What is Codesign?
The global market for educational technology (edtech) products is growing, yet educators often struggle to figure out which products will help them accelerate their efforts toward meeting learning objectives—they don’t know what products will allow them to address the existing barriers to student achievement. There’s often a lack of clarity about the research that drives the development of edtech solutions, making it difficult to determine what will benefit learners.
This calls for the use of a collaborative “codesign” approach to help ensure that edtech innovators create products and programs that meet the needs of educators and learners. For example, this could mean creating relevant tools that maximize student productivity and teacher efficacy in an era where there’s an increased opportunity to reimagine learning and teaching within and beyond the physical classroom space.
Codesign is a process in which different stakeholders come together to find a solution to a shared problem through research.
In the case of Leanlab Education, codesign typically brings together schools, edtech companies, and researchers to build better solutions that are informed by direct feedback from the schools. This way, the people who will use the solution are involved in its design and development.
During the design process, the stakeholders leverage the core tenets of codesign—equity of voice as well as shared values and a commitment to improvement—to better understand the student and teacher experience. Let’s have a look at these in more detail.
The key principles of codesign
Due to the participatory nature of codesign—"creating with, not for stakeholders”—it’s important to understand the following principles as these are what will hold the entire process together.
Ensure power sharing and inclusion
When there’s power inequality among the critical stakeholders involved in the codesign process, those with the most power will likely have the most influence over decisions.
However, codesign is about sharing power and ensuring that everyone’s ideas and perspectives are considered throughout the entire process from research and ideation to design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Simply put, codesign is inclusive, and it cannot exist without power sharing.
Prioritize relationships
The codesign concept is built around the idea of creating together, so relationships are essential. Codesigners must share a meaningful relationship that is based on trust and respect if they are to share power and create an effective solution together.
Prioritizing relationships means that the people involved in the process can express themselves and contribute to the conversations that lead to better outputs.
Focus on capability building
Codesign champions the concept that everyone has something to teach and something to learn.
With a focus on capability building, codesign goes beyond the traditional approach to building skills and capabilities. Instead of having specific people coaching others, everyone teaches and learns, thereby increasing collaboration, enhancing power sharing, and fostering better relationships between stakeholders.
How do I recognize codesign?
The key principles may help you create sound processes, but how do you determine if what you’re doing is truly codesign?
Consider this. Two edtech companies want to develop a digital reading tool for high school students. Company A creates the tool and asks schools to test it to see if it works for them. On asking teachers and learners for feedback, the company realizes that their tool is not as useful to high school learners as they anticipated.
On the other hand, before designing the tool, company B teams up with educators and high school students from a school looking to support teacher-led instruction with technology.
Through an in-depth, collaborative partnership, company B contributes their professional expertise in the edtech space to guide teachers and students through the design of the reading tool. The teachers and students provide feedback during the process based on their real-life experiences to help company B with things such as research, prototyping, delivery, and tool evaluation. Everyone’s voice is heard throughout the process.
Unlike company A, company B has codesigned its tool to ensure its usefulness and usability in real-world contexts. The following scenarios point toward a codesign process:
Both the people with lived experience (the teachers and learners) and the professionals (the edtech company) involved in the design process are equal contributors (codesigners).
There’s a holistic building of codesigners’ capabilities. For example, company B guides the teachers and learners through the design process while the teachers and learners provide feedback that allows the company to create an effective tool.
The proposed approaches are evaluated based on how much value they will bring to the people they’re intended to serve. For instance, the features included in the reading tool are chosen based on how well they will serve the needs of high school students.
Whenever required, power is identified, challenged, and negotiated. In the example, company B, the teachers, and the students all get an equal voice.
The top conditions for codesign
Once the values and necessary litmus tests are in place, it’s crucial to establish a few background conditions that are required for codesign to work.
Adequate support and sponsorship
The first condition is having enough support. For example, there may be pushback from some stakeholders after they receive feedback, especially if they see it as unfavorable. Advocating for a codesign process in such a situation requires support to ensure that everyone involved in the process understands the value of adopting this approach.
Besides this, codesign also requires sponsorship and financial support in areas such as:
Process facilitation and convening
Paying people with lived experience (for example, teachers) for their time and support
Capability building for codesigners
Testing prototypes and continually iterating before implementation
Communicating the process and its progress to stakeholders to create commitment
Culture and climate
Codesign is a unique approach to solution design, so not all work climates and cultures will align with it. As such, codesigners must build a specific, supportive culture that primes them for success.
Here are some of the cultural conditions needed for codesign:
A focus on collaboration, not control
Facilitating learning as well as the sharing of successes and failures
Creating environments where both formal and informal leaders can carry out their functions
Support for developing the skill sets for codesign
Promoting accountability from all the parties involved in the process
Building the right culture is primarily the responsibility of everyone involved in a project that uses the codesign approach.
Barriers to effective codesigning
Although codesign streamlines the process of finding the right solutions to problems, it’s not always simple to undertake.
There are some common barriers that make it difficult to codesign well, and if you don’t plan for them, you risk your codesign process falling short. The good news is that there are some strategies you can use to overcome these barriers.
Barrier 1: Stakeholders lack the tools or relationships to work together effectively.
For example, it can be challenging to involve non-technical stakeholders throughout the design and development process.
You can overcome this by: Developing process awareness from the project outset so that everyone knows where their input is going to fit in the bigger picture. To develop process awareness effectively, you’ll first need to:
Build relationships
Undertake some collective agenda-setting
Improve your organizational tools for collaborating with outsiders
Barrier 2: Stakeholders lack certain skills, but the initiative requires distributed expertise among all the stakeholders.
For instance, some stakeholders may lack the technical knowledge required for certain aspects of the codesign process.
You can overcome this by: Building knowledge through structured training or knowledge exchanges among the stakeholders.
Barrier 3: The power to make decisions is concentrated in one stakeholder group.
Power sharing is a core principle of codesign, but it’s not always easy to achieve. Sometimes, certain stakeholders will hold more power (for example, school leaders who control the budget) and this can make it difficult for everyone to have an equal voice.
You can overcome this by: Recognising everyone’s role in building a useful product or service. For example, educators may report to school authorities, but they have the lived experience required to help build an effective edtech tool. As such, their insights need to be taken into account when making decisions.
Tips to keep in mind during the codesign process
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to codesign, some general best practices will help ensure success as you go about the process.
Listen to feedback and act on it
When various stakeholders come together, it can be easy to dismiss some feedback. However, it’s crucial to listen to all feedback and adapt your product or program accordingly. Ask questions that help you identify what it is people really want and come up with ways to address these needs.
Gather structured input
If you gather input in a structured way, it will be easier to compile feedback and chart a path forward.
Some methods you can use to gather data as part of your codesign process include:
Surveys
Hosting events
User-testing
Conducting design workshops
Gathering comments from experts
Gather specific feedback
When you host events or conduct surveys, it’s a good idea to: 1) try and connect your participants to the personas you have created, and 2) gather feedback that’s as actionable as possible.
You need to check if your audience aligns with your personas. If there are people who don’t fit into your persona profiles, you may have to consider creating new ones.
In the end, you should aim to get specific feedback and suggestions from your audience. For example, asking a person what they specifically like or dislike about a tool is more insightful than just asking if they like the tool or not. Being specific will put you in a better position to take action and make improvements.
Codesign: Giving you the power to create the right solutions
When it comes to education, involving the right people in the design process is key to creating solutions that benefit learners.
This is what codesign aims to achieve. It’s more than a consultation process. Everyone is treated as equal collaborators in the design process, allowing for more informed decision-making.
Instead of relying on external research, critical stakeholders collaborate, cooperate, and share creative ideas throughout the design process, allowing for the development of the right programs and products.