Scaling Up Co-Design research and practice: building community-academic capacity and extending reach

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Co-design, the direct engagement of all stakeholders in design activities for the purpose of addressing complex problems, is seen as a way for supporting and enhancing collective creativity and leading to better, more sustainable solutions. Co-design is also becoming an important theme in community research and within community-academic partnerships. The summit organized by the AHRC-led Connected Communities program in July 2012 highlighted the need to tackle the theme of 'community engagement in and with research'. Within this context, the co-design and co-delivery of research and practice in community-academic partnerships is increasingly seen as a valuable paradigm for tackling complex social problems based on the principles of shared vision, equitable involvement, ownership and trust, capacity building and relevance. Despite their differences, those involved (community groups, community organisations and academics) recognize that through their partnership and interconnections they can create new opportunities for innovation and build their ability to identify and solve complex issues that would not have been possible to do alone. However this is not a trivial task. It requires the development of a shared vision, equitable involvement and trust, and overcoming limitations in resources, but also differences in culture, terminology/language used and methodology/practice. This challenge sets the scene for this project. The project proposes and reflects on a process for co-designing research in community-academic partnerships based on set of co-creative techniques that we call 'Design by Consensus'. The process is based on 'role playing' and collaborative visioning techniques. The aim of the proposed process is to unleash and build upon the intrinsic capacities of communities, community organizations and academic institutions in order to form a common research vision, helping scale up their practice and extend their reach. This process will result to the following outputs: - the development of a visionary code of practice/framework for community-academic co-creation and co-delivery of research using a set of shared principles; - the specification of research agendas that can help community-academic partnerships build their capacity using their existing assets and extend their reach and practice; - the production of a 'sketchbook/notebook of reflections' that aims to visually record reflections but also emotions for the proposed process, community-academic partnership and their outputs. The above outputs set the foundation for the co-delivery of research in phase 2.