‘Co-Creation’ is On Everyone’s Lips – Designers’ Perception of Opportunities For and Barriers To Co-Creation in Product Development Organizations

Other conference contribution, 2022

Co-creation, aimed at encouraging users to become active partners throughout the development process, has been widely discussed in academia for the last 10-15 years as a strategy for sustainable design of products that fulfil users’ needs and enhance users’ experience of future products. However, despite the fact that universities have undertaken to educate future designers on methods and tools for co-creation with users, we emphasize that there is still a noticeable gap between theory and practice, as designers’ opportunities for incorporating co-creation activities in product development organizations remain limited. The aim of this study, consisting of twelve semi-structured, in-depth interviews with design practitioners from Swedish industry, was to create a deeper understanding of the extent to which designers can and do actively involve users in the design process in industrial organizations. While we found that designers were interested and willing to work in a more user-centered way, there was no evidence of co-creation with users. The companies’ marketing departments were mainly responsible for customer/user contact, identifying and communicating user/customer requirements by means of traditional marketing methods. Hence direct communication between designers and users was rarely supported. Moreover, the informants often experienced a strong reluctance from the marketing department to provide them with necessary contacts, as this might interfere with their relationship with the customer. The barriers to accessing users were even more pronounced for designers in consultancy firms, where the customer functioned as the link to the market and frequently declined to allocate resources to user studies, arguing that they already possessed the necessary knowledge or that such studies were too costly. Consequently, irrespective of intra- or inter-organizational settings, designers’ ability to access users often depended on individual motivation and initiatives rather than organizational factors.