Co-designing With Companies

Today co-design is mostly intended as the activity that enables new collaborative relations between end users and designers. Many researchers in design (Sanders, 2006; Binder and Brandt, 2008; Westerlund, 2007; Mattelmaki, 2005) have conducted design experiments to test the effectiveness of the tools designed to support end users participation in design processes. Moreover co-design with customers has become an approach to the project for many design firms (Brown, 2008). The paper reports the authors’ experience with co-design in 4 different companies. All the cases presented have been planned as an opportunity of interaction between different actors from companies and external professional designers. Each of the design interventions has been conducted to boost innovation processes in companies with the aim to encompass the difficulties that people with an everyday contact with a problem find in expressing an innovative point of view on it. The analysis of the cases pointed out that co-design with company seems to diverge from co-design with end users for the aims perused, the tools used and the role that designers play in it. In particular, co-design with company seems to be more focused on designing new business models and envisioning innovation as a dynamic and systematic change at each level of the company; co-design with company is better supported by tools that boost envisioning (scenarios, trends analysis, promising cases) and support representatives from the different company internal divisions to discuss together; designers are sources of inspiration for the employees, they act as triggers of innovation more than as facilitators of the co-design process.