Co-Design Visions

For the latest Proud event a visioning workshop transformed the Imagination facilitation space into a green park evoking the environment of ‘Beyond the Castle’, we used this setting to display all the results of our co design process involving over 500 people so far. This process has included word-clouding, Castle ideas, co-design through stories and design through prototyping approaches.

The aim of laying out all this work was to help curate and organise this for the upcoming interactive exhibition we are running in the city centre in a few weeks time. Of course keeping to our co-design philosophy we did not undertake this selection ourselves, instead we recruited the 15 participants that have been the most active and enthusiastic co-designers so far. These included professional designers but also schoolchildren, residents in the area we are co-designing, archaeologists and musicians.

In this evening event we looked very closely at the outcomes of each of the events working in mixed groups to really interrogate these outcomes and to draw out the key results as they matched to the themes we have previously developed in the co-design process (leisure and culture, History and heritage, environment, accessibility and way finding and finally other perspectives. We went on to explore the commonalties but also the tensions in these themes as they relate across the range of activities undertaken.

Finally as a group (with some excellent facilitation from one of our designers) we developed a pyramid of values and directions to think about while developing the ‘Beyond the Castle’ area further.

All this will help us create an exhibition that really reflects the aspirations of the participants of the processes while avoiding ‘design by committee’. The contributions of participants (professional and others) really has been exceptional in the quantity of good ideas but also in the reflective and thoughtful contributions. We are also happy that our design for this process has been so well received, as one person said for yesterdays event ‘it was simply joyful’.