Codesign

Codesign (also written co-design) is an approach to designing services, products, or solutions that actively involves the people who will use or be affected by them as genuine collaborators in the design process, rather than as end users consulted only after key decisions have already been made. It draws on similar participatory principles to Participatory Action Research, but is oriented specifically toward designing something a service, a tool, a process, rather than researching and understanding a problem more broadly.

graph TD
    A[Identify Shared Problem] --> B[Bring Stakeholders Together]
    B --> C[Explore Needs & Ideas]
    C --> D[Collaborative Prototyping]
    D --> E[Test with Stakeholders]
    E --> F[Refine Together]
    F --> C

Core idea

Traditional design often follows a sequence where experts design a solution and then test or refine it with users afterward. Codesign inverts part of this by bringing the people who will actually use the outcome into the design process itself — workshops, collaborative prototyping sessions, and structured conversations are common ways of doing this in practice, aiming to surface real needs and constraints that an outside designer might otherwise miss or assume incorrectly.

Why it works?

Solutions designed with the people who will use them tend to fit real needs more closely than solutions designed for them based on assumptions — reducing the risk of building something technically sound but practically mismatched to how it will actually be used.

Relevance

This pillar sits under Research Methodologies, alongside Action Research and Participatory Action Research — relevant to designing tools, training materials, or processes within Vocational Education and Training in collaboration with the people who will actually use them.