Discover: Gathering insights and understanding the problem space.
Define: Narrowing down to identify the key challenge to address.
Design: Exploring potential solutions.
Deliver: Implementing and testing solutions.
Impactful community engagement isn’t about doing co-design perfectly, especially when you’ve got the right mindset. It’s about engaging real people in real problems in a genuine way. Design tools and processes can help with this.
The Double Diamond is a model developed by the UK Design Council. It has two distinct phases called finding the right problem and finding the right solution. These phases allow you to spend time understanding the problem before jumping to the solution. This is further broken down into four stages:
Discover: Gathering insights and understanding the problem space.
Define: Narrowing down to identify the key challenge to address.
Design: Exploring potential solutions.
Deliver: Implementing and testing solutions.
This co-design spectrum has been adapted from the IAP2 spectrum of public participation. Community engagement can fall anywhere on this spectrum. It is important to recognise that you don’t always have to operate at the far end of “co-design” to practise effective community engagement. Co-design isn’t about striving for perfection, but about making room for genuine participation and shared decision-making where it matters most. In the face of constraints and limitations, bringing an inclusive and equitable intention and mindset to any community engagement activity can be just as valuable.