The Co-Design Process

The Co-Design process helps communities to:

• Unite the community under a common vision of its future.
• Raise the healthy vitality of the community.
• Advance plans that are stuck in controversy.
• Bring harmonious dialogue to communities in conflict.

Open to the public and including youth, the Co-Design workshops require no preparatory study of data, and provide a forum for all participants to speak for themselves. Co-Design guides the community in organizing and hosting public design workshops.

At the workshop, participants visualize the round of life and special events they would wish to experience in the future. After a site walk when citizens note the qualities they wish to preserve or improve, groups of citizens describe their ideas to Co-Design artist/architects who sketch at their dictation. Citizens see the effect of their ideas as the drawings develop. Said one participant, “I know what I think when I see what I say.”

The drawings live on after the workshops and unite the community in a common vision. They form a traveling gallery that communicates the ideas fully and quickly to the community. Citizens view and rate the ideas, typically achieving over 90% consensus.

With this broad consensus, planners can plan pro-actively, avoiding the expensive yo-yo of rejection and redrawing of plans. Clear criterion for the eventual performance of their plans guides the designers, and provides them a platform for presenting plans in terms of their liveability and support for community values.

The public spaces that result tend to be rich in features from the many ideas contributed by the community, economical because the participants know they will pay for them, successful because they grow from the context of community life, and humane in their scale and detailing because the criterion is liveability.