1 What is Equity-based Co-Creation?
Targeted Skills and Competencies:
- Critical self-reflection to articulate one’s positionality and its potential impact on interactions with equity-deserving communities
- Honouring a range of worldviews (includes listening, acknowledging historical harms, unlearning harmful myths, and valuing lived experience)
- Critical allyship with equity-deserving communities (working in solidarity and collective action to identify and resist unjust structures that produce systemic inequities)
Focus: To highlight foundational principles and practices of Equity-Based Co-Creation, and become an ambassador for this knowledge within the learner’s communities or organizations.
What is Equity-based Co-Creation?
Over the last decade, co-design or co-creation has emerged as a ubiquitous research and service/systems development approach ranging from technology development to health and social system change.
Co-design, at a basic level, refers to the application of user-centric research and service/systems development approaches to solve a particular problem or challenge. However, co-design has also been described as a dynamic, creative approach to research that embraces partnership with community and focuses on systems change and improving human experience.
Equity-Based Co-Creation (EqCC) is a collaborative approach rooted in participatory action research, narrative theory, learning theories, and design thinking. It aligns with participatory action principles, emphasizing genuine collaboration with service users for positive social change. Narrative theory focuses on personal stories, providing a powerful tool for emotional connection and reflection among care providers.
Learning theory guides EqCC, emphasizing reflection and diverse perspectives. Design thinking, especially user-centred principles, involves users and providers in co-designing processes using tools like prototypes to enhance service functionality, safety, and usability.
Equity-based co-creation emphasizes valuing experiences over survey data, showcasing successful implementations, and providing an overview of the co-creation process. It stresses the goal of enhancing day-to-day experiences for both care recipients and providers, emphasizing emotional aspects through tools like emotional mapping and touchpoints.
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.g7714
The Language of Equity-based Co-Creation
We need to shift language to an asset-based approach where we don’t see people as vulnerable, we see them as bringing incredible strength to the dialogue, and we will do so much better if we’re fully inclusive.
– Gillian Mulvale, Ph.D. | Associate Professor, Health Policy and Management, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University
Co-Creation: Application of user-centric research and service or systems development approaches in order to solve a particular challenge. Co-creation has also been described as a dynamic, creative approach that embraces partnership with community and focuses on systems change and improving human experience.
Design Thinking: A process that leads to the outcome of ‘design’. Through the process of design, it can become clearer whether the life is, where the challenge is, what it is we are even designing for, and what it is that we need to do. Typically, design thinking involves six steps in a non-linear, iterative process: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, and Implement.
Experience Experts: Service users with lived experience who contribute knowledge and perspective to the co-creation process.
Inclusive Design: Design that advances accessibility and encompasses the full range of human diversity, including ability, language, culture, gender, and age. Inclusive design recognizes that we aren’t all the same; design must be usable, flexible, and customizable, among other qualities to be truly inclusive.
For further reading, check out these articles on Are you really doing codesign? and A COMPASS for Navigating Relationships in Co-Production Processes Involving Vulnerable Populations
