Co-Design Teams and Roles
Co-design is about bringing diverse perspectives together to create better outcomes. When addressing complex problems like unemployment, access to justice, or chronic health conditions, we need to include a wide range of people with relevant knowledge and experience. Rather than trying to get ‘everyone into the room’ at the same time; forming a ‘co-design team’ or ‘crew’ is an effective way to ensure your initiative is guided by the right mix of people.
Starting assumptions
Co-design uniquely brings together people with different kinds of knowledge and experience. Key considerations include:
The group will include diverse roles and perspectives
Team members likely haven’t worked together before
Many participants won’t have prior exposure to co-design processes
Organisations need to support team formation and compensate people who share their expertise and fulfil enabling roles.
Core structure and roles
A well-structured co-design project typically involves:
1. Core Project Team
These people are employed to work on the project day-to-day. They’re responsible for driving the project forward and maintaining its momentum. On low budget projects, there might be just one or two people leading this work as part of their professional role alongside many other responsibilities.
Two roles are essential to ensure there’s some ‘co’ and some ‘design’ in your ‘co-design’.
The Convenor (aka Facilitator, Lead or Host)
Every co-design project needs someone who can bring people together and facilitate collaboration. This person might be a formal facilitator or a natural leader who can create an environment where diverse voices are heard and valued.
Consider pairing a project lead or external facilitator with someone with lived experience as co-convenors to balance power dynamics.
The Creator (aka Designer, Maker, Storyteller)
Someone with specific design or making skills can help visualise and bring ideas to life. While every participant in co-design can be creative, an experienced designer, artist or storyteller can help to imagine, show and enact otherwise abstract ideas. Their visual, narrative or tangible artefacts will support participation and action.
2. Co-Design Team / Design Crew
This broader group includes professionals and people with lived experience. While they might not be involved daily, they participate in key workshops and some decision-making.
Co-design teams vary in shape and size. We’ve seen them work best as a consistent group of 8 to 16 people meeting at key moments during a project.
With adequate preparation and facilitation, co-designers don’t need any specific training or background to take part in a crew. They just need to be happy to share their knowledge, views and ideas with a diverse group, to build understanding and to imagine and enact alternatives.
Crucially, the team should include three main types of participant.
Lived experience representatives
People with lived or living experience of the issue or system being addressed may include:
People with personal experience of the issue/system
Family members, carers or friends
Community leaders or advocates
Professional experience representatives
People who work in a relevant role in the sector/system being intervened in may include:
Front-line staff
Service providers
System administrators
Technical specialists
Managers and decision-makers
In addition, academic researchers who rigorously study the issue/system being addressed may be invited to represent their specialist knowledge.
External perspectives
Sometimes it helps to have input from people without preconceived ideas or who don’t have a stake in the issue. Some projects benefit from having team members who can consistently provide support with creative representation or small group facilitation. These ‘outsiders’ who might be invited on to a co-design team or particular gatherings can include:
Designers, artists, graphic recorders, or other creatives
Critical thinkers who can challenge assumptions
People who can buffer power differentials or support group facilitation
‘Provocateurs’ who bring fresh perspectives
3. Enabling roles
Beyond these core participant types, several enabling roles can support your team. Some of them are likely to be on your project team, depending what core skills are needed for your initiative.
People with lived/living or professional experience on your co-design team might have the capacity to fulfil some of these roles. Others may come from your wider organisation/network or external providers who can offer guidance and resources.
Commissioner or sponsor: the person or group who initiates and funds the project. They provide the enabling resources and/or authorising environment. Whether or not they actively oversee or manage the project or sit on the co-design team, their support and understanding of co-design principles are essential for success.
Coordinator: handles logistics, scheduling, resource allocation and practical arrangements. Someone good in this role keeps track of everyone involved and everything that has happened and might happen.
Coach: provides guidance and feedback on your approach. This could be a mentor, supervisor or critical friend who helps you navigate challenging terrain, supporting the team’s strategic direction, methodological rigour, and ethical practice.
Connector or broker: helps reach and build relationships with community members and/or navigate systems and make change happen from within large organisations. They might be called an intrapreneur, insider-outsider, boundary spanner, community broker, knowledge broker or integrator.
Inquirer: questions assumptions, invites feedback and makes sense of data. This could be a researcher, analyst, evaluator or critical thinker who helps to uncover the full picture.
Carer: provides moral, social or emotional support and checks in on team/participant wellbeing. This could be a healer, therapist or peer/support worker.
4. Other Participants
People involved in specific activities across the process—what KA McKercher (2020) calls the ‘big circle’. This will involve a mix of the expertise and roles described above, as well as people who need to be informed of your work but not highly involved. Specifically targeting and recruiting other participants at relevant moments will be how you reach a wider range of people when their input is needed, e.g. through research, design, development, and testing activities.
Building your team
When forming your co-design team, consider:
Who benefits from the work?
Who might implement what’s being designed?
Who will have decision-making power?
What support will team members need?
What biases might exist?
How to build new relationships?
Remember that roles can overlap—one person might wear multiple hats, or several people might share a single role. The key is ensuring all essential functions are covered while maintaining a manageable team size.
It’s also important for people in multiple roles (e.g. a convenor or coach with lived and professional experience) to acknowledge when there are tensions between their roles and let others know when they change hats.
The size of your team and extent of their engagement might depend on your budget, since co-designers should be remunerated for their time and expertise (if their role on your co-design team isn’t already part of their paid employment).
You won’t always be able to recruit for ideal characteristics of co-designers, but if you can take them into account: inviting people who demonstrate the mindsets and principles of co-design will increase the likelihood of them working well together.
Of course, keep diversity in mind too. Where relevant and possible, ensure representation across:
Age and system experience
Gender and sexuality
Cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds
Abilities and disabilities
You can’t just assemble this diverse group then hope for the best. Success in co-design requires creating a safe and productive environment for your team, particularly through:
Clear boundaries and agreements
Transparent communication
Regular check-ins and feedback mechanisms
Priming and between-meeting support.
Closing thoughts
You can’t co-design without forming a team that represents key knowledge and experience needed for design and decision-making. With thoughtful consideration of roles and structures, you can create a team capable of tackling complex challenges and creating meaningful change.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This blog was initially published in January 2025 on emmablomkamp.com. This updated version was enhanced via discussions with participants in a recent Co-Design in Complex Systems course.
The ideas here were strongly influenced by my experience working at Innovate Change (a social innovation agency in Auckland, from 2013 to 2016). This approach to co-design teams is well described by KA McKercher in their book Beyond Sticky Notes and also adopted and shared by the Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI).
Some other sources, offering examples of how other organisations approach co-design team formation, include: NSW Health’s Agency for Clinical Innovation and ‘All of Us’; and Metro North Health’s co-design framework. See also the core roles in systemic design/innovation described by Leadbetter and Winhall and the UK Design Council.
