Co-creation in design and alignment means starting with empathy

Textile 2024 week 06

Part of the process I try to work with as much as possible with organisations is consensus building. A lot of times this means workshops which all too often translates to post-its on walls, whether virtual or otherwise. At this moment in time, while slightly cliched, is still a good mechanism to get people who with one another to visualise ideas in one place and get it all down on paper so to speak. Recently, I conducted an alignment exercise to try the same, but I think I wasn’t as clear as I could have been on the intent, and then I found myself explaining why I thought why we should do this a number of times. Meaning it wasn’t exactly working. Basically, I was missing the instructional bit of the design of the exercise which was a good but a little bit hard of a lesson. Propose a thing but be clear about intent. This is something we as designers miss all too often. We assume it’s clear, because that is the job of design, to make things clear. But what is clear in situations like this, is that we need to go back to the tool empathy and understanding not just users, but our colleagues.