Simone Taffe

Reimagining ageing: insights from teaching co-design methods with designers, seniors and industry partners

ABSTRACT Interest in co-design is growing in the design literature, as is problem-based learning in design education, yet little research exists on teaching co-design in collaboration with industry partners. This leaves design educators wondering ‘what is the influence of teaching co-design with actual industry partners on student learning?’ This study discusses a case study where two industry partners were invited to collaborate with seniors and multi-discipline design students to redefine ageing. Both projects involved co-designing future assistive technologies. The results demonstrate that when design students and seniors co-designed prototypes to de-stigmatize images of ageing, the results delighted our end-users. The findings suggest combining co-design methods with health-related industry briefs offers an immersive environment for design students to learn and apply creative strategies to propose novel designs, in new complex domains. As designers are not experts in health, co-design methods give designers tools to leverage expert end-user knowledge to produce innovative, high impact designs – hence opening up new work domains.

Generate don’t evaluate: how can codesign benefit communication designers?

Abstract Communication designers have historically been accused of neglecting end-user perspectives, believing designers are experts at creating inspired designs. Codesign has been applied to many design fields, however developing methods for engaging end-users have had little traction in communication design practice. In an era of end-user engagement, communication designers are left wondering how and when to include end-users in the design process and if codesign offers any benefits to project outcomes. This study trialled codesign workshops across two communication design case studies. Both studies involved non-profit contexts where designers and staff co-created communication design strategies, one for sustainable cleaning in childcare centres and the other for asthma management and awareness. The findings reveal that structured, hands-on generative toolkits conducted in small groups, sparked conversation and prompted innovative ideas whereas evaluating ideas with ranking toolkits blocked dialogue and hindered idea progression. Evaluation tooolkits based on ranking ideas created unexpected barriers to engagement, as end-users disengaged from the codesign process. I argue codesign can benefit communication design when structured hands-on generative toolkits simulate a perceived familiar environment, creating a conversational forum for ideas to flow while participants enjoy creating things with their hands.