The Co-Design Canvas: Structuring Collective Intelligence in Civic Design
Breaking Silos: A Framework for Inclusive and Adaptive Co-Design
Civic Design is rooted in the principle that transformation processes should be open to community participation as early as possible. It is not just about designing solutions, but about creating the conditions for collective intelligence to emerge, leading to inclusive, diverse, and viable proposals. Within this framework, the Co-Design Canvas has become a fundamental tool for structuring the co-creation phase in participatory and social innovation projects.
This article explores the Co-Design Canvas, an evolution within the Civic Design Toolkit, designed to organise and articulate participatory design processes effectively, facilitating dialogue among diverse actors and preventing the confrontational dynamics that often limit creativity and consensus.
A Circular Approach to Civic Design
Before examining the Co-Design Canvas, it is essential to understand the broader framework in which it operates: the circular process of Civic Design. Unlike linear approaches, where design occurs at a specific stage, Civic Design proposes a continuous process, where each phase informs and shapes the next. This process is structured into four macro-phases:
Situate: Identifying the context and mapping relevant stakeholders.
Socialise: Building trust and fostering dialogue to ensure diverse perspectives.
Co-Design: Generating concrete proposals through collective intelligence.
Implement: Bringing developed solutions into practice and evaluating their impact.
The Co-Design Canvas is central to the third macro-phase, providing a structured method to enable multiple actors to collaborate in defining proposals. However, as practical experience shows, an effective co-design process heavily depends on what happens before this phase, particularly in how trust is built and challenges are refined.
The Co-Design Canvas: A Framework for Co-Creation
The Co-Design Canvas is structured into three key phases – Catalyse, Deploy, and Synthesise – each with three essential actions. Unlike traditional approaches that work with a single, fixed group of designers, this framework is designed for open and dynamic processes, allowing participants to enter and exit at different stages while maintaining coherence.
1. Catalyse: Establishing Common Ground
This first phase focuses on setting the foundation for co-creation. It involves:
Analysing the problem: Ensuring the issue being addressed is well-defined, avoiding incorrect assumptions.
Activating exchange: Encouraging interaction among participants, fostering trust and constructive dialogue.
Identifying scenarios: Exploring opportunities and potential directions before narrowing down to specific solutions.
A crucial aspect of this phase is recognising that we are not working with a single, fixed group, but with a fluid and evolving network. This means that processes must be designed to allow for the entry and exit of participants, ensuring that new voices can integrate without feeling excluded or disconnected.
2. Deploy: Expanding Creativity and Exploring Possibilities
Here, collective intelligence begins to manifest more clearly. This phase involves:
Multiplying ideas: Encouraging and exploring multiple solutions without early constraints.
Enabling new scenarios: Experimenting with different ways to visualise and structure proposals.
Blending elements: Integrating diverse perspectives to create more robust solutions.
A challenge in this phase is ensuring that the process does not become a battleground for pre-defined positions. In many participatory initiatives, actors enter with fixed ideas, seeking validation rather than engagement in genuine co-creation. To counteract this, it is essential to create space for experimentation, ensuring that proposals are not prematurely assessed through a simple majority vote or selection process.
3. Synthesise: Refining and Converging Proposals
In the final phase, the ideas generated are structured into concrete solutions:
Selecting proposals: Identifying the most viable and relevant ones.
Reducing elements: Streamlining proposals to make them more actionable.
Finalising the proposal: Establishing a clear plan for implementation.
It is critical to ensure that this phase does not turn into a mere voting exercise. Civic Design does not function by selecting the most popular idea; rather, it seeks to balance situated knowledge and specialised knowledge to produce a well-rounded, meaningful solution.
How the Co-Design Canvas Differs from Other Participatory Approaches
Unlike traditional design or consultation approaches, the Co-Design Canvas:
Is not limited to a single workshop → It unfolds across multiple spaces and moments.
Does not prioritise competition between ideas → It fosters collaboration and consensus-building.
Is not a rigid framework → It adapts to different contexts and allows flexible participation.
Does not rely solely on expert facilitators → It encourages active roles for participants in facilitation and synthesis.
Beyond Co-Design: Shaping a Culture of Collaboration
The Co-Design Canvas is not just a methodology; it represents a shift in the way communities engage in shaping their environments. For collective intelligence to emerge, it is necessary to move beyond rigid structures and embrace processes as living systems, where relationships and trust are as vital as technical expertise.
Ultimately, the challenge is not merely to design effective solutions but to design processes that enable the best solutions to emerge organically. This requires fostering trust, encouraging experimentation, and avoiding a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to decision-making.
Civic Design is not simply about implementing participatory methodologies. It is about reshaping the way we build together, ensuring that communities are true co-creators rather than passive recipients of pre-determined solutions.