The Gap Between Good Intentions and Good Design
Most organisations that come to us care deeply about the people they serve. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that caring deeply about someone is not the same as understanding them. And understanding them — at a distance, from a briefing document, from a focus group you ran once — is not the same as designing with them.
The gap between those two things is where most well-intentioned design quietly fails. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Because a fundamental step got skipped.
What Co-Design Actually Is
Co-design means the people you’re designing for are part of the design process. Not consulted at the end. Not shown a finished product and asked if they like it. In the room, from the beginning, shaping what gets built and how.
It’s not a survey. It’s not a feedback form. It’s not a focus group where you test a concept you’ve already decided on.
It’s an ongoing working relationship where the people with lived experience of the problem are treated as the experts they are — because they are. No brief, no research report, no stakeholder interview gives you what you get from sitting alongside someone who lives with the thing you’re trying to fix.
Where the Phrase Comes From
“Nothing about us without us” is a phrase from the disability rights movement. It emerged in the 1990s as a direct challenge to a world where policies, services, and systems that affected disabled people were routinely designed, decided, and implemented without them.
The principle is simple: if a decision affects a group of people, that group should have a genuine say in making it. Not a token seat at the table. Not representation that happens to be ignored. A real, meaningful role in shaping the outcome.
It has since spread far beyond disability rights — into public health, education, urban planning, social services. Wherever decisions are made on behalf of communities, the question holds: are those communities actually in the room?
What It Looks Like in Practice
Real co-design doesn’t follow a script, but it has some consistent characteristics.
It starts early — before concepts are formed, before anyone has decided what the solution looks like. The goal at the start isn’t to test ideas, it’s to understand the problem from the inside.
It involves iteration, not presentation. You build something rough, put it in front of the people who’ll use it, watch what happens, and change it. Then do it again. The people you’re designing with aren’t there to validate your thinking — they’re there to improve it.
It respects expertise. The parent who has spent five years navigating a system, the person who communicates differently and has found ways to make themselves understood, the young person who knows exactly what it feels like when a service treats them like a case number — they know things you don’t. That knowledge is the raw material.
And it’s honest about power. Co-design doesn’t pretend everyone in the room has equal influence — that’s rarely true. But it’s transparent about how decisions get made, and it takes seriously the responsibility that comes with holding more power than the people you’re working with.
What Changes When You Do It Right
The most immediate thing is the product. Genuinely co-designed tools, services, and communications work better for the people they’re meant for. Not because of some philosophical principle, but because the people who know the most about the problem helped build the solution.
You catch things you’d never have caught otherwise. You stop building for the imaginary average user and start building for the actual range of people who’ll use what you make. You stop solving the problem you thought you had and start solving the problem that actually exists.
The second thing is trust. Communities that have been designed for — especially communities that have experienced exclusion, misrepresentation, or services that treated them as an afterthought — notice when something has been built with them rather than at them. That difference is felt.
And the third thing is sustainability. Organisations that build genuine co-design into their practice find that the feedback loops keep working. People stay engaged because they know their input shapes what happens. The relationship outlasts the project.
How to Start
You don’t have to redesign everything from scratch.
The first step is usually the simplest: find out who is most affected by what you’re working on, and invite them into the conversation earlier than you normally would. Not at the end to review the final version — earlier. At the point where what they say can still change what you build.
If you’ve never done this before, it can feel unfamiliar. You’re used to being the expert in the room. Co-design means sharing that role. It means sitting with uncertainty longer. It means changing direction when the evidence says you should.
It’s also more interesting, more honest, and — almost without exception — produces better work.
We’ve been doing this long enough to know that the organisations that build co-design into their practice don’t go back. Once you’ve seen what it produces, designing without it starts to feel like guessing.
If you want to talk about what that could look like for your organisation, we’d like to hear from you.
Jackie Streit and Jasper Streit are the founders of The Toy Cartel, an accessible design and strategic creative agency based in Sydney.