Co-Creation is a powerful concept: engaging broad stakeholders in a design or problem-solving process as co-designers. But where did it come from? Here’s a brief history of the idea, which remains emergent and evolving still today. (by Stephanie Gioia, Director of Consulting at XPLANE)

1. A Brief History
of Co-Creation
Co-Creation is a powerful concept: engaging broad stakeholders in a design or
problem-solving process as co-designers. But where did it come from? Here’s a
brief history of the idea, which remains emergent and evolving still today.

2. 1960-70sTrade unions in Scandinavia
extend the workplace democracy
movement into the right of
workers to co-design IT systems
that impact their job. They call this
cooperative design.

3. 1970sAmericans get interested
in the “Scandinavian
Approach” but think
“cooperative” sounds too
collectivistic, so they call it
participatory design.

4. 1971
John Heron coins the term
collaborative inquiry to
describe the importance of
researching “with” rather than
“on” people. Engaging end-
users in research and insight
gathering gains acceptance.

5. 1980sParticipatory design
extends from system
design to other fields.
Urban planners are
early adopters, calling it
collaborative placemaking
or collaborative planning.
They study the impact
of the approach, citing
improvements in efficiency,
reduced blockages, and
magnitude of goals
achieved.

6. 1988
Don Norman coins the term user-centered
design in his influential book Design of
Everyday Things. This marks a shift from
participatory design as an engineering
mindset focused on requirements and tasks
to a design mindset focused on holistic
systems and human needs.

7. 1990sUser-centered design evolves
towards human-centered design
and design thinking more broadly.
Participatory design remains
a more specific, focused strain
within these movements. Since
1990, there has been a bi-annual
Participatory Design Conference.

8. Larry Susskind founds the
Consensus Building Institute,
launching a generation of
professional negotiators
steeped in the theory of
collaborative dispute
resolution that features
co-creative activities
such as joint fact-
finding.
1993

9. 2000s
Studies performed on the outcomes
of co-creation found participants in
co-creative processes experienced
increases in individual competence,
support for the outcome, perceived
legitimacy of process, and
strengthened social networks.

10. 2000University of Michigan Professors
CK Prahalad and Venkat
Ramaswamy coin the term co-
creation in their Harvard Business
Review article “Co-Opting
Customer Competence”. They go
on to refine the concept in a series
of books and articles, initially
focusing on co-creation between
customers and enterprises
(similar to other emergent
concepts like open innovation,
collaborative innovation and
customer-led innovation).

11. 2006
Jeff Howe at Wired Magazine coins the
term “crowdsourcing”, continuing the
interest in breaking down barriers
between consumers and enterprises in
the interest of co-creation.

12. 2010In Ramaswamy’s 2010 book The
Power of Co-Creation, he devotes
a major section to co-creation
among stakeholders within an
organization, expanding the term
beyond mere customer-enterprise
value creation.

13. 2010
An international
standard on human-
centered design is ratified:
ISO 9241-210:2010. A major
principle of the standard is
“users are involved throughout
design and development.”

14. 2015Co-creation is a mainstream
term that encompasses prior
concepts such as participatory
design. Some define it
strictly as co-design between
enterprises and consumers,
others, like XPLANE, apply
co-creation to the inside of
organizations, including the
collaborative design of strategy,
process and culture.

15. What’s next?
Just as design thinking has managed to
expand the application of design principles
from typical design challenges (like
product design and interactive design) to
problem-solving in general, co-creation
is a rapidly expanding concept that
will no longer refer to just enterprise-
consumer co-design but to the co-design
process of any group of stakeholders. As
all these terms converge, one distinction
remains relevant. Methods like design
thinking, human-centered design, and
agile help us label how we answer the
question HOW do we approach design?
Co-creation answers the question WHO
designs? Even though design thinking and
co-creation have a natural affinity, they
hold different functions in describing a
design approach. This explains how there
are design firms who fervently espouse
“design thinking” but do a lot of black-
box studio concepting and then reveal
their insights and concepts to clients and
users. Likewise, fields as diverse as treaty
negotiators, city planners, and social
workers use co-creative principles without
applying a design thinking methodology.
Maintaining co-creation as a powerful
and distinct idea holds us to the standard
of always asking ourselves who is the
designer? and challenging us to broaden
our expectations of who should be
empowered to design.
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