By Minnie Bliesner and Diamonique Walker
Those in the public administration and policymaking sectors may have been hearing a new term floating around program design — co-design. Spurred on by the largescale and high-profile efforts of the New Zealand government to redesign programs in a way that centers the experiences of the whānau and other indigenous communities, public sector agencies and funders have increasingly embraced the model.
This increased focus on co-design has been motivated by the growing realization that programs designed by those outside of the populations they are designed to serve often fail to take their experiences and needs into account.
The “co” in co-design comes from a collaboration between those who have traditionally been part of the programmatic design process — such as state agencies, professional providers, and other stakeholders — and individuals with lived experience. Pioneered by KA McKercher in their book Beyond Sticky Notes: Doing Co-Design for Real, co-design re-centers the program design process around the people most impacted by them.
But co-design’s place in the public sector remains precarious. While the term co-design is increasingly common in government discourse, policymakers have yet to establish a clear and shared definition, leaving the concept open to becoming merely a public sector buzzword with little real impact.
That would be a mistake. Here’s why.
Meeting the Needs of Real People
We’ve long known that programs intended to provide help and support to individuals living within the system more often than not fail to meet the real needs of those served by the programs. Without lived experience, it can be difficult to fully understand how program parameters might impede participation or prevent people from getting the help they need.
Take, for example, a program designed to provide independent living services to youth who have aged out of the foster care system. Historically, youth can opt into or out of transitional programs designed to help support them during the transition into adulthood.
But as is often the case, issues with program design and implementation can lead to some unanticipated problems. If a young person opts out of the program, for example, they may not have access to other forms of transitional support, and the support they do receive will vary greatly depending on the ability of their social worker, foster parent or group home to help them transition into adulthood. This leads to a lot of gaps in services.
But even if a young person opts into the program, the stipulations for qualification can be so onerous as to depress participation and prevent the services from being effectively distributed. For example, they may need to engage in consistent contact with a specific program case manager to remain eligible. But youth in these kinds of programs may be juggling three or four case managers specific to other programs, along with attending classes, working, keeping up with their homework and a host of other responsibilities. Well-meaning stipulations and program parameters that don’t address the realities of the lived experiences of participants all too often mean that often these programs fail or are far less effective than they could be.
If the goal of these programs is to solve a specific problem — in this case, helping youth who are aging out of the foster system transition to adulthood with more support — introducing barriers to participation that hinder the ability of the program to deliver these services is counterproductive at best and at worst harmful to the population they are trying to serve.
Putting Power in the Hands of the (Right) People
Historically, decision-makers and those in power have created the programs in the public sector, regardless of their own experiences and background. To put it plainly, what we’ve had is a system where people who have never been in foster care, for example, design the programs for those who are.
The over-reliance on population-level data has contributed to this dynamic. Data has the ability to erase people’s experiences, to make the issues policies seek to address nameless and faceless, stripping the humanity from the process. Too much focus on data leads to programs that do not reflect the real lived experience of individuals.
The result? Program after program that fails to address the real needs of the people those programs seek to serve and that wastes funds in the process.
But centering lived experts at the core of program design puts the power back in the hands of those most impacted by the program — and those best equipped to understand how to make the programs work for the people they serve. Co-design restores humanity to program design and helps ensure that people determine policy, not the other way around.
It’s an approach to design with the people instead of using the for-the-people model of program design we’ve relied on — largely unsuccessfully — in the past.
Restoring the People’s Trust
Co-design also helps restore trust in the system for people who have far too often been victimized by broken policies and programs designed without their needs in mind. Individuals in these systems have been burned time and again and emerge from these programs with trauma and an understandable lack of trust in the system. Too often those in the system feel powerless in the face of programs that decide important life decisions for them based on policies informed by those in power or by abstract data rather than real people in the room with lived experience and a seat at the decision-making table.
That lack of trust can create a cycle where those with lived experience avoid engaging in these systems and programs as a matter of self-protection, and those programs continue to fail to meet the needs of the very populations they seek to serve.
Co-design helps restore trust by inviting individuals to be part of a participatory, collaborative process designed to give them a genuine voice and real decision-making power over the programs that impact their lives. Instead of feeling like they’ve been invited to the table only to find that they’re sitting at the kids’ table, they are equal members of the program design process, and their voices and experiences have real power.
By empowering those living within these systems and most impacted by the policies we create, we engage in collaborative, power-sharing program design that leads to real change and gives individuals the autonomy and control over their own lives that we all deserve.
And it’s those kinds of programs that can lead to real, much-needed change.