Completing an assignment always comes with a great deal of relief. I was very glad to be starting the week off on a positive note after delivering my 301 presentation to a high standard and submitting my revised proposal. As relieving as it is to finish something, the following thought is always: “what’s next?” Since I had gotten a grasp of what kinds of challenges our food system faces, I now wanted to understand the second part of my framed design challenge; how co-design can be used as a facilitation tool for key stakeholders. This was very exciting because it meant I was moving into the Ideation phase of my chosen design methodology. I could start coming up with some ideas for my final deliverable! It was, however, still very much rooted in secondary research and the Inspiration phase. 

I did some preliminary reading on co-design methods, and then I started off the Ideation phase with a quick brainstorm of different ideas. I love this initial part of the Ideation phase because it’s so free and there’s so much room for blue sky thinking. One of the tools in the Ideation phase of the human-centered design methodology is “Explore Your Hunch” (IDEO (Firm), 2015, 84). The name is pretty self-explanatory and basically encourages you to use your gut as a starting point for ideation. My gut was telling me that it was leaning towards four of the options I brainstormed: data visualisation, a co-design toolkit, a board game and a co-design framework. 

I trust my gut instinct very much, so I decided to take those four to the next phase of ideation. The next phase was centred around evaluation, I wanted to know how feasible each idea was, how effective it would be and the benefits and disadvantages. For each idea, I listed potential features, pros and cons based on my preliminary research as well as my own perspective. 

Something worth mentioning is the research I did on “serious play” games as a co-design tool. I watched Dr Kate Langham's presentation on "Play as a co-design tool" (Lanham, 2022]. and it helped me realise and understand that creating a design game requires so much research, time and resources. I came to the conclusion that it just isn’t realistic for me to pursue a game in the time that I have. 

I weighed up the implications of each idea and the one that stuck out to me was the co-design toolkit. The term “toolkit” is very broad but that was exactly what I wanted. I was drawn towards the freedom to explore different tools and curate them specifically for my design challenge. Arguably, if I had enough time and resources, all of my other ideas could actually exist within this toolkit. Using such a methodical approach, consisting of researching and evaluating my ideas, really helped me have faith in the final conclusion I reached. I could rest easy knowing that the reasons I had for choosing a toolkit were justified and carefully considered. 

Overall, this week felt quite breezy. Not because the work was easy or little in load, but because it was a lot more straightforward and methodical than the previous weeks. Before, when I was doing my research on food sovereignty, I was basically getting lost in a big dump of literature about food systems; struggling so much to pick a niche area to frame my design challenge around. In contrast, this week I had a step-by-step process I could follow which was to: 1. Conduct research about co-design tools, 2. Brainstorm ideas, and 3. Evaluate those ideas using research and critical thinking. 

I will bask in this breezy feeling while I can because I just know that I’ll be thrown more curve balls in the next few weeks.
 

REFERENCES

IDEO (Firm). (2015). The Field Guide to Human-centered Design: Design Kit. IDEO.

Lanham, Dr K. [MAGIC, TAPAS & CO-TRACE Projects]. (2022, June 23). Dr Kate Langham - Play as a co-design tool [Video] Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkfxV4V1I90&t=2244s

Meme about me realising I don't have time to make a co-design game [Digital Image] (2023). Original retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/SuperElmerDS/photos/a.1590028947991895/1789476898047098/.

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