New methodologies for facilitating meaningful citizen engagement have become increasingly important in a world in which many of the responses to the critical public policy problems we face need to be co-created with citizens and stakeholders. This chapter focuses on the growing academic and practice-based interest in co-design and assesses its contribution to social progress. It argues that co-design has an essential role to play in building trust with citizens and stakeholders, eliciting knowledge of policy and delivery problems that public organisations do not possess, and monitoring and supporting the needs and aspirations of target groups over time. However, the success of co-design is all in the doing. Done badly, it can destroy trust systems; done well, it can help solve policy and delivery problems, stabilise turbulent lives and improve life chances.

The chapter aims to provide an understanding of the emergence and development of the co-design approach and associated methods, the principles underpinning it, and the ingredients of better practice. It will draw on both academic and practice-based understandings. Both of the authors of this chapter have long-standing experience working on co-design interventions in both developed and developing contexts. Certain of these interventions will be used to illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the approach.

What is co-design?

As Box 13.1 illustrates, there is nothing new about the use of design thinking in the public sector. For example, the Design Council, formerly the Council of Industrial Design, was established by Winston Churchill's wartime coalition government in 1944 in Britain ‘to champion great design that improves lives and makes things better’. However, what does appear to be new is the multidisciplinary nature of its recent development. Co-design is now a hybrid concept that draws on:

• • product design thinking, where design professionals seek to empower and guide users to solve design problems and refine existing products or invent new ones (see Buchanan, 2001; Heskett, 2002; Brown, 2009; Martin, 2009; Verganti, 2009);