Design Choices Framework for Co-creation Projects

Recently, an increasing number of design and innovation projects apply co-creation as a process, agenda or tool. Beyond the field of design, these projects often include multiple disciplines such as marketing, service development and innovation, and management and organization studies. In marketing, Ramaswamy and Gouillart (2010) describe a co-creation approach to process design as involving several different stakeholders, exploring their experiences, organizing participatory workshops for improving interactions and building platforms for new interactions and continuous dialogue. In design, while different institutions define the term slightly differently (Mattelmäki & Sleeswijk Visser, 2011), co-creation is widely understood as practices where a design practice and one or more communities of practice participate in creating new desired futures (Holmlid, Mattelmäki, Sleeswijk Visser, & Vaajakallio, 2015). In this paper, co-creation refers to the entire process of a design or innovation project, which involves different stakeholders in various phases of the project, aiming to create desired futures together from the planning and research phase, a “pre-design” phase according to Sanders and Stappers (2014), to the implementation phase, a “post-design” phase (Sanders & Stappers, 2014). The term co-creation has also been widely used outside the design field. Service innovation and marketing research, for example, use the term co-creation to explain the shifting role of customers who become co-creators of value (Prahalad & Ramasway, 2004) with the rising notion of Service Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2008). In these domains, co-creation rather refers to co-creation of values in the use context where service is co-produced (Grönroos & Ravald, 2011). In our paper, however, the term co-creation focuses on creative activities and co-creation of knowledge of various stakeholders in a design or innovation project. The origin of co-creation in design goes back to 1980s when the participatory design (PD) movement emerged in Scandinavian countries. Research projects on PD were conducted to involve workers in the development of new systems for the workplace (Ehn & Kyng, 1987). Scandinavian PD carried a political agenda, asserting that people who are affected by a decision should have an opportunity to influence it (Schuler & Namioka, 1993). Since then, as Halskov and Hansen (2015) review the current PD research practices, the main concern of many current PD research projects is to clarify tensions among stakeholders and make sure that voices from different people are heard in the design process (e.g., see Buur & Larsen, 2010; Simonsen & Robertson, 2012). In 1990s in the U.S., Elizabeth Sanders introduced a notion of “collective creativity”, believing that everybody is the expert in regards to their life and can contribute to the design process. ORIGINAL ARTICLE