Co-design and the use of stories to enable empathy

The altruistic concepts of social responsibility, citizenship and sustainability are set to reframe Design Education in the 21st century from feeding consumptive markets to responding to issue driven agendas. Current thinking suggests that a way of moving towards this may be through co-creation (Sanders 2008). The new transferable skill set, seen as giving competitive edge and economic value (Design Council 2007 et all), needs to be explicitly practiced within the design curriculum. If co-creation is the new design process it requires us to change how design education communicates. If this change is effective, it could have unimaginable significance in the way our graduates approach employment and utilize their transferable skills, forming graduates for the 21st century (QAA) that can cope with change.

The following paper considers co-design from two perspectives, a research perspective and a teaching and learning perspective. The unifying thread between the two is the concern with the issue of effective change. Recommendations are made for the development of projects designed to expose communities to a new way of design thinking and action.