Welcome to the module called the co and co-design. This module is about the most important step of co-design. Who is involved and how are they involved? This is an important step in the design process because who's involved is really what defines the nature of the entire co-design process. Co-design is really about bringing the people who will be affected by a change process into the center of it or even better creating the change process with them by them for them. So this is where we are, we're in the beginning of the movie with the first practical module. Where we will be starting this whole process that will eventually lead you towards creating your own case study. What you will have at the end of this module is really an identity an idea of how to identify who needs to be involved. How are they related to each other and how might you find them? As usual, we will be taking practical examples from the trips project, but all of these examples should be really filled out for your personal project towards the end of this module. So the anatomy of a project. The anatomy project of a project is really made out by a series of questions by who is the project made for whom, what is it for, and how it is constructed? It is worth taking a moment to think about what the anatomy of your project might be. Are there any special aspects that you need to consider other special aspects you need to allow for? The co and co-design is the most important ingredients because it refers to who is involved with that the co essentially co-design is just well design. So since we believe in descriptions not labels, we are going to describe a little bit more about what does the co and co-design do. So the co and co-design creates a collaborative process that centers the involvement of people in the design of their own environment. It creates knowledge as a resource for action and it creates engagement with power relationships to promote transformation. So this means that we're essentially centering the people for whom this matter in their own environment creating knowledge that might act as resources for action for them. And engaging with the power structures around to see if there can be ways of promoting transformation and change. Now, the troops case study. List Jackson says that empathy is a word you use when you have already excluded the people you claim to be empathetic with. This vote was very inspiring to us when we first started the project. And the project in its core is focused on including persons with disability in the design and consideration of public transport. We have seven European cities in each of them, there are groups of persons with disabilities acting as core user teams. Now, these different cities have different people, different landscapes, different barriers, different existing projects, et cetera. So it's also important for us in the trip project to consider the local variations of different things that might be playing into the lives of the people in these core user teams. Now, the trips case study is really acting to constitute each group of subjects in the co-design process in their own social realities. And it's doing this by co creating a working structure for and by persons with disabilities. Creating a common ground between disabled people, institutional actors, nurturing collaborative processes that makes mobility concerns and concepts visible while integrating cultural, interpersonal, structural, and policy related viewpoints. In other words, we are working with each of these groups, and one of the first things we're doing is we're figuring out how will we work, what is going to work for you? What are the structures and the technologies and the tricks and the tools that are available to this particular group and how will we communicate with each other? But we're also creating this brewing common ground where we are beginning to create connections between the core user teams in the cities, but also the institutional actors around it. Looking for collaborative processes that might make these things visible. And all the time keeping in mind that there are different cultural, structural, interpersonal, et cetera viewpoints, and concerns, and backgrounds that play into this. I'm now going to hand over to Elvia, who would explain a little more about how we are doing this specifically in the trips case study. >> So far, Christina has talked about the who and now I will talk about the how, and this refers to the kind of co-design process that we want to create. In the early stages of the trips project, we use three basic principles to guide us in defining how we would work together. First, we focused on describing our approaches to co-design to describe something as to make it tangible and addressable so that it can be discussed, challenged, negotiated, and shaped collaboratively. Second, We treated these descriptions as living documents that could be evolved to adapt as things changed. And finally, we made a point of revisiting these descriptions throughout the project together. Through this approach, we created an active mode of inquiry that brings together research and action to promote the transformation of social reality. A way of co creating knowledge through making and an approach to participation that engages with the structural conditions that exclude people from having access to decision making processes. The overall aim was to create a truly collaborative and critical learning process that operates across differences and access needs. But most importantly, their respects and honors, the concerns and hopes of the persons with disabilities working in the trips project. So now, we'll move to the practical exercise of this module which is about identifying the who and how we want to involve them. So the idea of this course is that by the end of this, you will have put together a case study using a co-design approach. So what we're suggesting is a blank exercise template that will act as a starting point for you to adapt and apply these strategies to your chosen real life scenario. So now, let's figure out how to apply this to a real life scenario. So this exercise involves five steps. So the first one would be to list all the potential groups that need to be involved. The second would be to prioritize these by who will be most affected by the given change process. Thirdly, you would situate yourself, then you'd start thinking about ways of getting these groups on board. And then finally, you would start thinking about how these groups will be involved in the project. Now, let's look at a filled in example that is using trips as the scenario. So the first thing that we did was that we listed all the groups that would potentially be involved and we then prioritize them by how much they have at stake in accessible public transport. The first group are the groups most at risk of exclusion from public transport. And those are persons with disabilities, but also persons that have other temporary conditions that means that they are at risk of exclusion. The second group is made of the people that shape and are responsible for public transport, such as government authorities, transport providers, accessible transport tech people. The third group are those that advocate for the groups at risk of exclusion and that could be activist associations or individuals. And then finally, we have kind of other groups and those could be researcher consultants or business delivery companies that might be involved in the project as well. So the third step would be to situate yourself and I'll use myself as an example. So I am a researcher, I'm in a full time paid position at a university in the Netherlands, I am an able bodied whiteish gendered woman. My role would be to facilitate the co-design process focusing mostly on the groups listed above under numbers one and three, so the groups at risk of exclusion. I would be interfacing with the other groups as well, but I would be benefiting from playing this role. Because this would feed into my investigation on the politics of an in collaborative design research methods. The fourth step would be to start planning on how to get them on board and in trips this was part of the grant agreement. So it was written down that we had to establish seven groups of persons with disabilities to work as part time paid members of the project for the entire duration of the project. There were a set of tasks that were planned to constitute these groups administratively and these included recruitment efforts. And then finally, what is it that you want this working process to feel like for those involved? And for us, we wanted to create a nurturing space where people could voice their expectations, needs, questions, and wants. And our main focus was to create a process that supports the seven groups and gaining as much autonomy in the project by placing their priorities in the center of our efforts. So now, it is your task to use this template and fill it in so that it applies to your real life scenario. And when you have done that, you will complete the first step that in the end will take you to a case study. And to close, in this model, we talked about the single most important ingredients in co-design, the who is involved, identifying the who is the starting point of the co-design process we propose in this course. This will ground your case study in the priorities of the groups that are involved in the project and this is what we take as co-design. If you remember one thing that is that your role is to hold space for the people most affected by change process in a way that they are centered in the planning and development of it. So that ultimately they're in control of determining what this process is used for and how it will affect their lives. If you're able to do this, then you have achieved. Of course, this is incredible difficult, but the emphasis really is on holding this space for this gathering and re centering of priorities and experiences. Co-design is political, and it is about engaging with the power dynamics and decision making structures. In the next module, we'll be talking about how to create a process that is informed by research.
