What Co-Creation Adds to User Research

Co-creation is sometimes misunderstood as asking users to design the product. That is not its purpose. Participants are not expected to understand product architecture, interaction patterns, technical constraints or the compromises required to bring a system to market.

What they understand is their own experience. They know the habits they no longer notice, the workarounds they have developed, the situations that create uncertainty and the small decisions that shape how a product fits into daily life.

Good co-creation gives people better ways to express that knowledge. Researchers then interpret the material, and designers turn the evidence into coherent, viable solutions. It brings users into the early design conversation without transferring design responsibility to them.

Think of a mechanic who recognizes an engine problem by sound. The diagnosis may arrive before the mechanic can explain every cue behind it. Driving can work in a similar way. Familiar navigation decisions often happen quickly and habitually, without the driver consciously narrating each step.

An interview can still reveal a great deal. But when we ask people to reconstruct habitual behavior in a meeting room, we often receive a simplified account of what they believe they do. Parts of the experience remain difficult to recall, notice or put into words.

In Convivial Toolbox, Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers distinguish four forms of knowledge that are useful for understanding this research challenge:

Different kinds of knowledge require different ways of researching them. Conversation is important, but it cannot uncover all levels of knowledge on its own.

Sanders and Stappers organize generative research around three broad modes: Say, Do and Make. We sometimes use 'Create' in our own presentation language, but 'Make' is the term used in the original framework.

The three modes are complementary. Each makes a different part of experience available to the research team, and the strongest studies often combine them.

Say covers what people can tell us through interviews, discussions, surveys, diaries and other forms of self-report. It helps us understand opinions, explanations, remembered events and the reasons people can consciously articulate.

Its boundary is not dishonesty. Recall is incomplete, behavior is reconstructed after the fact, and some knowledge has never needed to become language. A fluent answer is not always a complete account of experience.

Do covers what can be observed in behavior and context. It can reveal sequences, interruptions, environmental constraints and discrepancies between what people report and what happens in practice.

Observation also changes the questions researchers can ask. Instead of relying only on a general account, we can explore a specific moment: what was happening, what the person attended to and what made a decision easy or difficult.

A participant creates a collage, map, model or rough prototype. The inexperienced interpretation is: this is what the user wants us to build. The more useful interpretation is: what decisions did this person make, and what do those decisions tell us?

Making requires people to move beyond a quick, abstract answer. They have to work with competing ideas and make some of their thinking visible. In the process, they may:

The visual quality of the result is usually irrelevant. A polished artifact can contain shallow reasoning, while a rough arrangement can reveal a precise need. Meaning does not live in the materials. It comes from the associations and explanations the participant brings to them.

This is also where professional interpretation matters. If several drivers put information directly in front of them, the conclusion is not automatically to copy that placement. The underlying need might concern visual attention, certainty or access at a particular moment. The design team must distinguish the expressed form from the experience the form represents.

Asking someone to 'design your ideal solution' sounds open and creative. In practice, it can produce surprisingly narrow answers. People may reproduce the last product they used, repeat a familiar convention or convert an immediate frustration into a feature request.

Future thinking becomes richer when it has something meaningful to build from. At UX Spot, we rarely begin by asking people to imagine the future. We first ground the research in lived situations, memories and emotional responses, then explore what mattered and why.

This principle draws on the path of expression described by Sanders and Stappers: present and past experience can provide a springboard for imagining future experience. The point is not to follow a public workshop recipe. It is to recognize that reflection prepares people to imagine beyond their first or most familiar idea.

Good co-creation begins before a workshop. Giving people time to notice aspects of their own behavior can make a familiar experience visible again. When they later explore future possibilities, they have concrete situations to think with rather than a blank sheet and a vague instruction to be innovative.

There is also no universal co-creation toolkit. The expressive language has to fit the research question, the people taking part and the experience being explored. A useful toolkit supports expression without prescribing the answer. Designing those conditions is part of the research expertise, not a matter of selecting a standard pack of workshop materials.

In-car navigation shows why this grounding matters. Navigation behavior is habitual and highly contextual. What a driver needs changes with route familiarity, traffic, interruptions, time pressure and the moment-to-moment demands of driving.

Ask someone in a meeting room how they use navigation and they will give a reasonable reconstruction. But that account cannot fully reproduce the timing, attention and trade-offs of an actual journey.

In an automotive navigation project, we first studied navigation in the context of people's real driving lives rather than immediately asking them to imagine a new interface. We did this by using a Diary Study platform specialized for China, called Recap. Recap allowed for participants to capture a range of rich, and in-the-moment contextual insights. Later reflection and generative research gave participants ways to express priorities and expectations for future navigation experiences.

The resulting creations were not treated as interface designs. They gave the design team richer evidence about what information mattered, when it mattered, where uncertainty appeared and how drivers expected navigation to support different situations.

The distinction is critical. A participant can express that information should be easier to notice at a demanding moment. A professional design team must still decide how that need should be represented across an interaction system, while accounting for safety, technology, consistency and implementation constraints.

Co-creation does not make professional expertise less important. It works because participants, researchers and designers contribute different forms of expertise to the same problem.

In practice, these roles can overlap. A design researcher may facilitate the work and later help translate its implications; a designer may contribute to the research framing. What matters is not rigid job titles, but clarity about whose experience is being expressed, how it is interpreted and who remains responsible for design decisions.

Participants bring situations, memories, habits, frustrations, workarounds, needs and aspirations. This is knowledge a design team cannot manufacture on their behalf, however experienced or empathetic the team may be.

Researchers decide how to frame the inquiry, help people express knowledge in different ways, facilitate without imposing meaning and interpret what emerges alongside other evidence. The job is not simply to collect artifacts. It is to understand what those artifacts reveal.

Designers bring interaction design, systems thinking, technical understanding, product judgment and the ability to give form to an experience. They reconcile user evidence with safety, feasibility, business goals and the behavior of the wider product or service.

Co-creation does not transfer design accountability to participants. It improves the raw material available to the design team. That clearer division of roles protects both the integrity of the research and the quality of the eventual design.

Users are not designers, and they should not have to be. Their contribution comes from something the design team cannot reproduce for them: direct expertise in their own experience.

When research gives people more than one way to express that experience, designers can work from richer evidence than opinions and feature requests alone. What people say, what they do and what they make can reveal different parts of the same reality.

The final design still depends on professional interpretation and judgment. Co-creation makes that work stronger not by handing design over to users, but by helping the team understand the experience it needs to create.

Our approach to co-creation draws on the generative design research methods described by Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers in Convivial Toolbox. We have adapted these principles through our own research practice.

• Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design, Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers, BIS Publishers, 2012.
• Co-creation and the new landscapes of design, Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers, CoDesign preprint, 2008.