Co-design Management Framework for Community Empowerment through Local Government - Design School Collaboration

Abstract

The notion of empowerment in the context of co-design is vastly studied in community architecture, community design, participatory planning, social innovation, and knowledge management. Despite the growing literature on co-design in various disciplines, there is a need for a comprehensive approach to co-design that explores different meanings and manifestations of communities that are under the influence of continuous change and transformation in urban areas. Our aim is to investigate (1) how the co-design process could be enhanced to foster community empowerment and (2) which design methods and tools could be explored to align with the paradigm shift towards a new model of co-design that aims to include biodesign, which sees nature as a co-creator and co-designer. This study proposes a new framework of community empowerment for a [re]-defined co-design management framework as an outcome of the collaboration between the local government and planning agencies and the Design School of Izmir University of Economics, Turkey. Methodological framework - derived from the Double Diamond diagram developed by the Design Council, illustrates a co-design system to integrate various actors; stakeholders (designers, local authorities, academics), community representatives (users, NGOs and civil initiatives, independent designers and artists). The findings address the opportunities to grasp the potential of co-design and generate new collaborations among actors including living organisms. This enables us to reconsider how co-design, as a knowledge management tool, can be utilized for empowering communities in urban areas, and to examine how it can be reframed for more livable urban environments. Through the construction of our framework, one of the crucial outcomes addresses the co-evolution that challenges the human-centered design paradigm and evolves it towards co-designing with living systems. Thus, the final framework becomes multi-scalar and multi-directional, and requires constant vertical and horizontal movement between, and within, various micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of knowledge interactions.