The Struggles of Co-creation - The Highs and Lows of Involving Stakeholders into the Service Design Process

This paper presents our experiences from a research project on how to co-develop new methods for idea generation within a service design practice. As an example the paper describes how service designers used two visual inquiry methods together with customers and employees in different service situations. The results show that that there is great potential in developing methods for co-design work based on design approaches. This project relies on a mindset where materials of different kinds, that can be organized and reorganized in different ways are used. This supports a way of creating knowledge that facilitates production of other results than the purely verbal. We have also realized that it requires a great amount of work to achieve a great result.