Defining co-creation

Co-creation is an approach to design which considers that stakeholders can provide ongoing value to the design process if we engage them consistently throughout the project and invite them to take a participatory role in key decision making. The benefit of this approach is in the diversity of perspectives and experiences which contribute to in the co-creation activities. To use co-creation in a project, workshops are often designed around the key parts of the project that require critique; in this way, co-creation becomes stakeholder engagement.
Co-creation workshops usually provoke conversations and participation around important topics that correspond to a certain part of a design project where insights, validation and new leads are required.

“The co-creation session aims to explore potential directions and gathers a wide range of perspectives in the process.”

Schneider, J., Stickdorn, M., (2012). This is service design thinking: Basics, tools, cases. BIS Publishers.

The information that comes out of co-creation workshops is then synthesized to provide insights that are adjusted considering the scale of the project or that of its parts. The information obtained can be used to better guide the research project so that it is better tailored to the requirements of the stakeholders and of the users.

Relevance

Within the scope of strategic planning withing Solidarité Ahuntsic, the community organization that I was working for at the time, co-creation was utilized to engage stakeholders from multiple community organizations and initiatives as well as community residents, recruiting them to participate in multiple co-creation workshops. These workshops helped define the key issues to be addressed within the community and to collectively orient the  objectives. The final plan also reflected language that residents and local organizations were already using and familiar with. After the fact, co-creation can also help with stakeholder buy-in to the final product that is being developed, in this case a strategic plan for the borough of Ahuntsic in Montreal.

Integration

The workshops were structured to take roughly 3-4 hours and to define and rework actionable objectives that would be deployed collectively among community organizations with shared missions or projects between 2021 and 2025.

Co-creation workshops were included in the planning process as a form of stakeholder engagement. Liliane Salamé-Pichette, the strategic planning lead at Solidarité Ahuntsic, chose to use co-creation within our process because of her familiarity with the effectiveness of the generative tool and its methods. Solidarité Ahuntsic also employed the help of Meilleur Monde, a Montreal-based service design studio, to aid with workshop facilitation and in the synthesis of the session data.

Participants

Most participants of the co-creation workshops were the leaders of community organizations within the same borough (Ahuntsic). Below is a persona that embodies the most important aspects of the participants in our strategic planning workshops.

Method

Due to COVID-19 safety measures, the co-creation workshops were held virtually through Miro and Zoom with additional activities on Jamboard.

To clarify some of the language used, the workshop activities were split up by “orientations” which are calls to action for individual identified issues that exist within the borough and by “means” which are the specific actions and projects that are planned to address their congruent issues. The means and orientations that were being defined and refined in this workshop were previously defined in a rougher form and this was an opportunity to further define what the strategic plan would address. The granularity in the structure was also used to make important connections with the organizations that would be involved and those that would be participating or affected in the periphery.