Co-Creation Workshops
Inviting the people a solution is meant to serve into the creation process itself, as active contributors who build and shape concepts alongside the team — not just react to them.
There is a world of difference between asking people what they think of your idea and building the idea together with them. The second one is co-creation.
What it is
Designing WITH people, not FOR them — and why it is a fundamentally different thing.
A co-creation workshop invites the people a solution is meant to serve — users, customers, frontline staff — into the generative process itself, as active contributors who build, modify, and reimagine concepts alongside the team. It is fundamentally different from gathering feedback or running interviews: participants are not reacting to the team’s ideas, they are helping create them. The distinction is the whole method. In research, you learn from people; in co-creation, you make with them.
This design-with (rather than design-for) stance produces two distinct payoffs. First, the solutions themselves are better grounded: because the people being served are shaping the concept directly, the output carries their real language, their mental models, and their actual priorities, rather than the team’s assumptions about them. Ideas that would never have occurred to the team — because they come from lived experience the team does not have — surface naturally when the people with that experience are building alongside you.
Second, and often underrated, co-creation builds ownership. When the people affected by a solution have helped create it, they are invested in it, they understand it from the inside, and they become advocates rather than skeptics. That shared ownership smooths the later, hardest part of innovation: adoption. A solution handed to people is resisted; a solution built with them is championed. The investment that comes from having co-created something is itself one of the method’s most valuable outputs, and it is not something you can add on later.
Design WITH people, not FOR them. See the difference.
Contribution, not reaction, is the dividing line. Toggle between the two — and see why it matters.
Toggle between design-WITH and design-FOR to see how the same people, in the same room, produce entirely different results depending on whether they are contributing or reacting — and why only contribution produces grounded insight and ownership.
When to deploy it
For making with the people a solution serves. Not for evaluating a finished idea, or when participants can’t contribute, or you won’t let them.
Use it when
- →You want solutions grounded in the real language, mental models, and priorities of the people they serve — not just the team's assumptions about them.
- →The people affected have lived experience or context the team genuinely lacks and could contribute directly.
- →Later adoption will depend on buy-in from users, customers, or frontline staff, and building ownership early will smooth it.
- →You are generating or shaping concepts — not just validating a finished one — and want the served people to help create them.
Do not lean on it when
- ×You actually need feedback on a finished concept — that is concept testing or an interview, not co-creation. Do not dress a feedback session up as co-creation.
- ×The participants lack the context to contribute meaningfully. Without enough grounding, people cannot genuinely co-create and the session produces little.
- ×You are unwilling to let participants genuinely shape the outcome. Inviting "co-creation" when decisions are already made is tokenism that erodes trust.
- ×The problem is so highly technical that participants cannot contribute directly — though they can often still shape the experience around it.
The honest limit: co-creation’s value depends entirely on genuine contribution and genuine influence. Its defining failure mode is the session that is really feedback in disguise — participants reacting rather than building, which forfeits both the grounded insight and the ownership. Its other failures are inviting people without the context to contribute, and failing to give them tangible materials to build with. Set up for real making, or do not call it co-creation.
How it works
Six moves, from recruiting the right participants to capturing the concept and the ownership it built.
Invite the right participants — the people the solution serves.
Bring in actual users, customers, or frontline staff, the people with the lived experience the solution must fit, and make sure they have enough context to contribute meaningfully. A short orientation that lowers the intimidation of "designing" pays off in richer contribution.
Set it up as making, not reacting.
Design the session around participants building, modifying, and reimagining — not approving or rejecting. The structure itself must invite contribution; if the team presents and participants respond, it has become a feedback session. This is the design decision that matters most.
Give people tangible materials to build with.
Provide concrete stuff to make with: sketching materials, cards, props, building blocks, templates, rough prototypes to modify. Tangible materials are what let non-designers actually co-create rather than just talk. Their absence is a common failure mode.
Use structured generative activities.
Run the session through activities that channel contribution — often hosting methods like Crazy 8s inside the workshop, and using Analogs & Precursors as stimulus. Structure gives every participant a way in and keeps the making productive rather than scattered.
Let participants genuinely shape the outcome.
Ensure participants' contributions actually influence the solution: their language, priorities, and ideas showing up in the output. This genuine influence is what produces the grounded insight and the ownership. Tokenistic inclusion produces neither.
Capture the output and the ownership.
Synthesize what was created — keeping participants' real language and priorities intact — and recognize the investment built. The participants who co-created are now advocates. Both the grounded concept and the ownership are deliverables of the session.
Best practices
What good looks like — and the mistakes that turn co-creation into feedback in disguise.
When it goes well
- ✓Participants genuinely shape the solution rather than approving or rejecting it, and their language and priorities show up in the output.
- ✓The right people are in the room — those the solution serves — with enough context to contribute.
- ✓People are given tangible materials to build with, so non-designers can make, not just talk.
- ✓Adoption is eased downstream because the people affected helped build it — they arrive as advocates.
- ✓The session is structured for contribution (often hosting activities like Crazy 8s), keeping the making productive.
The mistakes, and how to avoid them
Running a feedback session disguised as co-creation.
The defining failure: participants react to the team's finished idea rather than build with the team. Structure the session so people genuinely contribute and shape the outcome — presenting a finished concept at any point is the tell that it has become feedback.
Inviting participants who lack the context to contribute.
People without enough grounding cannot meaningfully co-create. Choose participants with the relevant lived experience and give them the context they need — a short warm-up that frames the space without anchoring them to the team's existing thinking.
Failing to give people tangible materials to build with.
Without concrete stuff to make with, non-designers default to talking, and the session loses its generative power. Prepare real materials in advance: sketch supplies, cards, props, templates, rough prototypes. The materials are what make co-creation possible.
Tokenistic inclusion.
Inviting 'co-creation' when the decisions are already made is worse than not asking — it erodes trust and is worse than a straightforward feedback session. Only co-create if participants can genuinely influence the result.
Losing participants' real language in synthesis.
The grounded insight lives in how participants actually talk and prioritize. Preserve their language and framing rather than translating it into the team's. Generic summary is exactly what co-creation exists to get past.
Logistics
Recruit the right people, prepare real materials, and structure the session for making — not presenting.
Co-creation works best with a cross-functional group: the people who will use or be affected by the solution, alongside the team building it. Recruit participants with real lived experience, and give them a short orientation that provides enough context to contribute without anchoring them to the team’s existing thinking. A warm-up that lowers the intimidation of “designing” pays off in richer contribution.
Prepare tangible making materials in advance
The single most important logistical act. Have concrete materials ready — sketch supplies, cards, props, building kits, templates, rough prototypes to modify — so participants can build rather than just discuss. The materials are what make co-creation possible for non-designers; their absence is the most common failure mode.
Design the session as a sequence of generative activities
Structure the workshop around activities that channel contribution. Co-creation sessions commonly host methods like Crazy 8s inside them, and use Analogs & Precursors as stimulus material. A good structure gives every participant a way in and keeps energy on making, not discussing.
Separate surfacing from presenting
Get participants contributing before anyone on the team presents any direction. The moment the team presents a finished idea, the session risks becoming feedback. The structure should invite participants to build from their own experience, not react to the team's.
Facilitate for contribution, protect quieter voices
The facilitator's job is to draw out genuine input from everyone — not let the team or the loudest participant dominate. Techniques that ensure individual contribution before group discussion (as in Crazy 8s) help every participant actually shape the output.
Plan to honor the contributions afterward
Decide in advance how participants' contributions will be captured, carried into the solution, and acknowledged. Nothing erodes co-creation's ownership benefit faster than people seeing their input ignored. Common formats include in-person workshops with physical materials and remote sessions on a shared digital canvas — named as common examples, not endorsements.
AI and this method
AI can help run the workshop and synthesize what comes out of it. It cannot be the people in the room — or manufacture the ownership they build.
Toggle between modes to see where AI genuinely assists a co-creation session — and the two things it fundamentally cannot supply: real participation and real ownership.
In-depth example
The same problem. Two approaches — one surfaces what the team couldn’t know, one misses it entirely.
A health system redesigning a frustrating chronic-care programme. The team could design a fix and ask for feedback — or design WITH the patients and frontline nurses who live the experience. Toggle between the traditional approach and a hypothetical AI-first approach to see what each produces, and what each misses.
How the workshop ran
The team ran a genuine co-creation workshop — inviting real patients and frontline nurses, the people who live the programme, as active contributors. Crucially, the session was structured for making, not reacting. Participants were not shown a finished redesign to approve; they were given tangible materials — journey templates, cards, sketching supplies, rough concepts to modify — and built and reshaped the experience alongside the team.
The session began with a short orientation: enough context for participants to contribute as makers, not enough finished thinking to anchor them to the team’s assumptions. Then the building started — from both sides of the table at once.
What the workshop produced that the team alone couldn’t have
The waiting-room check-in — which the team considered a trivial administrative step — was the most stressful moment in the entire patient journey.
The team had designed around clinical outcomes. Patients reframed a "minor" administrative step as the emotional crux. It showed up in their exact language: "that moment is when I feel most like a number."
A scheduling adjustment the team had designed as a workaround would have created three new handoff failures that the clinical team knew about but couldn't surface from the outside.
Nurses contributed specific operational knowledge the designers would never have known to ask about. The workable fix came from them: a change the team's design had overlooked entirely.
The language the eventual solution used to communicate with patients came directly from how patients described the programme in their own words during the session.
The grounded texture — specific, surprising, in people's own words — is exactly what a feedback session could not have produced. It came from participants building with the team, not reacting to the team's framing.
The outcome — and the ownership that came with it
The redesigned programme was grounded in ways a team-led design followed by a feedback session could not have produced: specific to these patients’ actual priorities, shaped by nurses’ operational knowledge, and expressed in the language the served people actually use.
And something else happened that mattered as much as the concept: the patients and nurses who co-created it became its advocates. Having helped build the redesign, they were invested in it and understood it from the inside. When it came to rollout — the hardest part of any change — the people affected were already champions rather than skeptics.
Designing WITH the served people produced both a better-grounded solution and the ownership that carried it into practice. Those two things came together, and neither was available the other way.
Frameworks
Where Co-Creation Workshops show up.
A generative, design-with method, co-creation maps to the develop-and-ideate moments of frameworks: where solutions are created with the people they serve, before committing to prototype or build.
Related methods
What to pair with Co-Creation Workshops.
Sources & further reading
The work behind this method.
Convivial Toolbox
Liz Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers (2012)
The definitive source for generative co-creation and participatory design. Sanders and Stappers' framework distinguishes between designing FOR (expert-led, user as subject), designing WITH (collaborative, user as partner), and designing BY (user-led), and makes the case for why the design-with stance produces both better-grounded solutions and the shared ownership that eases adoption. Their treatment of generative tools — the tangible materials that enable non-designers to contribute as makers — directly underpins the method's logistics requirements.
Gamestorming
Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo (2010)
For collaborative workshop activities that channel group contribution. Gray, Brown, and Macanufo's catalogue of generative activities — many of which work well inside a co-creation session — provides the structural vocabulary for running sessions that produce genuine making rather than discussion. Their treatment of group dynamics and facilitation for divergence is directly relevant to the co-creation facilitator's job of ensuring everyone contributes.
This Is Service Design Doing
Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider (2018)
For co-creation in service design practice. Stickdorn et al.'s account of co-creation as a core service design method — alongside the practical tools and facilitation approaches that make it work in real organizational settings — is the most comprehensive practical guide to the method as applied in service contexts. Their emphasis on involving frontline staff alongside customers as co-creators reflects the method's full scope.