Every product and business is different, that's why it is really valuable to get a good insight in the product or brand together with other stakeholders. Brainstorming and designing together gets all the knowledge of different disciplines and backgrounds together. By sharing the results you can bring your knowledge across, so others are up to date about your field as well and can incorporate it in the future themselves.
Sometimes the solution for a problem seems straight forward, in other cases you have no idea how to solve an issue the best way. Therefore I like to do creative sessions with the stakeholders to come up with different solutions and think out of the box.
There are many different ways to approach such a session. That's why I like to chose a method that fits the group dynamics. For instance with a group of designers you can generate an absurd question, such as "How can Superman help elderly finish an exam" instead of the normal question "How can a nurse help elderly finish their plate", to come up with more creative solutions that might do the trick in a better way. For a management team however it can be better to individually come up with some answers to the original problem statement and cluster the ideas while discussing them with the whole group.
Co-designing can be done in different groups, with other designers, stakeholders or end-users. It helps getting closer to the best possible solution, because you can incorporate all possible views from the other participants instead of only your own experience.
When co-designing with a group of designers I prefer to shortly walk through the problem, the user input and the goal of the session. After that we can come up with the ingredients necessary to create the solution. For instance when thinking about how eligible a student is for a specific study programme, you need to incorporate the grade requirements and application documents in the design. If the overview is complete I like to split the group to come up with solutions separately and discuss these afterwards to see what and how the solution is best presented. From there 1 designer can be responsible for creating the final solution.
