Co-designing social change – Reviewing some methods and tools

This short paper came about when engaging with Cecilia Casas, who asked us and Dr Yanki Lee to share co-design methods and tools at the ESDA (Escuela Superior de Diseño de Aragón) DESIS Social Design Days III (Zaragoza, March 2024). We were asked to discuss the involvement of participants in equitable co-creation and reflect on how best to manage the relationship between what Manzini (2015) calls ‘expert designers’ (those who are design trained) and what he calls ‘diffuse designers’ (those who are not trained in design yet play a crucial role in delivering democratic design solutions).

Manzini (2015) suggests designers should be ‘facilitators’, ‘mediators’ and ‘catalysts’ in the context of design for social innovation, but his work also recognizes that ‘context is everything’. Drawing on our experience of social innovation projects with prisoners (Gamman & Caulfield, 2023) and refugees (Morgado and Mazzarella, 2024), we were aware that not all approaches to co-design can be automatically transferable to different political and geographic landscapes. We found it tricky to translate our UK-based approach for a workshop in a Spanish context, but a helpful dialogue developed with colleagues from ESDA.