"Nothing about us without us." It comes from the disability rights movement. It's been adopted by co-design practitioners, human-centred designers, and community development workers across every sector. And it's the single most important principle behind everything we do at The Toy Cartel.
It sounds simple. In practice, it's one of the hardest things for most organisations to actually do.
What co-design actually means.
Co-design is not a workshop. It's not a focus group. It's not sending a survey to your existing customers and using the results to inform your decisions.
Co-design means bringing the people you're designing for into the process of making decisions — before those decisions are locked in. Not to validate, not to test, not to confirm what you've already built. To shape.
User testing evaluates something that already exists. Co-design shapes something before it's built — or before the key decisions that will determine whether it works get locked in. The difference in outcome is significant. User testing tells you what's broken. Co-design helps you understand why the wrong thing was being built in the first place.
Why it matters especially for accessibility.
If you're designing for communities you don't personally represent — people with disability, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, older people, people with low digital literacy — co-design isn't optional. It's the most reliable path to getting it right.
There are things you can't fully research your way to. Proximity to an experience changes the quality of every design decision in ways that are difficult to replicate from the outside. The assumptions you don't know you're making — about what's obvious, what's accessible, what's familiar — are exactly the ones that co-design surfaces.
We've seen well-funded, well-intentioned design projects fail because the community they were built for wasn't genuinely involved in building them. The outputs sat unused. The organisations were confused. The communities they were meant to serve weren't surprised at all.
What genuine co-design looks like.
It starts early. Before the brief is written, if possible — or at least before the key 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. Not a token representative from a community — a genuine cross-section of people with different relationships to the thing you're making. Including people whose experience will challenge your assumptions.
It creates space for honest feedback. Community members, particularly those from groups accustomed to not being listened to, will often tell you what they think you want to hear unless the environment is genuinely safe. Building that trust takes time and care.
It shapes decisions, not just outputs. Co-design that only touches aesthetics or wording — while the fundamental structure, technology, and logic of a thing have already been decided — isn't co-design. It's a consultation process wearing co-design's clothes.
The objections we hear.
"We don't have time." Co-design takes time upfront. It saves far more time downstream — when you're not rebuilding something that didn't work, or wondering why no one is using 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 lived experience participants that don't involve exploiting existing client relationships or cherry-picking 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 that they may not yet have words for.
What it looks like at TTC.
Our co-design process always starts with understanding the community you're trying to serve — not just who they are on paper, but what their actual experience of your service, product, or communication looks like in practice. From there, we bring representative community members into the design process. Not as subjects. As contributors.
The result is design that works because the right people were in the room from the start. Not design that was made for them. Design that was made with them.