We are in a time of great rehabilitation. For a century, the workforce was designed around the concept of production with predictability, reliability, efficiency, and control being central values. In contemporary office spaces, the design of factory floors has neatly translated into square spaces filled with cubicles, each its own little production unit. Through education we have prepared the population for these environments, naturalizing them to the point that many people like their cubicle and personal niche within much larger systems. As long as they do what they were hired for, they have security, and there is no need to step outside that box. Or so the myth goes….
This business model works, especially for producing many of the products and services that our world runs on today. The problem for the people in this system is that it reduces the beautiful complexity of being human into something less, something along the lines of performance metrics and human capital. That, in turn, reduces human creativity. Herein lies the rub. It is no secret that innovation is the Holy Grail of business. Some would argue that innovation is the sole differentiator left in a global economy where it is easy to replicate the latest and greatest business strategy. Innovation is sorely needed to address the global challenges we face today, from food shortages to environmental destruction. Simply put, we are in a time of “innovate or die.”
Many innovation models in business are excellent at producing incremental innovations, improvements upon existing products. The next iPhone will include the latest tech and a couple of new features that meet or shift the desires of consumers, but the concept of a smartphone is well established. This is not what we need, and it is not what companies and social entrepreneurs are calling for. What we need is strategic innovation—ideas that break the mold, chart entirely new territories, or find elegant solutions to complex problems. What we need are the ways and means to meet hopes and dreams. That is what this book is about.
Our answer to the innovation challenge is co-creation. It is based on one simple principle: harnessing the collective potential of groups can lead to breakthroughs wherein every participant is empowered. Collective creativity is a difference that makes the difference.
This book is meant to be a guide for practicing professionals who wish to implement co-creation into their design teams, organizations, or learning platforms. Throughout we will lay out the What, When, Where, and How of co-creation. Here we want to focus on the Why.
The Why is straightforward . We need people to be creative so that we can innovate. The tricky part is figuring out how to cultivate creativity in workspaces that, in general, kill it quite effectively. The good news is that we are recovering from industrial systems that stripped away the invitation to be fully human in the workplace. In many places workplace well-being is now a major factor in talent acquisition and retention. Companies like Steelcase and Herman Miller have entire research divisions focused on designing furniture that supports these spaces. Innovation labs, start-up commons, and DIY workspaces are filled with funky, comfortable furniture designed specifically to improve upon sense of well-being and inspire new ways of working. Books on spatial design focus on social interaction, flexibility, and other principles that fly in the face of the neatly ordered cubicles and desks. We will be discussing these principles to help you design your own creative spaces later in this book.
Creative spaces alone, however, are insufficient. The innovation landscape is littered with the remains of creative workspaces that go unused, or worse, reordered into neat rows. I encountered this phenomenon firsthand when teaching in the School of Design for the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Our classroom had Steelcase Node chairs, rolling self-contained desks that can be easily configured into any or no arrangement. Due to the famous architect Zaha Hadid’s design of Innovation Tower, our building had no square rooms. One might think this a dream come true for a design school. After all, designers pride themselves on being able to reinvent space. The reality was quite different. For months upon moving into the building, every elevator conversation contained talk of how inefficient the building was, with both teachers and students lamenting on how challenging it was to arrange the rooms “orderly.” In my classroom students did their very best to arrange the Node chairs into lines in a grid. Every day I would force them to rearrange, and it took several weeks for them to understand that I was challenging the psychological structures that informed them of “proper” class formations.
While educators carefully evaluate content delivery in classrooms, how that content is delivered is actually the real lesson. When a class, or business meeting, is arranged with a teacher or leader at the head of the space and everyone else in front of them, the message is one of control and followership. Starting in schools, people learn how power works and what they need to do to wield it—that is, become the expert or boss. We continue this pattern throughout life, ever working longer and harder to climb the ladder to a position where we are the ones in control. This pattern, for good or bad, is deeply ingrained in how we understand “proper” educational and work spaces. It is not something we think consciously about, and when given a choice most people will default to it because it is comfortable. When a space violates the norm, people often feel uncomfortable, and least at first. This simple conditioning is why so many innovation spaces are left unused. What is needed is a set of practices, or a process, that encourages people to use space differently. Enter design thinking.
Design thinking is reshaping the landscape of innovation across multiple sectors, from business to education. As Tim Brown from IDEO states in his book Change by Design, “Design can help to improve our lives in the present. Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future.”1 Design thinking is a thought process and iterative pathway that brings structure to creativity with demonstrable outcomes. For businesses, “Design thinking can do for organic growth and innovation what TQM did for quality—take something we always have cared about and put tools and processes into the hands of managers to make it happen.”2
Design thinking is an iterative, experimental learning process. It employs empathy, entropy, and creative reframing of spaces and ideas to shake up existing knowledge and shake out new ideas. Human-centered design, or co-design, is particularly salient for supporting creative teams because these approaches focus on people and their needs. In short, design “rehumanizes” the work of innovation.
The focus on the human experience as a starting point contrasts the analytical, economic logic of business. Reality, for the business manager, is precise and quantifiable. “Design assumes instead human experience, always messy, as its decision driver and sees true objectivity as an illusion. Reality, for designers, is always constructed by the people living it.”3 These two perspectives on reality are equally essential for innovation. As Ogilvie and Liedtka argue in Designing for Growth4:
Companies that have adopted design thinking create or send teams to spaces wherein the rules of normal offices are suspended and teams can interact on completely different premises. In these spaces teams often turn to design thinking processes such as those provided by Stanford, IDEO, or the Aalto Design Factory as a way of working. Design consultancies can also be hired to work with a team in either a design studio or a dedicated project space within the client organization. In both cases teams enter into physical and psychologically “other” spaces with the hopes that the processes in there will translate into innovative ideas that can be enacted back in the “regular” world. This oscillation between the known, controlled world or organizational life and the unknown, chaotic world of creativity is working to generate innovations large and small. It seems then that the combination of creative workspaces and design thinking is an answer to the innovation challenge. So why write this book?The future will require multiple tools in the managerial tool kit—a design suite especially tailored to starting up and growing businesses in an uncertain world, and an analytic one suited to running established businesses in a more stable one—not two opposing sets wielded by warring groups of people who can’t communicate with each other.
If reality matched the argument I have just laid out, then there might not be a need for another book that praises the value of design thinking. Yet reality has a way of being difficult, and what works in theory often fails in practice. This is just as true for design thinking as for anything else. While the reasons are many, one of the main ones is the fact that humans are not robots. As Neil deGrasse Tyson aptly notes, “In science, when human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why Physics is easy and Sociology is hard.”5 Humans simply don’t conform to mathematical models. That trait can frustrate the systems engineer, but it is also a source of our creativity.
An equally important factor is that the conditions of every project are different. Because the context and human elements of any project cannot be predicted, no formulaic implementation of a process will maximize creative outputs. In business, for example, the adoption of design thinking has led to strategic innovation, but often this occurs only when that process is facilitated by a gifted design thinker. What is it about that individual that makes or breaks a project? What are the attributes of the successful design lead and their process that set them apart? As much as design talks about understanding the user and designing with rather than for, a black box remains as to how exactly to do that well. Here we pose co-creation as an answer that can advance design thinking and its application to innovative projects across sectors.
Stories of Co-creation
Over the years we have learned that trying to explain co-creation conceptually can be quite challenging. It is better to show through example what it can do. To that end, we have chosen a cast of characters to illustrate co-creation throughout the text. Each of these we have either worked with closely or been inspired by, and we want to give credit where credit is due . The cast includes the Eliad Group and their program iLead+Design, the nowhere group ltd., the U.Lab and corresponding Theory U initiatives, the Presencing Institute, Brains on the Beach (BoB), the Institute for Cultural Affairs (ICA), Social Artists and the Building Creative Communities conference, the Stanford University d.school, IDEO, the Aalto-Tongji Design Factory, and our peers in and around the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong. This book exists only due to their amazing work, the relationships we have developed through our research and beyond, and the spirit of co-creation from which we have all operated. We are grateful.
It is through the exemplary work of these individuals and groups that we can answer the question, “Why co-creation?” In the spirit of “show don’t tell,” what follows is the first of our stories of co-creation.
iLead+Design by Aaron Eden
Building the iLead+Design program with my co-founders was one of my first consciously co-creative experiences. I’ve been intentionally developing co-creative spaces ever since. iLead+Design, now in its fifth year of operation, is a summer intensive program for high school age youth I started with co-conspirators Bob Cole of Middlebury Institute of International Studies and Sean Raymond of York School. The program brings together two or three small teams of participants, each with a dedicated coach. The teams explore social innovation and design thinking by working on real problems brought in by community partners. The program balances time between experiential workshops on relevant co-creative skills with on-problem work time and weaves team space and group space together to form a lattice of co-creation at multiple scales.
A unique aspect of the co-creative environment, and one that is often missing from our profes...