A poster for co-design

What does co-design mean to you? This Effortmark poster for World Usability Day 2020 celebrates some of the things that co-design means to me.

At the end of September 2020, I attended the inaugural meeting of a cross-government co-design community. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about co-design, especially at an event where farmers, people interested in farming regulation, and people working at Defra (the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) came together to begin co-designing what farming regulation might look like in future.

Co-design means a lot to me now

Co-design has started to mean a lot to me, including:

• “Listen first, ask second” (not coincidentally, the theme of my first poster collaboration with Julia Allum)
• “Designing with” not “designing for” – accepting that we must create space to make decisions jointly with people who are affected by them
• Understanding that our co-designers may come from viewpoints that are dramatically different.

Farmers and nature co-design our landscape

This poster, another collaboration with Julia Allum, celebrates the way that our landscape, especially here in the UK, is co-designed by farmers and nature working together.

As before, Julia has generously agreed to make the poster available with a creative commons license. So to print your own: download the poster artwork (.pdf)

If you’d prefer to get a top quality giclée print, or a large size (up to A1), then Julia has co-design listed in her shop.

Note: this is an Effortmark project, influenced by my work at Defra but not funded by them.