I am writing this blog post with a bit of doubt about what I have established as ‘co-design’ and how a problem should be addressed. The reason I bring this up is:

When I have participated in co-design sessions, we always used synthesized, processed data, when in reality we need to take a step back in order to really understand whats happening, this is because details get lost in between communication and interpretations.

What I thought as co-design:

We were brought together in a room, where there are different stakeholders, being design, product, business, engineering, you name it. Then we present research findings an ask them to solve them in balanced groups (by balanced i mean, making sure there is one of each in every team) But the thing is, most of the time, no one in that group is the actual end-user. So that raises the question: are we solving from a privileged, disconnected lens? Are we really putting in the users shoes?

An ideal situation would be to co-design with said users, that would bring a very different point of view, can help break schemes, biases and stigmas around difficult stakeholders, since these would be people outside the organization and usually stakeholders are not part of the initial, problem discovery process.

With this I’m not saying we should do what the user says we should, but rather listen, understand, and meet halfway between what works for both user and organization.

Which is ultimately what Design Thinking is all about, right?