By Dr Emma Blomkamp, Jethro Sercombe, Jade Tang-Taylor and George Aye

“Is it so unusual for designers to get together and share struggles and insights in this part of the world?" asked the international guest of local hosts and partners in our debrief on the Doing Design Differently Tour.

This event series across Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand, invited design practitioners, leaders, academics and students to engage in critical and constructive conversations on the role of design in pushing back against the status quo.

Tensions between the ethics of social or participatory design and the profit imperative in an advanced capitalist economy underpinned our reflections.

Co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Greater Good Studio (USA), George Aye spoke with over 1,200 people in five cities during this three-week tour, presented by CoDesignCo and supported by local partners in Australia and Aotearoa.

Alongside workshops and conference presentations, Aye visited design studios and participated in informal gatherings. At the Sydney meet-up, a participant remarked how unusual it was for designers working in different agencies and organisations to gather so collegially.

Whether because of the impact of lockdowns, a scarcity mindset, or workload issues, hosts in other cities agreed. We don’t often get together as a professional community to share insights and strategies for overcoming common challenges.

It’s not that we’re short on things to talk about. Public and not-for-profit funders have brought numerous co-design efforts to fruition locally.

More and more, ‘co-design’ crops up as a stated requirement in government tenders and social sector job descriptions. Nearly a third of the 65 recommendations from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System explicitly mentioned co-design or co-production.

However, our small market, rigid procurement processes, and ad hoc funding dynamics make it difficult to sustain relationships and knowledge over time.

The Australian and Aotearoa design communities experience ripple effects when government priorities shift. Opportunities often rely on tightly forged interpersonal partnerships. Amidst fluctuating conditions, our peers have also experienced a recent swathe of redundancies.

Unlike the US’s expansive philanthropic scene that funds innovation, or the UK’s more collaborative public innovation ecosystem, Australia and Aotearoa’s charitable sectors incubate relatively few social design projects.

The public sector pits agencies against each other; we often compete directly for the same projects.

Design and innovation agencies sometimes invest several days of work into developing a proposal – including building and nurturing relationships in order to deliver the work – only to find the project awarded to a lesser experienced group who apparently offer better value for money.

It’s incredibly rare to see these agencies collaborating on a response, even on large pieces of work.

In contrast, British innovation providers seem more likely to collaborate, as our colleague Perrie Ballantyne observes.

Now employed by Innovation Unit Australia New Zealand, Ballantyne used to work at Nesta in the UK. Along with philanthropic organisations like Lankelly Chase and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Nesta actively worked to build the innovation ecosystem and grow the collaborative capability of providers to support social innovation across a range of contexts.

Encouraged by practice development and innovation programs, practitioners were often quite open about sharing their intellectual property and working together.

“Government departments behaved this way too,” Perrie explains, “supporting connection and collaboration across whole sectors, and partnering with organisations like Innovation Unit [and so many others] on innovation programs.”

We’re curious about how to nurture design-led innovation practice and flourishing co-design practitioners, fully aware of the very real constraints we face.

As well as being home to some of the world’s leading co-design and systems innovation practitioners, Australia and Aotearoa have a strong history of similar practices.

Our sector’s social focus aligns with community development principles like reciprocity and empowerment. Caution with jargon and further translation is needed when dealing with partners less familiar with common design terminology.

Terminologies evolve as well. While common in design circles, “co-design” remains unfamiliar to some.

With the spread of terms and methods, co-design quality can also become diluted in application. Already some people see it as little more than a buzzword or hollow promise. Shaping conversations for different audiences is an ongoing need.

Beyond current government and non-profit strongholds, corporate projects and international development work hold additional promise if co-design capabilities can be accurately conveyed.

Evolutions in participatory methods also show influences from Indigenous world views valuing collective knowledge. As approaches spread, recalling the importance of context and these First Nations’ origins matters.

If we cannot get over the push to compete with each other, we risk undermining the incredible strengths of our sector.

It is a sector in flux, characterised by distinctive geographic, economic, sociocultural and political realities.

While spreading awareness remains important, maturing Australasian co-design likely requires consolidated expertise and strategically cultivated partnerships (amid conversation over coffee or beer).

This will take time.

The passion for improving equity and justice through careful design is alive and well. Nurturing the conditions where it can thrive will take patience and collective care.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article draws on a panel discussion hosted by RMIT University’s Master of Design Futures and an email exchange with Perrie Ballantyne and Marius Foley, which built on contributions from numerous partners and participants in the 2023 Doing Design Differently Tour