A systematic literature review on co-design education and preparing future designers for their role in co-design

ABSTRACT

As emphasised by various researchers, the role of designers is now less about ‘designing for’ and more about ‘designing with’ users and other stakeholders. The main reason behind this shift relates to the importance of the active involvement of ‘people with lived experience’ in co-design. Now, designers are also expected to facilitate the active participation of non-designers in co-design processes. However, it is noted that the importance of co-design and the role of designers in co-design have not been widely integrated into design education. Thus, a systematic literature review is conducted to find out the necessity and prevalence of co-design education in higher education programmes and its instructional methods. This paper presents the outcomes of the review of seventeen (n = 17) studies, published between 2007 and 2021, analysed through thematic analysis via NVivo. The findings of this study shed light on the necessity, structure, and challenges of co-design education, as well as evaluation, gaps, and opportunities in this area. Specifically, the significance of motivating students to acquire the necessary mindset for co-designing, which can potentially initiate a meaningful co-design process through game-based approaches and self-learning, is underlined.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-design education
• designers’ role in co-design
• design education
• co-designing mindset

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their appreciation to the European Commission for providing support and funding to the PhD research of the corresponding author through the Erasmus+ KA2 project ‘T-CREPE’ (Textile Engineering for Co-Creation Paradigms in Education). Grant Agreement Number: 612641.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2023.2242840.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission [612641].