the world has gone mad; social, political, economic, and environmental issues affect us all, and challenge designers to think and reflect about the future with a conscientious mindset in order to prevent a crack in the Earth! Here, I’m talking about the movement for a sustainable and postindustrial society.

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The postindustrial society emphasizes, not the production of goods, but of services; which depends on intelligent designers and users of technology, and which can be explained like this:

“A process of change in which humanity is beginning to come to terms with the limits of the planet, and which is also leading us to make better use of the connectivity that is available to us: a dual dynamics merging into a single process in which we can already see certain characteristics. Starting with these it is possible to outline a design scenario built on a culture that joins the local with the global (cosmopolitan localism), and a resilient infrastructure capable of requalifying work and bringing production closer to consumption (distributed systems).� (Manzini, 2015, p. 2) As a result, the last couple of decades have led to the development of a variety of micro-societies, such as urban agriculture communities, do-it-yourself communities, and technological platforms of local sharing, to emerge at all levels, and become influential in regard to how we can live a fulfilling and social life, or how we can innovate new adaptive systems of collective and sustainable design thinking.

However, these utopian movements of social-

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ism and fluid connectivity are also very difficult to predict, with regard to the value of their inputs and, most importantly, their outcomes.

It will in fact create a very complex environment in which many adaptive systems, projects, or products will be effected significantly.

Manzini (2015, p. 3) claims that three contextual challenges define the nature of many design problems today. While many design problems function at a simple level, these issues affect many of the major design problems that challenge us, and these challenges also affect simple design problems linked to complex social, mechanical, or technical systems. These issues are: 1. A complex environment in which many projects or products cross the boundaries of several organizations or stakeholders, producers, and user groups; 2. Projects or products that must meet the expectations of many organizations, stakeholders, producers, and user groups; and 3. Demands at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control.

So, what about my questions about our role as upcoming designers, and how we connect this fluid reality to our future design process?

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Final thoughts & conclusion It is unmistakable! We are floating in a sea of social innovation and design. Human-centered design has become an open-ended ocean, where the dynamics of design thinking must evolve itself into innovative and customized solutions which focus on the activity of the end-user.

Connectivity has, therefore, become a key part of what makes the world spin, and what makes us human, in all the serious, weird, and fun aspects of our contemporary lives. Thus, new frameworks need to be explored and developed in order for us to prepare ourselves for the complex, unknown scenarios that we might face in the years to come as designers, and as Homo sapiens.

Design is, in every sense of the word, a complex and beautiful mess!

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To see abundance wherever we go

By Giulio Ceste

During the preparation of our activity for the Tingbjerg FerieCamp [see ‘Projects timeline’, p.12], I was cycling almost every day to the Tingbjerg Library to work there with my groupmates. Every morning, when I entered the neighbourhood on my bike and passed by the local school, my attention was drawn by an old wooden shed. Placed in front of the school building, but facing the street, this construction was quite puzzling for my curious eyes: it reminded me of some sort of street installation or exhibition space, though it didn’t seem to be in use at that moment. The dirt it was covered with made it look abandoned, but it didn’t seem to be that old.

For the first couple of weeks, I hesitated stopping by the shed - mostly because I am a latecomer and I usually had to rush to the library - so I kept wondering about that wooden construction without taking a closer look.

However, as our project started taking shape, my fascination with the object kept growing, so I suggested to my group that we all have a walk on site and see if we could find in the shed any inspiration for our work. The team liked the idea.

The actual visit to the site happened in a very particular moment of our design process, after we had agreed on the overall theme of our activity for the FerieCamp. We wanted to enact an alien encounter between children of Tingbjerg and a delegation of extra-terrestrials from the fictional planet Dumdum. Hence we

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had already started looking for tangible and evocative objects - or props - that we could use to reinforce our narrative [see ‘Child’s play’, p.34]. To our explorative gaze, this mysterious shed now looked like a fertile large-scale prop, which our aliens could adapt to their needs during their mission to Earth. It could become a spaceship, an observation deck, or many other inspiring science-fiction objects. However, first we had to understand what this shed really was and why it was there, in Tingbjerg, in front of a school.

We went there during a midday break, as we wanted to take the time to experience the object and get inspired by any small detail we could notice. We sat on the deck at its entrance and started by having a relaxed lunch in the sunlight. After learning that it was a good spot to spend breaks, we shifted our attention to the inside of the wooden construction, and began a more active inspection. We found a yellowed map of the neighborhood and showcases containing bottles of seeds, old leaves, branches, and other sorts of vegetal traces, all labelled with now-illegible tags. It looked like someone had tried to collect the flora of Tingbjerg, map it, and create some sort of classification system. However, everything inside the shed, from the glasses of the showcases to the items they contained, had become aged by the weather, and had begun to vanish.

in the past, probably with kids. What surprised us the most was the similarity between such an activity and the one we were designing for the FerieCamp. We also wanted kids to help us collect and recombine sensory traces of the neighborhood; but instead of gathering things as botanists, we expected children to explore the district as participants to an alien visitation. We needed to find out more about this twin project. Who had built the shed? Could we reconnect to its story through our project?

One could say that this construction had been there waiting for us to bring it back to life; we only had to understand how to make this happen.

Moral of the story What occurred next I’m not going to tell: what I have learned from this story is more interesting. In our lives we pass by many sheds - the question is, how many times do we pull the brakes and jump off the bike? Whenever we enter a new landscape, if we are curious about the surroundings, a world of opportunities will appear just around the bike lane. If we stop looking at things as part of the background, and instead look at them as entities with their own stories and meanings, we will realise that we don’t need to build everything from scratch: most of the job has already been done.

It seemed like this wooden construction displayed the results of an activity which happened

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