It contains images and stories from practice to get us reflecting on experiences we have as co-designers and “being okay in it not being okay.” The purpose was to present an alternative narrative to the uncritical, ‘glossy’ accounts of co-design, and draw attention to what happens when challenges are encountered in practice. Also, to identify opportunities for professional growth and practice change with designers who work in traditionally ‘social work’ contexts.
To inform the learning resource, three social work placement students undertook interviews with 13 co-design facilitators globally. They were asked to reflect on the complexities, challenges, and successes of facilitating co-design, and how they navigated power dynamics when designing with marginalised communities.
This collaboration between social work academics and designers created the Rupture and Repair zine – a reflective practice learning resource for designers, policy makers and funders with the aim to develop more self-aware, reflective, and ethical design practice.
Meet the team
- Rachel Goff she/they
- Patrick O’Keefe he/him
- Jo Szczepanska she/her
- Hope Lumsden-Barry she/her
- Georgi Lewis she/her
- And Jayde, Yiwei and Yi
All of the systems that surround co-design push us to faux design, which is why co-design is hard to do.
There are systemic, contextual, and relational challenges that impact co-design activities (Pirinen, 2016) connected to Neoliberalism, which favors economic value creation, risk aversion, self-sufficiency, individualism, and continuous improvement (Moll et al., 2020; Stern & Seigelbaum, 2019), and that can further marginalise already oppressed communities by reinforcing dominant structures including settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Miller et al., 2025).
Evidence highlights a range of barriers that hinder collaboration and obstruct the delivery of mutually beneficial outcomes (Antonini, 2021). Research talks a lot aboutprinciples, processes, and methods for co-designing with communities (Jagtap, 2022; Moll et al., 2020; O’Brien et al., 2021; Porche et al., 2022), but there has been less focus on how co-design facilitators might strengthen or improve their practice when things get hard.
You need to know that the system around you will get in your way – can you use existing methods and tools in emergent ways and plan for where those pushbacks will happen? It can be reassuring to know it’s not just you.
Things we’ve noticed when talking about the co-design process with people is:
- Design work is “messy”, “explosive”, sometimes “forced” and often feels like project management and putting out fires.
- We heard frustration at the conditions that may or may not be in place to facilitate ethical and collaborative design work, such as resourcing, unrealistic time frames for building trust, or limited scope of projects.
- Getting things wrong can develop wisdom and attunement; reflection upon practice and acknowledging the extent of knowledge can support
- For co-designers even experienced ones… critical reflection sounded like: “Am I doing it right?”
“I also think of rupture in relation to volcanoes…it’s
broken and it’s exploding and it’s hot, but it’s really like, more land is being made. So in a way, now there is more square footage that we need to care for. Or, at least, be able to map at some point if we choose to”
What are we looking at now?
- More recently we’ve turned our attention to looking at ruptures as the first step to reflect, transform and repair
- If we look at these things as needed and plan for them to happen, what could this mean for our craft?
- What would unconditional support for co-design work including bumps and forks look like?
Leave a Reply