Co-creation

People before systems

Design for people

“If you design for everyone, you delight no one. That is the recipe for a mediocre product.” (Alan Cooper)

Engage early and engage often

• Identify your key stakeholders and assumptions early.
  • Persona exercises
• Identify the needs and use-cases of your stakeholders.
  • User stories, Journey mapping
• Give your users a say in the design and development process
  • Co-creation, Design sprints
• Validate your assumptions with actual users
• Iterate

Utilize user and people-centered design tools

• Persona exercises
• User Stories
• Journey Mapping
• UI Sketching

Ensure data is used after release

• Provide incentive for users to use the data.
• Focus on telling compelling stories rather than just the data.
• Forge collaborations among the data users and data providers.
• Build grassroots communities around open data.

Co-creation isn't

• Putting different people in one room and expecting them to generate a solution themselves.
• Gathering and consolidating ideas from different people.
• Finding the “middle-ground” solution between stakeholders who have varying, and oftentimes competing, interests.

Co-creation is

• Confronting the inherent power relations and inequalities between your stakeholders. Those who have more must be willing to give-up more and those with the most to lose should have a say in things.
• Acknowledging historical injustices and their present-day impacts.
• Helping everyone develop a shared point of view no matter how difficult it is.