Co-creation has been identified as one of the business strategies of the future, improving effectiveness and knowledge sharing and thus cutting down on the use of resources and consumption in general. During Copenhagen Coʼcreation: Designing for Change 09, more than 250 Danish and foreign companies, designers and experts in innovation concluded that there is a huge potential in using co-creation as a business strategy for innovation. As a pilot project, Copenhagen Coʼcreation invited management teams from Sticks’n'Sushi, ME-FA and KPMG to work for a day on how each company could use co-creation to translate knowledge and skills into new products and solutions and improved work processes. One of the aims of Copenhagen Coʼcreation is to spread the knowledge about co-creation gained during the international meeting in August 2009 to Danish companies.

Sticks’n'Sushi took part in a one-day workshop on 3 December 2009 – and when we asked Kim Rahbek afterwards what his company gained from working with co-creation, he stressed that he sees great potential in it in terms of processes of development within Sticks’n'Sushi.

On 3 December 2009, SticksʼnʼSushi took part in a Copenhagen Coʼcreation Workshop. Kim Rahbek, SticksʼnʼSushi (left) with Mikael Hallstrup and Niels Clausen-Stuck, Designit, who ran the workshop.

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The collaboration between IIT Mumbai and IIT Chicago featured Chicago students directing research in Powai, and IIT Mumbai students directing research in Chicago. As a result, research approaches were tailored to each group of students’ needs. IIT Mumbai students focused on physical product design solutions and IIT Chicago focused on designing systems and strategies encompassing combinations of product, communication and service design opportunities. The goal of all of the projects was to contribute to increasing prosperity and small business growth within Chicago and the Powai neighborhood.

Key insights and design ideas derived from the collaboration

Exploring the possibility of for-profit and not-for-profit hybrids

Students explored the creation of for-profit/not-for-profit hybrid organizations by designing systems that:

• Strengthen communities by connecting local resources
  A self-sustaining business model for a Balwadi that integrates a non-for-profit community service provider, a for-profit entity and an educational incubator around the core values of creating social and economic value for the Powai slum community.
  (Gauri Verma, Valerie Campbell, Edwin Steinmetz , Vishwesh Kelkar)

• Empowering Self-employed Women in Powai through Social Networking
  A Kitty-Cooperative model for women’s groups in the Powai slum designed make NGOs more effective in addressing the needs of their constituents in the areas of health, education and financial independence.
  (Bhumi Gajjar, Soham Patel, Anshul Maheshwari)

Utilization of Ubiquitous or Predominant Technologies

Record-keeping and Credit Management Systems for Kirana Stores in Powai. New paper ledgers and record-keeping applications for mobile phones address preponderance of credit-based transactions, unclear payback details, and shop owner’s monopoly of the main register in stores. (Antonio Quinones, Nai-Hwa Chiang, Preethi Lakshminarayanan, Swapnil Jadhav)

Exploring New Types of Currency

Efficient Scrap Collection Systems for Powai Slums A scrap collection system that offers increased efficiency and profitability to Powai scrap collectors by facilitating networking, scrap processing, price transparency and the introduction of incentives. (Vasile Bora, Dan Folwaczny, Kyungsun Kim, Shilpa Rao, Amy Sprague)

The full paper was presented on April 7, 2009 at SDSE 2008, Bangkok Thailand.

20091123_092213_Sustainability_and_a_Global_Design_Process.pdf

Consumer behaviour
A company like Novozymes that produces enzymes for use in industrial processes (primarily detergents) has to be very well informed about human behaviour. So well informed, in fact, that they are totally familiar with our eating habits and how we wash our clothes. For example, a connection has been made between the new ‘light’ products that grace our dining tables and new kinds of stains that appear on our clothes.

”What it’s all about is that Novozymes have developed enzymes to wash clothes clean even at 30 degrees Celsius. And when we lower the temperature on the washing machine we save energy and CO2– without having to alter our habits. This is one of the easy choices people can make in their daily lives, and at the same time have a positive influence on the environment. These days we cooperate on innovation with those of our customers who produce detergents and who possess a wide knowledge of the needs and wishes of consumers. In the future, when sustainability will be a decisive factor in terms of innovation and finding new solutions, we shall have to understand to an even greater extent at what point along the value chain it is important to make a special effort to make our daily lives more sustainable, and to understand how we can contribute to this. This is why we have adopted an approach to innovation based on the value chain,” explains Mette Johnsen.

Focus on the whole of the value chain
‘I do 30′ is a campaign which has been launched quite simply to get people to lower the water temperature when they wash their clothes. To get an overview of the environmental challenge – in this case the total CO2 footprint connected with washing clothes at a high temperature – Novozymes, using a so-called Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), has been able to identify at what point along the value chain it pays to make an effort. That point is the heating of water in washing machines. Put briefly, it is all about linking a technology that makes it possible to lower temperatures with human behaviour.

”We take the broader view and focus on the high energy consumption connected with doing the laundry. 70% of all CO2 emissions connected with the production and use of detergents are in fact related to washing – and not least drying – clothes at high temperatures. If we are to live up to our vision about sustainability, we shall have to win over the consumers. What is new in our campaign, apart from the whole sustainability approach, is that we are getting the message right out to the end users and getting them involved. It’s out there that we see the effects”, says Mette Johnsen.

Co-creation turns the spotlight on the solution rather than the product
Instead of using TV spots and advertisements, co-creation has made it possible to establish a dialogue with people who do their laundry in a proper manner. Thus, the focus is not on the detergent, but on what people can do themselves.

”The whole campaign is constructed on a social platform. For example, the logo has been designed using what we call crowd sourcing, which means that we had more that 200 suggestions to choose from. The video has been made using ordinary people who have been casted to to take part at street level. Moreover, the further conduct of the campaign will closely involve our online members, who now number over 10,000”, concludes Mette Johnsen.

/ link

About Mette Johnsen

A global talent machine
A practical example of how Grundfos uses co-creation is their new talent programme.
”One of the major challenges that we constantly face at Grundfos is how to train and develop a staff of over 18,000 people in more than 50 countries. We have come a long way with training the broad mass of our employees, but on top of that we now also need to be world class at developing the very best of them, those with real talent. We badly need the best people because we have designed a very ambitious strategy with a vision that aims to develop radically innovative products and solutions”, explains Lisbet Thyge Frandsen.

To meet the challenge of designing a concept for developing talent that can be used all over the world, Grundfos has chosen to develop the concept as a co-creation project.

”We had to act quickly and it had to work all over the world. And because it will affect a very large number of people, I felt it important to develop a concept that that they all could relate to. So, to ensure that the concept had local roots and was culturally broad in scope, we gathered a group of 40 managers and specialists from 23 countries who were all passionately interested in the task and prominent in terms of forming public opinion in their local environment. This was a very diverse group and they were given four days to design a new concept for talent development”, adds Lisbet Thyge Frandsen.

Diversity sparks off creativity
The fact that we involved so many different people in the process has led to an increased level of innovation and a fantastic sense of ownership. Lisbet Thyge Frandsen stresses that this can only be achieved if people dare to challenge both themselves and others: ”It’s very tough and demanding. There can be lots of disagreement, so if you’re leading the process you have to let go of the reins. In the end, it’s a question of daring to renounce some of one’s own power”, she says.

Lisbet Thyge Frandsen sees it as a clear global tendency that companies increasingly involve specialists. Another tendency is that barriers between companies are being broken down and an increasing number of so-called free agents are appearing on the scene. These tendencies are reflected at Grundfos.

”At the moment here at Grundfos we are trying to build up the skills needed to design innovative products and solutions by calling on designers, anthropologists, engineers and economic experts. The idea is that they each use their special professional skills to help map out the needs of the market in cooperation with future users. I see innovation as combining things in new ways, which means involving people with radically different approaches”, concludes Lisbet Thyge Frandsen.

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About Lisbet Thyge Frandsen

The headline is a quote from Allan Chochinov’s foreword to Emily Pilloton’s book ‘Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People’ and very precisely frames what the book is about and what it aims to demonstrate. In it’s full length the quote goes “(…) designers would do well to remember that they are not in the artifact business. They are in the consequence business”.

Through her own introduction ‘Design Can Change the World’ and the book’s more than 100 examples from the real world, Emily Pilloton illustrates co-creation as a basis for social entrepreneurship through design and how designing for sustainability (for people, planet and profit) transforms challenges into opportunities.

“Design has been disconnected from reality”, Emily Pilloton says and through Project H Design, founded in January 2008 by Emily herself, she strives to re-establish the connection based on the bold (and somewhat beautiful) statement that design is problem solving with grace and foresight. One of the keys to re-establish the connection is to not just consider HOW we design stuff (as most ‘green design’ is about) but to carefully consider WHAT we design, and use design as a catalyst to create solutions that go beyond doing no harm.

Even though, HOW we design is an important issue to Emily Pilloton and the best introduction to the principles of Project H Design might as well be her own as can be seen here.

The book’s examples illustrate the true nature of designing for sustainability. Though the focus is on societal design or social entrepreneurship through design, it is evident that nothing exists in a vacuum and all projects though aimed at solving one specific problem (perhaps through grace and foresight) also target a variety of other issues. Thus most of the books examples though categorised into one of the eight main categories Water, Well-being, Energy, Education, Mobility, Food, Play and Enterprise, could be categorised under several others, which is also illustrated by an easy understandable iconography throughout the books simple and sober design.

It would be too extensive or too narrow to pick specific examples from the book here. So let me just pick one that demonstrates Emily Pillotons ambition to “Design for the 100 Percent” (a reference to the 2007 Cooper-Hewitt exhibition ‘Design for the Other 90%’) and dissolve the distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’: Learning Landscape is developed by Project H Design in partnership with Architecture for Humanity and is a modular and scalable playground system for elementary math education based on 10 math-based games to be played within a squared grid. The Learning Landscape is designed with teachers and children and is so far implemented in Uganda, Dominican Republic and South Carolina. The success of the design derives from a systemic approach (as opposed to an object or product based approach) making it scalable, universally adaptable and context specific.

For reasons unknown, in the European release of the book later this year, the subtitle has been changed to ‘Design that Changes Peoples Lives’. Ironic, as the key to success for most of the showcased project is not forcefully changing people’s lives but exactly empowering them by designing with them not for them. Which I believe most people are better off with.

At Elephant we firmly believe that contemporary design requires a strong convergence of multiple disciplines. With approximately 65 professionals, Team Elephant comprises of business strategists, design thinkers, communication experts, engineers and social science experts working together in multidisciplinary teams to enhance clients’ businesses.

What was the need?
The need was felt on two fronts.

The first front was the way in which the whole design profession is seen. Design has always been considered an intuitive profession where the individuals’ creativity determines the success or failure of a particular design project. Designers traditionally view any kind of system or process for designing as something that is detrimental to their work and profession.

The second front was to systemize the design process of Elephant. Elephant Strategy + Design has been growing at a brisk pace. The number of projects, diversity of projects and number of designers have been growing continuously. With this growth, we needed a strong system that would help us not only to maintain excellence in design output but also to reduce rework, reduce redundancies, make use of the accumulated knowledge and most importantly democratize and decentralize the decision-making. The issues that were before us were as follows:

• How do we formally capture the amorphous design process and use it to provide our clients the best design solutions on a sustainable basis?
• How can our capability yield better productivity?
• How do we improve design productivity?
• How can our environment support continuous improvement of the design process?
• How does our design environment have early predictors of success / failure?
  

The Co-creation Exercise
This is a process Innovation through co-creation. The objective of this process innovation was to manage the design process to deliver consistently successful results. The focus was to manage the design process across complex, global, product and brand portfolios, to organize the designers work across the process lifecycle.
This process innovation successfully informs ways in which Elephant designers convert original project brief into a design output. The process takes care of engagement with different stakeholders both internal and external during the project lifecycle, the quality and timeliness of the deliverables at each project stage and the professional evaluation of the output.

The processes defined and developed help our designers to think systematically when they conceptualize their creative artifacts. Considering all the environmental factors for a business and the context in which the design output will be used, the process supports the technical, business and human factors in a balanced manner. The process helps the design to evolve in a comprehensive manner.

The process innovation contributes in framing of the problem effectively and then carrying out the same thread throughout the project lifecycle, thereby enabling the design to enrich the environment where it will be located, and capable of ensuring the cost effectiveness of its delivery.

As a part of our process innovation, we developed the definition of total design’s project quality advancing possible parameters to describe it. Through the implementation of this process, we achieved the designed quality of our output making it essential that quality is a key element of our design process contributing to the expressive different ways our client visualize and experience design.

It is at the initial stages in the design process where perceived design opportunities are transformed, through the generation of ideas and iterations, to problem definitions and potential design solutions. The design teams establish what the project should consist of, and whether it should exist at all, in a set of recommendations for a plan of action to present to the client. Event though it is the starting point, it is the most critical point which determines the quality and usefulness of the output. Our process addresses this point very strongly. Our process gives us the flexibility to move ahead of the design brief by ascertaining its appropriateness or to go backwards and to view at the given design brief from a new perspective. This tool box developed by us as a part of our process which helps us to go back and forth creates immense value for our clients by showing them opportunities they did not visualize.

In the middle phase i.e. the analysis process, perceived problems in a specific situation are transformed, through expert analysis and synthesis of information, to objective recommendations for decision-making. In both the initial and middle phase greater insight is the key element to ensure the success of the project, or, in other words, to determine a good design. Our process helps us to bring to the fore the right insights through a rigorous analysis and to validate the hypothesis generated in the initial phase.

The third phase of realizing the design solution and to implement it is equally important. However it solely rests on the correctness of the outputs of the first two phases. The crux of the challenge here is how to convey the knowledge in a way that inspires designers and creates alignment with the given problem statement and the analysis. Our process helps the designers to achieve design exploration based on the insights. The process describes how to translate brief, research, insights and patterns into tangible outcomes. The implementation of our process gives concreteness and objectivity to the entire solution. The process serves to inspire designers, rather than predetermine their outcome.

Besides informing the quality of design, our process also takes into account administrative issues like accounts and deliveries, project management issues like time management, process management, talent management and team composition and above all the issue of knowledge management where the immense knowledge that is generated across different projects is not only documents, but is also made available to different teams for their future usage.

What was the impact?
The process innovation was implemented on May 01, 2009, on the occasion of 20’th anniversary of the establishment of Elephant Strategy + Design.

Since the implementation of the process, the employee productivity has gone up considerably. Due to the volume of work, we used to work all six days of the week with the exception of 2’nd and 5’th Saturday being the weekly in addition to Sundays as off days. Now thanks to the implemented process, we have only 5 working days. We could save roughly 4 working days in each month resulting in boosting of employee morale as well as cost savings. The employees report to work fresh on each Monday due to a 2 day off and also result in less number of employee leaves. The cost savings is achieved as the everyday establishment cost is saved for 4 days which is about 13% of the overall establishment cost.

Earlier the common scene at the design studio was that of chaos, designers working long hours, deadlines being nearly missed and so on and so forth. Now since the implementation of the process, the scene is quite different. All deadlines are honored; most of the designers (except in case of exigencies from client side) go home in time.

The decision making has improved immensely as a result of decentralization. Clear role definitions have improved the quality of the individual output; wastage of time and resources has been reduced.

In our opinion the most important impact of this process innovation is qualitative. The multiple options and new opportunities for growth and innovation that our process generates for the clients create value for them that is beyond their expectation. It helps our clients to interact with our teams in a manner that is not ambiguous and leads to effective exchange of thoughts, concepts and information as a part of the framework as against spur of the moment reactions. As the process clearly delineates expectations and deliverables the happiness quotient of our clients has gone up.

How was this different?
In the past there have been a few attempts in academic literature to document the design process. However most of these attempts have been at the tertiary level. These design process models successfully document the building blocks of the design process, but fail to summarize the implementation of these blocks and also do not address the intricacies of project management, talent management and knowledge management.

Many Indian design companies list a design process on their websites, but in very few cases it goes beyond from being a thinking model to an action model. Also most of these design processes do not tackle ground realities.

We believe it is the first time, at least in India that Elephant Strategy + Design has created a design process which at the same time successfully addresses multiple issues from both supply and demand side. The uniqueness of our process lies in the fact that it was co-created by the entire team at Elephant (design & non-design backgrounds).

What did the process achieve?

• Capability to manage/ integrate a wide variety of design disciplines
• Interface improvement between clients, project managers, business managers and designers, leading to effective implementation of projects
• Reduction of complex and costly operational practicalities
• Effective project, talent and knowledge management

The Innovation
The objective of this process innovation was to manage the design process to deliver consistently
successful results. The focus was to manage the design process across complex, global, product
and brand portfolios, to organize the designers work across the process lifecycle.

Co-creation makes it sustainable
The most interesting and noteworthy high point of our endeavor was that it was bottoms-up rather than being top-down all the way. Right after the idea and decision to create a unique Elephant Strategy + Design, Design Process, the entire staff was involved in the development.

Elephant has broadly nine kinds of teams based on their functions & skills.
Three types of Design Teams:
Communication Design, Product Design & Environment Design.
Design Research Team, Implementation Team. Business Development Team, Project Management Team, Accounts & Finance Team and Administrative Team.

The entire development happened in three phases:

Phase 1
All individuals listed their activities, correlated their activities with each other.
Thereafter they gathered in their teams to identify the task list
Based on the activities and task, they created a work flow on as-is basis
Within the workflow they identified key and critical activities

Phase 2
From the as-is basis workflow, they got down to the task of creating an ideal design process encompassing the entire project lifecycle.

For each of the key activities within the workflow they identified the input, output, resources required, supporting processes and interface with other stakeholders

Phase 3
In this phase the design teams interacted with other design teams and other department teams of the company. In these interactions the anomalies, redundancies were focused on. This phase resulted into a clear Elephant Strategy + Design, design process.

Phase 4
This was the final phase where implementation was the key. In this phases the design processes were documented, appropriate forms and records formats were created, all kind of output generated by the design teams was standardized, a clear and accessible knowledge management system was put in place.

As is evident from above, in the entire development, all the Elephant team members were involved. This in our opinion is the key to the successful implementation of the new process, change in designers’ mindset to be more organized and structured, and above all being participatory is extremely sustainable as against a top driven model.

Ashwini Deshpande, Founder Director & Principal Designer of Elephant Strategy + Design

elephantdesign.com

About Ashwini Deshpande

In the innovation economy the individual is being placed at the focus of innovation. This is a fact that not only companies but also policy makers must face. Today you need to involve citizens and businesses in the co-creation of new public policies and services to create relevant solutions and to reap the benefits of innovation.

Realizing this, the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority has taken policy making a step further by bringing it into the new age of social media. The Authority has launched a new online platform which gives the public a chance to co-create the future Danish design policy.

The online platform allows citizens, organizations and businesses to suggest ideas for the policy as part of the Authority’s review of the current design policy. The platform is open to anyone who wants to have their say on the future design policy.

To kick off the discussions on this site we have asked design institutions, design experts and companies to formulate which challenges they find most important. Everybody can participate by commenting on the challenges or by presenting ideas of how to solve the challenges.

The first part of the project runs until the end of October 2009. In this part we collect ideas and comments from the platform. Afterwards selected themes will be further discussed to formulate input to the future Danish design policy.

We would like to invite all of you to take part in the process, and if you feel inspired share your ideas or comments on www.policydesignthinking.com.

We hope that many will join and help us co-create the future Danish design policy.