CREATEd Co-Design Toolkit
from the Center for Research Use in Education
A User-Centered Design Process
Collaborative design, or “co-design”, is an approach to finding solutions to complex problems by gathering a group of people working together with diverse perspectives. It is used in many fields and industries. A key feature of co-design is that those most impacted by decisions are treated as equal collaborators from the very earliest stages, addressing power imbalances in decision-making. (1)
In education, we can more concretely define co-design as:
a highly-facilitated, team-based process in which teachers, researchers, and developers work together in defined roles to design an educational innovation, realize the design in one or more prototypes, and evaluate each prototype’s significance for addressing a concrete educational need. (2)
Co-design has been applied in education through research-practice partnerships, curriculum development, and in reform initiatives to generate equitable and impactful change. (3)
In the context of our work, co-design is an innovative approach to creating more usable research products as well as democratizing research use through more equitable and inclusive processes. The CREATEd co-design process uses the knowledge and experiences of researchers, practitioners (e.g., educators, administrators), communication design experts, and other interestholders in producing resources that both draw on research and are useful and relevant for achieving greater equity in educational policy and practice.
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For additional information on co-design, visit: https://www.beyondstickynotes.com/what-is-codesign
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Penuel, W. R., Roschelle, J., & Shechtman, N. (2007). Designing formative assessment software with teachers: An analysis of the co-design process. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 2(1), 51–74. doi:10.1142/S1793206807000300
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For more, see Pieters, J., Voogt, J., & Pareja Roblin, N. (2019). Collaborative curriculum design for sustainable innovation and teacher learning. Springer Nature; Cobb, P. A., Jackson, K., Smith, T., Sorum, M., & Henrick, E. C. (2013). Design research with educational systems: Investigating and supporting improvements in the quality of mathematics teaching at scale. In B. J. Fishman, W. R. Penuel, A.-R. Allen, & B. H. Cheng (Eds.), Design-based implementation research: Theories, methods, and exemplars (pp. 320–349). New York, NY: Teachers College.
How Is Equity Centered in Co-Design?
At the center of truly collaborative work - including co-design - is equity. However, equity has many dimensions and meanings in such work. Below is a framework based on interdisciplinary literature on engaged scholarship, participatory action research, organizational theory, and cultural anthropology. This framework highlights three critical equity issues: goals, process, and outcomes.
These concepts are integrated throughout the CREATEd Co-Design toolkit to help users center equity in all aspects of their work. For example, the facilitation guide emphasizes building relational equity through team building and norms. Additionally, the (re)Centering Tool encourages teams to be explicit about their equity goals for the project as well as clarify the time, skills, and other resources team members bring to the work, which support participatory and distributional equity.
To learn more about this framework, read our Dimensions of Equity brief.
Who is Involved in Co-Design?
Codesign values and leverages diverse experiences and perspectives, particularly those that reflect the intended audience of the tool, resource, or innovation in development. Therefore co-design is enacted by a team, including the roles featured in the image below.
What Does the Co-Design Process Look Like?
The CREATEd co-design toolkit is organized around the following key activities:
Organize
Goals: To identify research to be transformed; build a co-design team of researchers, educators, communication and design experts; orient team to process
Team Members: TBD - co-design can be initiated by researchers, practitioners, intermediaries and other interestholders.
Products/deliverables: Co-design team, selected research, orientation
Plan & Partner
Goals: Content planning, planning for how to develop product and how success will be measured.
Team Members: Researcher, Designer, Facilitator, Practitioners, any additional partners or experts as needed
Products/deliverables: Scope and Schedule for Implementation, Initial dissemination plan
Test & Refine
Goals: Listen to interestholder feedback on deliverable and determine if additional deliverables or edits to current deliverable are needed.
Team Members: Researcher, Designer, Facilitator, Practitioner, any additional partners or experts
Products/deliverables: Feedback on design and set of planned revisions
