Copenhagen Co’creation has asked Silje Kamille Friis three questions about designers working with co-creation today.

The core of co-creation is innovation and the ability to cooperate across specialist areas. What challenges do you think face designers in terms of cooperation with customers?


Traditionally, most designers have been working to provide results for customers within a particular field of design: graphic design, multi-media design, product design, and so on. The designer is the expert responsible for developing the project and carrying it through. Within the past twenty years we have witnessed an increased reliance on user-driven methods, which provide input to the development process and hopefully improve the quality of the final product, but the designer is still the expert responsible for developing and carrying out the project. Students today learn these methods at most schools of design, and many design bureaux employ anthropologists and sociologists to carry out various surveys and such. But when we start talking about ‘cooperation’ we are indicating the need for a new range of skills. We are asking design bureaux to facilitate externally types of processes which they perhaps have not yet applied internally. This calls for a new kind of explicit knowledge about design processes and methods and an insight into psychological, educational and organisational mechanisms, for example. How to lead and manage cooperation between various areas of expertise? How to design processes? Who is responsible for the end results when untrained staff is at work in the kitchen? GK VanPatter of Humantific in New York uses the metaphor of a baker’s shop: in traditional terms, the designer has been the baker delivering good bread. The customer buys the product and hopefully goes home satisfied. End of story. But what if the customer wants to help develop the dough and bake the bread? That’s a completely new situation. Translated to the world of the design bureaux this means that the business has moved from R+D and production to Training & Development.


Co-creation is about designing WITH people rather than FOR people, which calls for new patterns of cooperation between customer and designer. What potential do you see in this for the customer and the designer?

Co-creation offers both opportunities and challenges. If customers are involved in finding solutions, there is a greater chance of them being implemented and integrated with other activities within the organisation. In my time as a designer and product developer I have seen loads of consultancy projects hailed as exciting and inspiring, but which have never been implemented – perhaps because they are too far out in terms of the general stance of the organisation, do not attack the central problem at issue, or are not given priority and nursed along in terms of existing internal solutions. Another potential is the learning potential. The design company is not alone in learning from development projects; the customer and the design company learn together. In this way a closer relationship is established between the design bureau and the company, one which can lead to long-term cooperation. For example, IDEO is the house designer for Proctor & Gamble. Among the challenges is the fact that the design company has to muster a whole new range of skills which they can’t simply take down from the shelf. Facilitating design and development work is a complex affair. In addition, it becomes difficult to maintain one’s original ‘expert’ role – and then there’s the question of who is responsible for the final product.




Danish design companies are beginning to achieve positive results using co-creation, but as yet there is not a broad store of experience with co-creation, either in Danish commercial circles or Danish designers. This was pointed out several times at the Copenhagen Co’creation Seminar in August. How do you see the position of Danish design companies in terms of co-creation? 

Well, I can’t answer that question in general terms, but I am in contact with several design bureaux that are experiencing internal challenges with regard to delivering product and process services. We are back to the role of the designer as expert. Many designers work intuitively from their experience and are basically not interested in involving customers in finding design solutions. They feel considerable responsibility for the form of the final product and tend to see cooperation as a challenge in terms of creating the best result. Another problem is that customers often buy into the style of a design company. If you open up and invite cooperation you have to hand over a degree of responsibility and control, otherwise cooperation will not be lively and based on equality. This means that you have to keep a clear head about when in the process you can cooperate, or alternatively draw sharp lines between different kinds of services. I recently encountered a graphic design company that alongside the traditional graphic design package, in which the customer is not co-creating, offer Co’creation and an interdisciplinary think tank to help customers work with complex questions. This seems an interesting approach to me and I am looking forward to seeing how it works out. In my experience, most design companies in Denmark are still product-oriented – the last link in the food chain. What I mean by this is that customers only approach the company when they have identified the problem they need solving: a new visual identity, a new product line, website, etc. It would be fantastic if Danish design companies could be strong players in terms of the innovation agenda and be able not only to find solutions, but in addition to unravel complex situations, ask those difficult questions and coach their customers. I think we are going to see more of this in the future.

Silje Kamille Friis, PhD, researcher and consultant has been working with innovation processes and methods within a large number of companies; e.g. Danish Radio, Montana, Novo Nordisk through her consultancy company innovatingwithpeople.