What Does Genuine Co-Design Actually Look Like in Practice?
By the Upturn Communities Team · February 2025
‘Co-design’ has become one of the most overused — and least understood — phrases in the social sector. Organisations that convene a single focus group before launching a programme they had already designed in a boardroom are claiming co-design. Statutory bodies that share a draft consultation document and invite responses are claiming co-design. At Upturn, after more than 20 years of genuine community engagement, we think this matters — and that the difference between real and performative co-design is not just semantic. It is the difference between programmes that work and programmes that don’t.
What Co-Design Is Not
Co-design is not consultation. Consultation is what you do when you’ve already decided the broad shape of what you’re going to do and you want to check if the community has any obvious objections. It is a fundamentally extractive process — communities give information, and then organisations go away and do something with it that the community may never see.
Co-design is also not the same as involving community members in delivery. Many programmes now employ ‘community champions’ or ‘peer navigators’ to help deliver services. This is valuable — but it is not co-design. The design has already happened. The community is being asked to implement, not to shape.
What Co-Design Actually Requires
Genuine co-design requires four things that are genuinely difficult and genuinely uncomfortable for many organisations:
- The courage to start without the answer. Real co-design means entering a community with a question, not a solution. This requires funders and commissioners who are willing to accept that the final programme may look quite different from the one they initially envisaged.
- The time to do it properly. Co-design cannot be rushed. Building the trust required for community members to share their real views — particularly in communities that have been let down before — takes months, not days.
- The humility to follow where the community leads. This is perhaps the hardest requirement. When community members identify priorities that differ from organisational priorities, genuine co-design means taking that seriously — even when it is inconvenient.
- The infrastructure to sustain participation. Co-design is not a one-off event. Sustaining community involvement through the design, delivery and evaluation of a programme requires dedicated resource, genuine relationship investment and mechanisms for ongoing feedback and adaptation.
What We Have Learned at Upturn
Our Limehurst Village programme — which created 30 new business start-ups within a single community — began with six months of listening before a single pound was spent on delivery. Our Cheshire Enterprise Start-Up programme involved 20 partner organisations, but the programme design was shaped primarily by what the people we sought to serve told us they actually needed.
In both cases, the programme that emerged looked quite different from what any single organisation would have designed in isolation. In both cases, the outcomes significantly exceeded what similar, top-down programmes had achieved in the same communities.
We are not claiming we always get this right. Co-design is a practice, not a destination — and we continue to learn. But we are certain that the effort is worth it. Communities are not passive recipients of support — they are active co-authors of the change they seek. Our job is to create the conditions in which that authorship is possible.
