Being Designerly: Collaborate & Co-Create

In this series about Being Designerly, we explore ways to be more creative by thinking, feeling, and acting like a designer. In previous articles, we discussed designerly behaviors and skills such as Putting People First, Being Curious, Being Observant, Thinking Critically, Having Empathy, Advocating for Users, Working Transparently, and Communicating Visually. This one is about Collaboration.

Collaborate & Co-Create: working with others to create or achieve something

Though they seem similar, collaboration involves working together towards a common goal, while co-creation actively includes others, like customers, in the process of creation.

Collaboration

We can achieve much more, much faster, working together. It is uncommon for a single person to come up with the best solution by themselves. Gone are the days of the lone designer working on a solution by themselves. No single person or discipline has the answer to all problems, design or otherwise. It usually takes a team from different disciplines and backgrounds to solve big problems.

A multi-disciplinary team working together toward a common goal is an example of collaboration. This brings different perspectives into the creation process, from idea generation to providing feedback during the creation process. Generative AI can support collaboration if you think about people collaborating with AI tools. We’ve seen how AI tools can generate designs, logos, layouts, code, write content, do homework, and generate legal documents. But there are enough examples of it being plain wrong, which is why we should not blindly rely on them and use them as assistants in our workflow.

Co-Creation

Co-creation has evolved over time and is commonly used to describe creating with customers. At its core, co-creation involves people not usually part of the typical design and development process in the process of creation.

LEGO Ideas is my favorite example of co-creation. Customers, most often Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOL), create their own ideas for LEGO sets digitally or with LEGO bricks. They can submit those ideas to the site, and others can upvote ideas. Ideas that get selected to be produced commercially earn the original designer 1% of royalties – going by the price of LEGO sets, that is a nice amount! The recent 2023 BTS Dynamite set came to life because of a collaboration between two AFOLs and co-creation with LEGO. This co-creation also gives LEGO insight into what their fans and customers are interested in, gives them ideas to build on in the future, and a base of customers who are invested in the set because they submitted or voted for it.

The next time you are working on a project, get others involved. These could be different departments, different specialties, different backgrounds, and, where appropriate, even customers. Maybe even AI.

The next article will focus on the designerly behavior of experimenting & iterating. You should also sign up for curated content on the topic every other week at news.beingdesignerly.com. I hope these will help you, designer or not, be more creative and innovative by being designerly!