"Nothing about us without us" comes from the disability rights movement. Co-design practitioners, human-centred designers and community development workers in every sector have since taken it up. For us at The Toy Cartel, it's the most important principle behind everything we do.
It sounds simple. In practice, most organisations find it one of the hardest things to do.
What co-design really means.
A workshop, a focus group or a survey of your existing customers can all be useful. None of them is co-design on its own.
Co-design means bringing the people you're designing for into the decisions while those decisions are still open. They're there to shape what you make, before anything is fixed.
User testing checks something that already exists. Co-design shapes it before it's built, or at least before the big decisions about whether it'll work are locked in. That makes a big difference to the result. User testing tells you what's broken. Co-design helps you see why you were building the wrong thing in the first place.
Why it matters so much for accessibility.
Maybe you're designing for communities you aren't part of, like people with disability, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, older people or people with low digital literacy. Then you need co-design. It's the most reliable way to get it right.
Some things you can't fully research your way to. Being close to an experience improves every design decision, and that's hard to copy from the outside. Co-design brings out the assumptions you don't know you're making, about what's obvious, what's accessible and what's familiar.
We've seen well-funded, well-meaning design projects fail because the community they were built for was never really involved in building them. The results sat unused and the organisations were confused. The communities they were meant to serve weren't surprised at all.
What good co-design looks like.
It starts early, ideally before the brief is written, or at least before the big structural decisions are made. You don't invite people in once the building is up and ask them where they'd like the furniture.
It involves the right people. One token representative isn't enough. You want a mix of people with different relationships to what you're making, including people whose experience will challenge your assumptions.
It makes room for honest feedback. Community members, especially from groups who are used to being ignored, will often tell you what they think you want to hear unless they feel safe. Building that trust takes time and care.
It shapes decisions as well as outputs. If people only get a say on the look or the wording, after the structure, technology and logic are already decided, that's consultation. It's fine as far as it goes, but it won't change much.
The objections we hear.
"We don't have time." Co-design takes time upfront. It saves far more later on, when you're not rebuilding something that didn't work or wondering why nobody uses it.
"We don't know how to find community members." This is a real challenge, and it's one we help with. There are established, ethical ways to recruit people with lived experience that don't exploit existing client relationships or cherry-pick the easy voices.
"We've already done our research." Research tells you what people say. Co-design helps you understand what they mean, and what they need but may not have words for yet.
What it looks like at TTC.
We always start by getting to know the community you're trying to serve. That means who they are on paper, and also what using your service, product or communication is like for them day to day. Then we bring representative community members into the design process as contributors with a real say.
The result works because the right people were in the room from the start, and the people it's for helped make it.