Co-Design as a Process of Joint Inquiry and Imagination

Reference: Marc Steen (2013). “Co-Design as a Process of Joint Inquiry and Imagination.” Design Issues 29(2), pp. 16–28. MIT Press. DOI 10.1162/desi_a_00207. Author: Marc Steen, senior scientist at TNO (Netherlands), working on human-centered design, co-design, and open innovation.

Summary

A conceptual essay that frames co-design — designers and prospective users working together throughout a design project — as a process of joint inquiry and imagination. The title states the thesis: co-design is understood not as a one-off consultation but as a shared activity in which the people involved jointly inquire into a situation (studying and making sense of people’s experiences and needs) and jointly imagine possible futures (envisioning and giving form to how things could be otherwise). On that reading, co-design is a way of organising design so that lived experience and expertise are brought into the same room and treated as generative, rather than users being researched-about and then designed-for.

This matters to anti-violence technology because the field’s strongest design commitments — Survivor-Centered Design and Trauma-Informed Design — rest on exactly this move: building tools with victim-survivors, not merely for them. The paper gives a design-theory vocabulary for that stance, and it sits directly upstream of practice frameworks in this vault such as Creating Collectively, the lived-experience-led design-and-production approach that names co-creation as an intentional, continuous practice rather than a claim to represent others.

Key ideas

Co-design is a joint process: inquiry (understanding a situation together) and imagination (envisioning possibilities together) are done with participants, not extracted from them.
It reframes participation from consultation into sustained collaboration across the whole project, treating users’ experience as a source of knowledge.
The framing underpins participatory, survivor-centered practice: whose voices shape a tool, and at which stages, is a design decision — a counterpoint to top-down or extractive design.

Connections

Informed bySurvivor-Centered Design
- Co-design is the participatory mechanism survivor-centered practice relies on: building tools with victim-survivors, not merely for them.
Related toTrauma-Informed Design
Related toCreating Collectively
- Insight Exchange’s lived-experience-led design framework enacts co-design as described here.
CentresVictim-Survivor
Informed byFeminist HCI
Related toTechno-Solutionism
- Co-design is a corrective to designing gadgets for users without them.

Sources

https://direct.mit.edu/desi/article/29/2/16/69111/Co-Design-as-a-Process-of-Joint-Inquiry-and
DOI record (Crossref): https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00207

Note: the publisher’s page and PDF are behind a Cloudflare challenge and the abstract is elided from indexed metadata, so this note records the cross-verified citation (Crossref / OpenAlex / Semantic Scholar) and situates the source from its stated title and framing. Expand with a close reading when the full text is at hand.

Tags: #research #co-design #participatory-design #design-theory

Backlinks

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Linked Pages

techno-solutionism

Techno-Solutionism

Techno-solutionism is the assumption that complex social and political problems can be fixed with technology. In anti-violence tech it shows up as the belief that the right gadget or app can “prevent sexual assault” or “ensure the safety of women” — a framing critiqued at length in The Safest Woman Alive and Datafication of MeToo. The danger is twofold: it shifts the burden of prevention onto victim-survivors (who must buy, learn, and correctly use devices), and it draws attention and funding away from structural change addressed by the other Four Domains of Power.

This is the central tension running through the vault: tools can genuinely help in a crisis, but should be weighed against Trauma-Informed Design, feminist critique, and the limits of what design alone can do.

In this vault

Critiqued byFour Domains of Power
Tension withPersonal Safety Apps

feminist-hci

Feminist HCI

Feminist HCI is the subfield of human-computer interaction that brings feminist theory, critical theory, and standpoint epistemology to bear on how interactive systems are conceived, built, and evaluated. Its founding statement is Shaowen Bardzell’s 2010 CHI paper Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design, which offered both contribution criteria (theory, methodology, user research, evaluation) and a “constellation” of feminist interaction design qualities — pluralism, participation, advocacy, ecology, embodiment, and self-disclosure — meant to guide and assess design as it unfolds. The agenda extends to questions usually left implicit in HCI: scientific objectivity, whose values get encoded, how data is collected and interpreted, designer reflexivity, and the unintended consequences of the systems we ship.

The lineage runs forward into Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice (2020), which frames design as operating within a “matrix of domination” and argues for processes led by, not merely consulted with, marginalised communities — showing, for example, how normative design erases trans and disabled users. For anti-violence technology, feminist HCI supplies the theoretical backbone of Trauma-Informed Design and Survivor-Centered Design: it names power, insists on participation, and treats embodiment and lived experience as design knowledge. It also grounds critique of Techno-Solutionism and of safety tools that ignore how systems are situated in real relationships of Gender-Based Violence and Coercive Control.

In this vault

Sources

https://des4div.library.northeastern.edu/bardzell-feministhci/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_HCI
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043458/design-justice/

Tags: #concept #theory #hci

victim-survivor

Victim-Survivor

Victim-survivor is the term used in much lived-experience-led practice (including Insight Exchange’s) for a person who has been subjected to violence and abuse. It deliberately holds both realities at once — the harm done to a person and their ongoing agency — and signals a stance of centring that person’s own meaning, pace and decisions, as in Trauma-Informed Design and Survivor-Centered Design.

In this vault

Related toTrauma-Informed Design
Subjected toGender-Based Violence

creating-collectively

Creating Collectively

Insight Exchange (DVSM) · Design & production framework · Free / web

Summary

Creating Collectively is the term Insight Exchange uses to describe how the conceptualising, making and sharing of its insights and materials involves many people, in different parts and in different ways, through continuous listening and responding. “Creating” names the actions of generating, organising and reorganising insights and concepts; “collectively” encompasses the range of individuals involved — each with varied subject-matter experience and skills, including (but not limited to) lived and learned experiences of violence and abuse.

Insight Exchange is explicit that “collectively” is not a claim to represent others, a movement to belong to, or an attempt to reach consensus, and that it does not guarantee the value the work will hold. It is offered “not as a model or theory, but as a description of intentional actions” — a counterpoint to extractive or top-down design, grounding how the organisation’s reflective resources (e.g. My Safety Kit), responder programs (e.g. Responders Lab) and communication audits (e.g. No Hidden Door) are made.

Focus areas

The approach is described through a series of documents, each on a focus area:

Creative Design and Production — design commitments and the principles and process used in communication and design, including how booklets, animations and modules/videos are made.
User Experience (UX) — UX commitments and principles, and how the website environment, web pages, web forms and reports are managed and created.
Creating In Language — taking responsibility for the use of power in developing materials, and the commitments and principles Insight Exchange applies when creating in (multiple) languages.

Connections

Produced byInsight Exchange
Informed byTrauma-Informed Design
Informed bySurvivor-Centered Design
CentresVictim-Survivor
- Co-creation with people who hold lived and learned experience of violence.
Related toMy Safety Kit
Related toResponders Lab
Related toNo Hidden Door

Sources

trauma-informed-design

Trauma-Informed Design

Trauma-informed design builds tools around the realities of people who have experienced violence: defaults that fail safe, control left in the user’s hands, language that validates rather than directs, and the assumption that a device may be monitored. It is closely tied to Survivor-Centered Design and underpins discreet, dignified experiences. Insight Exchange’s resources — My Safety Kit, Responders Lab, No Hidden Door — are practical expressions of the approach.

In this vault

survivor-centered-design

Survivor-Centered Design

Survivor-centered design places the rights, needs, safety, and stated preferences of people who have experienced violence at the center of every design decision, rather than treating them as a population to be managed. A survivor-centered approach prioritises a survivor’s safety, agency, and wellbeing, and insists that survivors be involved at every stage of design and implementation — not consulted once and then designed around. In service and product terms it translates into the trauma-informed commitments of safety, choice, consent, collaboration, trustworthiness, and empowerment, and into reframing the operative question from “why isn’t this survivor ready?” to “what does this survivor need right now to feel safe?”. It treats lived experience as expertise and resists building tools for survivors without building them with survivors.

The approach is closely tied to Trauma-Informed Design (its principles overlap heavily) and is the practical lens through which a vault tool is judged to genuinely centre the Victim-Survivor. It is informed by Feminist HCI and design-justice thinking, which name whose voices design usually erases. Survivor-centered design also sets a critical boundary against Techno-Solutionism: a flashy feature that increases a survivor’s exposure, or that an abuser can repurpose, fails the test no matter how clever, which is why these projects weigh Privacy and Safety and the realities of Coercive Control before shipping.

In this vault

Related toTrauma-Informed Design
CentresVictim-Survivor
Informed byFeminist HCI
Tension withTechno-Solutionism

Sources

https://www.spotlightinitiative.org/design-survivor-centred-programme
https://wscadv.org/projects/domestic-violence-housing-first/toolkit/survivor-driven-trauma-informed-mobile-advocacy/

Tags: #concept #design #survivor-centered