 Involving users in the design process is hopefully already a key practice in your day-to-day work. This practice often goes by the name of co-design, but do you know the difference between co-design and good co-design? Well, the differences are significant and we're going to explore them in this episode. As you'll learn, not all co-design is created equal. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Ima Blomkamp. This is the Service Design Show, episode 183. Hi, my name is Mark van Tijn and welcome back to a brand new episode of The Service Design Show. On this show we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make the difference between success and failure all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business, and our planet? Our guest in this episode is Emma Blomkamp. Emma is a respected coach and mentor on the topic of co-design and she's also the founder of co-design Co, which is a network of people learning and sharing about co-design and related practices in order to achieve equity, regeneration, and well-being. We've all seen dozens of examples of product and services where the user wasn't involved in the design process, where a solution seemed like a great idea on paper or was driven by an interesting technology once released upon the market, this solution completely flopped and got no adoption by the users. So I probably don't have to convince you of the value of involving users in the design process. Solutions where users haven't been involved are just much more likely to fail, very likely. Or when you take a more positive standpoint involving the users just increases the likelihood that your solutions will be adopted and actually used by your end customers. So we should all try to involve the user in our design process, right? Well, not so fast, because when done in a careless way it can actually backfire and cause a lot of unnecessary harm. So there is a significant difference between co-design and good co-design, and in this conversation with Emma, we're going to explore what good actually looks like. If you stick around till the end, you'll have learned in which situations you shouldn't strive to do co-design at all. You'll also learn how you can make a strong case for building deeper relationships with users even though it seems more expensive in the short run. We also talk about the major pitfalls that can derail even the best co-design intentions and how you can handle the heavy responsibility that comes with involving users in the design process. I hope this got you excited to learn all the things there are about co-design, so it's time to jump into the great conversation with Emma Malamkamp. Welcome to the show, Emma. Hi, Mike. Good to have you on. Going to talk about a topic that's very dear to your heart, and I think that's an understatement. We're going to talk about co-design and everything related to it before we dive into that. Emma, as always, it's really nice to hear a little bit about your background and what you do currently. I know you do a lot, so, Kitchie, give us a brief introduction. Of course. Thanks so much for having me. I usually start my co-design story in Auckland, New Zealand in 2013. I'd already done a few different things for work and studies. I kept returning to university. I'd just completed a PhD, and I had to get a job. So I found myself working at a little social innovation agency in Auckland, where I learned on the job all about co-design and social innovation and community-based behaviour change campaigns, and got really excited about all those things and met a lot of great people, learned a lot, and have been obsessed with co-design ever since. So from there, I, a few years later, moved to Melbourne, Australia, where I am based now, and had a brief return to academia, where I was at the policy lab at the University of Melbourne, but very much focusing on design capability in the public sector and co-design for policy worked then as a strategic design consultant for a little bit before, in January 2020, launching my own business, not knowing at all what the world had in store for us, but have been really fortunate to have had lots of great clients and opportunities, and I'm sure we'll get the chance to talk about some of them. You also run a community. I'm all into communities these days. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. So one of the favourite things that I do is run a training programme called Co-design Practitioners. It used to be called Co-design Bootcamp, and one of the things that I noticed when participants finished their seven or eight months that they'd spent with this wonderful group of 15 people sharing and learning together that they wanted to stay connected with each other, with me, with the resources I provided. And so about two years ago, I started developing a community membership model based on that, and working with an associate at the time. We then launched 18 months ago as Co-design Co, which is a community of practice for people who are committed to co-creating compassionate systems. So it is about Co-design, but it's also about more than Co-design. Really, any kinds of creative and participatory methods we can use to create positive change in the world. And this is a community where every, well, it's open to everybody from around the world. It's not just limited to Australia, right? Yeah, that's right. We were initially entirely online when we started. We'd just come out of the really hard lockdowns that Melbourne had experienced, and it didn't even occur to me to think about in person at that point. So naturally, we were online and being online, although the time zone can be a challenge, we are, we're and are open to people from all around the world. Our strongest kind of cohort of members is based in Australia, and with my connections with Aotearoa New Zealand, we've got a few members in New Zealand, and then kind of a sprinkling of people in all over the world, Indonesia, Qatar, the States, Canada, and some in Europe too. It's interesting. We need to see how we can mix up our communities, because the circle community, which I host, has a strong representation in Europe and North and South America with a little bit of sprinkling from Australia. But I think there is a lot of overlap in the interest of our members. So that's maybe something we need to continue outside of this conversation. Yep, I'm all for collaboration and exchange. So there's a lot to do and a lot of value to create in this community. Thanks for this introduction, Emma, but as you might know, we always have a lightning round with five questions to get you know, you as a person next to the professional a little bit better. So five questions you haven't prepared for just the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? Sure, sure. Alrighty, what's always in your fridge? Nuts, smoked almonds, preferably. In your fridge? Yes, that's an Australian thing. I'd never put nuts in the fridge until moving here. Apparently they stay fresher for longer. That's interesting. Alrighty, noted that one. If you could recommend just one book for us to read, which book would you recommend? The first one that came to mind is Cloud Atlas. Don't judge it by the film. The book is quite wonderful by David Mitchell. Got it, noted. What did you want to become when you were a kid? As a typical girl in the 1990s who was obsessed with dolphins, I wanted to become a marine biologist. I wasn't very good at science though. So then I wanted to become the first woman Prime Minister of New Zealand, but then somebody else bit me to it. You can try to become second. Alrighty, next question is, if you could watch a single movie for the rest of your life, which movie would you pick? Emily, I think the French film. Got it. And the fifth and final question, which I'm really curious about to learn more from you is, do you recall the first moment you sort of got in touch or heard about service design? It would have definitely been in my first job in Auckland when I had to Google co-design and social innovation to get the job. I didn't know about this field at all. I think my strongest first memory is doing the service design jam. And so I took part in a weekend of service design activities when I was really new in that job and had a wonderful time. Yeah, shout out to Adam, Marcus and everybody else who still is sort of pulling the jams forward. Cool. Thanks, Emma. Thanks for sharing that. This was a nice introduction. Now let's go deeper into the co-design stuff that you're so passionate about. And I think even though it might sound a bit obvious, but I'm really curious to hear a bit more about your definition of co-design because everybody is using it quite loosely. What is your perspective on that? What is co-design? In the most simple terms, the most plain language, I'd say co-design is making stuff together. If we want to get a little bit more nuanced about it, then I would say it is using creative and participatory methods to create something new or to change something. And then I've got academic definitions that I can pull out as well, but that's maybe enough of a starting point. Well, we'll add academic definitions to the show notes for anyone who wants to dive deeper into this. So creating stuff together and you in our pre-interview, pre-conversation chat you mentioned, creating better outcomes. This is maybe the follow-up question. And again, I'm going to try to ask the silly and stupid questions, but why do you feel co-design is important? Well, we only need to look around and see all of the dysfunctional systems that we're part of, the health systems, the justice systems, the education systems, all of these systems that aren't getting good results and wonder how things could be different. I think one of the reasons we don't get good results is that decisions get made on behalf of people, that the people who are most affected by an issue aren't usually involved in designing the response to it. And when I've been involved in co-design programs that have really meaningfully involved people to develop mutual understanding of issues, so often it's not just asking what people already know, but actually creating new understanding by exchanging perspectives by lots of different people who have different experiences on a system, including if we're talking health, for instance, it's the people who work in it as well as people who are patients or consumers and their family members. So building understanding and then coming up with better ideas about what we can do and ideally also being involved in iterating and implementing those ideas in iterative ways. How does this align with you? One of the things I wonder about is whether here in Australia and New Zealand we have a particular understanding of co-design and it might be different in different parts of the world. That's a good question. Usually I'm not on the receiving end of the questions, but I can tap into some of my experience when still I'm doing the studio work and I think co-design has been a fundamental part of our work back then. I think I don't see a lot of difference between what you're describing here, especially I'm based in the Netherlands. The university in Delft has a strong co-design representation, co-design agenda, so I think the term landed quite early I think in that design space. So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but I see a lot of similarities. I don't see any meaningful differences there. I think we draw a lot on the Scandinavian traditions of co-operative design and participatory design as well as local indigenous ways of knowing and being. Here in Australia we've got the longest kind of continued civilization. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been here for tens of thousands of years and there are really ancient practices of just coming together, exchanging ideas, building understanding, solving problems together that I think we draw on as well as the European traditions to have a really nice mix of practices here. So Emma, one of the questions that I had here in my notes preparing this conversation is something that I think we really need to dive into deeper. There is a difference between doing co-design and doing good co-design or doing it well. What's your take on this? Yeah, I'd also add there's a difference between saying you are doing co-design and doing co-design and doing it well. I think it can be a bit of a buzzword and some people maybe they truly believe that going into a meeting room with one other person and writing a couple of ideas on a whiteboard is co-design. There are some people who would say, yeah, we co-designed it based on that. I wouldn't call that co-design. I'd say you'd need a few more people involved and especially the people who are really affected by an issue. I think there's a few different ways to think about what good co-design is if we're talking about especially engaging marginalised people. We need to be really sensitive to some of the challenges and the reasons people have been excluded from design and decision making and need to think really carefully about inclusive facilitation, creating culturally safe spaces, having trauma-informed practice. There's quite a few considerations there to think about how do we work really ethically and inclusively with people. I think bad co-design would look like we're just a bunch of white people in a room making decisions on behalf of other cultures. Good co-design would be being sensitive to that and making sure that not only are you including a wide range of people in your design process, but you're doing it in ways that make them feel safe and welcome and able to be creative and contribute meaningfully. Is there a transition quite quickly into different areas that I'm curious about? I'm assuming that it's not a black and white matter. You're doing bad co-design or you're doing good co-design. With growth or maturity or progression, do you see that people or practitioners can go through? Where can you start without compromising the fundamental values of good co-design? Yeah, I think you make a really good point that it's not just black and white. There's good or bad. One of the things that in my community and with participants in my training we talk about sometimes is doing things in a co-designer-ly or co-design-ish way because there are some quite lofty goals of fully sharing power that are quite hard to achieve in practice. I think it's good to follow the ideals and principles of co-design, recognising that you might not always fully achieve them, but in working towards them you can do well. In that sense, I think a good place to start is with the principles or the mindsets of co-design. That might just be something like, how can I be a little bit more inclusive or participatory? It might be that you are doing a design project that isn't going to be full co-design, but perhaps in the research design you could let people have more of a say in which activities they take part in. You could give people a little bit more choice or you could do some testing of your research materials with participants to refine them so that they're actually getting to shape them. There might be some small things you could do to let people have more influence over what you're doing. I think that could be a place to start, but one of the really important things is that it's actually a meaningful opportunity for people to contribute, that you choose something that can be influenced, that you're not just trying to practice co-design where a decision's already been made, for instance, and the people you're inviting to have some influence have no chance of making any actual contribution or changes. So having sort of a charter or a manifesto or some principles and values that you state upfront, things that you try to adhere to to your best ability is a good start, knowing what these values are and then trying to implement them wherever you can. And the other thing you mentioned is, that sounds obvious, but not using it as lip service or actually, it's not co-design if people just have to agree to something, right? Yeah, totally. To borrow a phrase from my friend and peer, Joe Stapinska, that's co-design, not co-design. Yeah, there is no design part to just giving your opinion, I guess. Yeah, just answering a survey is not co-design. Well, yeah, and I think if we stay true to the design element or the design aspect of co-design, then we all know what good design, well, I hope we have an idea of what good design should look like and that's more than just giving a yes or no answer. Cool. So, yeah, you want to add to that? No, totally. I think that's where people can go wrong. Sometimes there's not enough co and sometimes there's not enough design. But I'm imagining in this podcast we are talking to more of a design audience, so hopefully they know that if we're talking co-design, there's a design process involved and perhaps what they could do is lean a bit more towards the co where there are relevant opportunities to do so. I haven't dig into all of the resources that you have available, but is there like a manifesto or a document or something that people can hang on the wall as a guide to good co-design? Sort of. We do have a manifesto for co-design co, but that manifesto is more about how we want to show up as a community with each other to practice what we preach and to push our practice. I have a couple of other resources that are freely available on my website. And one of them that I think is quite useful is about co-design maturity and that's more about people understanding the kind of different levels or stages you might go through on a learning journey that, you know, you don't just go to a half hour webinar and learn everything you need to know about co-design, but there are kind of ways to get to mastery and to help recognize what that looks like along the way. I think if you're looking for a good definition of co-design, I would direct you to beyondstickynotes.com, K.A. McCutcher's website. They've got a really great definition of co-design and the principles and the mindsets. Cool. Adding that one to our resources in the show notes as well. Staying on this topic, if we discuss for a second the things you teach and have thought through your coaching practice, if you look back on it, what do you feel is the most important thing that you teach people? And I can imagine that there's your perspective on what you feel is important and then there's the feedback from your students or participants, what they feel was the most valuable part. Yeah, and I think it depends which level they're at. So if I think about participants in my co-design practitioners program who are already people who have some experience with co-design, who are already facilitating co-design but are wanting to really strengthen their participatory practice, the thing I hear from them is that they realise through our program the importance of relationships. So it's not just about getting kind of extracting things from people but the real beauty of co-design happens when you build reciprocal relationships and you're actually genuinely engaging with people and forming respect and care and you're both getting something out of the exchange. Do you have an example to make this a bit more tangible? Like what does this look like or what's the before and after? Yeah, I think if I think of an example from some of my earlier work actually when I worked in a social innovation agency in Auckland, we did a lot of community-based co-design and one of our projects was about trying to change the behaviour of young drivers. So there were a lot of young people who were driving without a licence or without the right licence and we were interested in kind of making sure that they were getting through the driver licensing system and then driving with the right licence. That was a project that focused on a particular geographic location, a place-based community and one of the things that I think was key to the success of that project was that we, me and my colleagues at this agency formed a really great relationship with a community leader who ran a marae, so like a meeting place and they were already doing lots of great things in their community but and initially we just approached them because we wanted a venue. We just, we needed somewhere, you know, good local place to hold some workshops but through getting to know them we realised that they, you know, they offered a lot more than that. They were also had a family with young people in it who were affected by this issue and started to participate in the project and one of the things we found was that like we could partner with them on an organisational level as well so it's like we could look at what their organisation needed and how we could support them so that it wasn't just coming along and taking from their community and you know some of this is just getting to know people and having cups of tea and laughing and finding opportunities where you might be able to easily offer some kind of support or advice or a connection that's beyond the immediate scope of the project but actually is great for both of you. Thank you for sharing that example. Why do you feel that this is sort of the biggest insight that people get? Like it seems very natural to build relationships as a design practitioner. Yes, it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be a surprise, should it? I think a lot of the times I wonder how, it's a good question, I don't have a ready answer on it but I wonder if you know so much is to do with the pace and scale at which people are working especially in design consulting and in public sector projects with limited budgets and often financial year deadlines to achieve things. I think a lot of people doing this work are under a lot of pressure to achieve things quickly to do a lot in a short amount of time and sometimes the design process can be transactional. It can be about getting people along to get this stuff from them and I think sometimes unfortunately when people start out in co-design that's maybe how they see it. Like this is a good way to get stuff out of people and it can become quite transactional especially if you start having to do lots of workshops and lots of engagements with different people and people also make the mistake around quantity over quality. So people think oh we've got to get as many people as possible involved and there's pressure that definitely comes from outside design like in a world where numbers have a huge weight to say oh yeah we engaged a lot of people rather than we actually worked really closely and built amazing relationships with a few people who were most affected by this who are now champions of this issue. Yeah it's the depth of a relationship versus the quantity the number of relationships you have and yeah like you said there is a lot of pressure to do busy work and sort of investing the time in nurturing, fostering, growing these relationships seems quote-unquote expensive or it seems like a big investment and the thing is that it pays off in the long run and you mentioned the pace and the scale at which people need to operate usually it's really hard to have the focus on the long run but that's maybe one of the big challenges here. Totally I think it's also challenging and if I reflect when I was doing this kind of work as a consultant we were taking, I was working across lots of different sectors so it was also hard to build up meaningful relationships in that way because I was working with different kinds of people a lot of the time. I think working in a place-based way is useful because you can cut across those sectors and see in one community how it's affected by lots of different issues and I think that was maybe one of the big advantages we had working in New Zealand and especially working in one particular part of the city a lot whereas in a larger city in a larger state in a larger country and when I was new to this country I think I really struggled to have those relationships too. It's not kind of yeah how people are working but when I look at people who are really successful in this space they've often been a little more focused on a particular area or a particular issue or a particular sector and as a result have been able to build strong relationships in that space. Yeah and I can second that because regular listeners of the show know that I have a weak heart for people who work on the inside in-house service design professionals and that's very place-based you can you sort of if anywhere you have the opportunity there to build those relationships and to invest in them and I'm seeing the same pattern that people who are successful aren't the best quote-unquote service design professionals they are the ones who sort of are able to foster and build these and nurture these relationships yeah. So Emma you mentioned this is something that people who are already on the co-design journey learn or take away and then maybe take it to the next level I'm assuming that there is also an implied answer there to the people who aren't yet on that journey what do they take away? You have a good memory for following your questions and the answers I was hoping I'd avoided this one. I'm struggling to identify one thing but I think one of my favorite pieces of feedback recently was someone who took part in my introductory workshop and they said the key thing that they took away from it that I'd said that I couldn't remember saying was that co-design is hard work no now I can't remember it isn't that funny I can't even quote myself I'm not very good at remembering quotes um basically though what they were saying was that even though it's it can be really hard it's also can be fun and one of the things that I love when people remember or rediscover is the value of being playful and I've seen that a few times recently that people have felt a bit stuck especially if you're you know working on a really complex issue so some of my clients for instance are you know designing a response to family violence that's not a fun issue but there are ways to approach it with lightness with playfulness that open up all kinds of possibilities that aren't as accessible to you if you are you know not letting yourself laugh or imagine joy so interesting that these are things that we know are important but maybe are pushed out of us because yeah it's not the default culture within work environments yeah interesting um anything else you want to add there I think one of the things that yeah people also realize is that it can be small and this relates to what we were saying already like you don't have to have huge numbers of people who take part people are sometimes surprised when I say we can you know go through a co-design process looking at a complex issue with a core group of 12 to 15 co-designers if you've you know kind of carefully selected people to represent different kinds of experiences and perspectives so that there is diversity within that group if you've got the right mix of people who understand the issue and are committed that's that's a good number of people to be involved yeah a small is a relative number it's a what a small so sticking sticking to this what have you seen or what are some situations where you see good intentions of doing good co-design uh sort of sort of go wrong where when does good co-design fall flat one of the most frustrating things that happens I think is when things seem to be set up while you've got say I don't know an organization maybe a few organizations have come together and said they're going to fund and support this project and and you're going to go through a co-design process and everyone involved has good intentions and and is interested in seeing whatever is designed come to life at some point it doesn't get realized and this happens a lot for various reasons sometimes there isn't true commitment from the organizations to actually implement whatever is designed sometimes they're not as open as they said they might have been to actually letting the people involved design something they might have had another solution that they wanted implemented and were hoping that was going to be the result or sometimes the government changes there's a new policy the funding is no longer available the leader who sponsored that has left there are so many reasons why things don't get realized but it can be so frustrating for everyone involved and some of that can be avoided if they're if you're not paying attention to to the context and not thinking about where the thing you're designing is going to land to make sure that that's part of your process but some of it is just shit happens yeah and this is i'm assuming this is something that the listeners here will recognize a lot that implementation is one of probably the hardest thing actually realizing and getting the solutions out into the world where they impact the customers the company because that's the moment where things start to hurt people actually feel a difference like the research stage and the ideation stage prototyping stage that's still sort of that's the playground and then when when you need to put it out into the world people actually need to do stuff think budgets need to be aligned and that's like yeah i was gonna say this is where if you do co-design well it can help though because you can get once you know what kind of thing you're going to be implementing you can make sure people who would be involved in implementing it are part of the design and prototyping especially in the prototyping phase so done well you can try and address some of this like if you know you're going to be developing a marketing campaign make sure you've got someone with marketing knowledge in your co-design group i think that's also one of the mistakes people make or a misconception about co-design is that it's it's just the the consumers or the users or the people with lived experience and definitely co-design is you know when we turn towards co-design one of the reasons is we're interested in trying to address some of the power imbalances and privilege the voice of lived experience but that doesn't mean we should stop listening to professional experience and consider the lived experience of people who work within these systems and what they know about implementation and try and build that into the process too yeah absolutely and the people who you work with are just as important as the people who you work what a quote for and somehow we tend to forget that that yeah yeah yeah have you seen situations where you thought well a co-design approach actually wasn't helpful here or we should stay away from co-design like it i can imagine that there is like a danger where co-design is seen like the answer to everything everything should be co-designed should everything be co-designed no i think there are there are some situations that are more technical and technical expertise is really important i think in those situations so i'm thinking of an example of involving people in evaluation say and you absolutely can take participatory approaches to evaluation but i can remember a project i was involved in where there wasn't a lot of time for building capacity for people who'd not been involved in designing an evaluation before and implementing it to contribute to that so i think on one hand you have perhaps areas that are very technical and you can't just expect ordinary people to quickly grasp and be able to design in them i think if you're really committed to being participatory you and you've got the time and resources you can build capacity you know so that people can who are interested you know can increase their technical expertise but that's not necessary you know is it necessary i think is the question is like is this you have to ask do you need to do that so that's one area another example is more in like a chaotic space where it's it's a like a real crisis or things are changing so quickly and i for instance was part of a team in australia in the early period of covid that were um trying to develop a um covid tracking tracing app and it was such a chaotic situation we were actually working for a state government department that didn't know the federal government department was also doing this process itself and so and there was such a rush such a race to to try and come up with something however that project was fascinating because there were all these health experts and technological experts very very rapidly trying to come up with an app that could help people understand um proximity and things like this yet they weren't even planning to do any user testing before it was going to be launched and become compulsory and that was for me quite horrifying so even though there wasn't time to fully co-design and there were aspects of that that were technical there was still a huge opportunity to at the very least consult with some consumers and thanks to the involvement of myself and a colleague and a brown we were able to at least make sure we consulted with a consumer reference group who sure enough you know really busted some of the assumptions that the the development team had and when we saw the failure of that app in Australia not the one we were working on but the the federal government's one I also couldn't help but think if they'd just taken a little bit longer and at the very least done a little bit of user testing or consultation even if not full co-design yeah well in the end they do use a testing but that happens when it's live and out in the public and then that's that's the full-scale user testing it's just it becomes more expensive and more time consuming to fix the errors when it's out and some of them yeah they can't in the end because they've chosen a technological solution that is incompatible with IOS for instance yeah okay so this this helps another thing that I'm curious about is if you look at the set of people that you're working with have you found specific talents or attitudes or skills that people need to have to be good co-designers good question I definitely found that there are people who have good people skills or facilitation skills that they're not necessarily trained facilitators but they have an ease or a capacity to bring people together and and to host and I actually really noticed this myself when last year I was working with someone who was a former English language teacher and that's also what I did in the beginning of my career and I hadn't realised how much of my English language teaching skills I'd actually transferred into co-design facilitation until I noticed someone else doing the same thing so I think there's a variety of ways and places people might gain relevant facilitation skills which I think are an important part of co-design if you want to leave I think there's lots of different roles in co-design and I would like to acknowledge that like co-design facilitation is very important bringing people together in a variety of ways and and leading groups through design and innovation processes but co-design also involves other design skills and you know having graphic designers and service designers on a co-design team with they don't necessarily even need to be you know they don't themselves have to be the facilitator but those are relevant skills to contribute obviously the other thing I'd say in response to that is I have noticed some people have more of a natural disposition to the co-design mindsets one of them um and definitely here referencing the mindsets um that K.A. McCutcher puts forth through beyond sticky notes so um one of them the idea of being in the gray for instance being comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty is one that many of us struggle with that's definitely been an area of growth and challenge for me personally to you know not not see things black and white to you know be able to sit with all of the complexity and not jump to a solution or need need things to be predictable that can be challenging and some people are just better at that than others but I think these are things you can learn and I've seen that especially through some of my coaching and mentoring clients especially when we're on more of the kind of mindsets side of things I think those are things that take if they're not your natural disposition it can take time to adjust um and it can be helpful to reflect on you know how you're feeling about things what your natural response is how you yourself can kind of manage yourself to be in the gray if that's not something that's comfortable for you and so I think it is possible to learn to be better at it but I do want to acknowledge it does just come more easily for some people. This is uh very interesting I had a related question to your coaching experience and you already sort of hinted upon it and I don't know if there's an answer but let's find out what do you see that people need most support is there a specific area is there a pattern that you have discovered? I think the only there's a lot of different things that different people need support in depending on their skills their experience the work that they're doing but if there's only one pattern it's probably moral support it's hard work especially to do co-design well you are balancing a lot of sometimes conflicting demands and interests you are working with a lot of different people if you're doing it in the space of social innovation or systems change you're trying to respond to some really complex issues that are connected with some really complex issues that are causing major harm in the world so it's a lot it's a lot to handle and like we said before if you're doing this at a pace and you know with huge expectations sometimes with a high workload and lots of demands it can be really full on so sometimes it can just really help people to have someone just to talk to about what they're doing what they're going through somebody to help validate if things are being done well or if they are having a negative experience someone yeah to kind of walk alongside them basically yeah yeah and this is you find this in your community oh 100 and I was just writing down this morning that this circle community and I think it goes for you as well is a place where just professionals can laugh together can cry together can celebrate wins and learn from failures and that's that's already a lot and I think you're describing something similar one of the one of the upcoming events that we actually have as part of co-design code the community of practice is around the kinds of support the different models or forms of support that practitioners might be able to access and benefit from like supervision coaching mentoring peer coaching or supervision I think in some fields these are really established practices and there are frameworks and even expectations you know if you're doing social work or therapy for instance it's expected that you have supervision that's not something that is established for designers or facilitators yet you might you might be working in an organization and have a manager but that doesn't mean you're actually getting practice supervision especially according to any kind of ethical frameworks so one of the things we're really interested in and this is I'm doing this with K.A. McCutcher, Kirstie Alderton and Morgan Catteldo who as well as there'll be other members of our community of practice kind of contributing to building our knowledge about these different kinds of practices of support that we might be able to use and offer and that's going to be really helpful because showing creating awareness building vocabulary around what types of support you can get mentoring coaching training communities that sort of opens up your eyes that they're like you don't have to do it alone and you can actually pick and choose and find how you want to be supported totally it's one of the things I've been trying to figure out for myself operating my own business you know I've been in organizations where I haven't received the kind of support I would like either and I know that for you know many friends and colleagues unfortunately that's the case too so I've been thinking for a while about like how do I create my own support team and structures and networks of support and it's obviously especially important for someone like myself who is working alone a lot of the time you know I do work in collaboration I have contractors and collaborators and clients but you know I'm not in any kind of formal team or organization but speaking with people even who work in-house actually sometimes they need to do the same thing too. This is I'm going to follow your progress on this topic because I think it will be very relevant for this community as well am I heading towards sort of the end of our chat I'm I'm really interested to hear your perspective on the future and if you look into the future of co-design what are the things or what is the thing that excites you the most? I've been pleasantly surprised to see co-design mainstreaming here in Australia in the social and public sectors at least I think I'm not sure how this compares with elsewhere but here in Victoria in Australia for instance it's quite common for a government policy to say co-design is happening for government funding requirements to say you have to co-design this thing so as a result of that I've seen increasing demand and interest in co-design I think there's a huge risk that we continue to see really token efforts or shallow forms or foe design happening but in the community and communities that I am part of I am surrounded by really thoughtful critical people who question dominant norms and design and ask themselves and ourselves how we can do better and are really interested for instance in culturally responsive and trauma informed ways of working so I think we're going to see kind of more and more of this work I'm curious to see whether we get any kind of clear ethical standards or guidelines you know out of that of like what what do we say is good co-design and as a sector as an industry or as a community maybe are we going to start defining these things more clearly or is there advantage in leaving it open and flexible to be more responsive so that's something I have no crystal ball but I'm curious to see what happens in that regard very interesting topic I have some thoughts on that as well but we'll leave that for a different conversation can we hear some of your thoughts well briefly I do think that we are in a stage where there is enough experience and knowledge to crystallize some learnings and I don't like to use the word best practice because that's too rigid but we definitely can provide some guidelines and compasses and manifestos that sort of define a minimum minimum standards and I do think that we have enough experience and knowledge right now to know what at least some of these minimum standards are related to doing good co-design related to doing good service design and we're not starting from scratch there are already some very good efforts going on but I do think we need more well maybe that's something we can collaborate on too let's see Emma if somebody made it all the way here to this point in our conversation what is the one thing you hope that they will remember to be playful and value relationships be playful and value relationships thank you so much Emma for taking the time to sharing your journey with us to sharing what you're doing the amazing work that's happening in Australia and that's trickling to the rest of the world really looking forward to seeing how your journey evolves and how are that maybe intersect in the coming months and years yeah thanks so much Mark it's been a really interesting conversation and I genuinely hope that we are able to continue it and keep exchanging ideas about supporting these similar overlapping communities that we're leading thanks a lot Emma what's your biggest takeaway from this conversation with Emma leave a short comment down below I'd love to hear from you and if you've made it this far into the conversation and enjoyed what we talked about make sure to click that like button this lets me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this my name is Mark Fontaine and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me and was an absolute honor and pleasure please keep making a positive impact and I'll catch you very soon in the next episode of the surfs design show see you soon