Co-Design Is Everywhere. What Do We Mean By It?

By Symone Campbell, In-House Research Fellow

Co-design seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Throughout 2026, co-design has been showing up in more places across education and technology, from sessions at SXSW EDU and the ASU+GSV Summit to conversations at New York’s EdTech Week. It’s also moving beyond conference programming and into institutional expectations. In October, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) released a federal research funding opportunity that requires applicants to establish co-design partnerships with communities directly affected by their proposed solutions.

At the same time, we’ve noticed that it often evokes the air of a magic ingredient that can make a solution more effective, equitable, or responsive to the people it serves. But what do we actually mean when we talk about co-design? And are we all talking about the same thing?

What does it mean to practice co-design, rather than simply invite people to the table? Who gets to shape the questions, make decisions, and define success? And how do we know when the process is leading to better outcomes?

The field does not yet share a clear definition of what it means, what it requires, or how we know when it works. Rather than taking a firm stance or enforcing a strict definition, our work at Siegel remains curious and inquiry focused, exploring how a lens of co-design can be applied across our grantmaking. While co-design holds great promise, the next hurdle is building clearer language, stronger frameworks, and better evidence for when and how it actually leads to more effective and equitable outcomes.

The Definition Problem

Although calls for co-design are increasingly showing up across the field, there remains a major definition problem. Co-design can generally mean that people affected by a problem are treated as experts in their own lives and brought into the process through creative, hands-on methods, not just consulted after decisions have already been made. But sources diverge on depth, scale, decision-making authority, and whether co-design is being used for products, policy, services, or systems. 

Additionally, co-design often gets conflated with participatory action research, youth participatory action research, consultation, community engagement, and youth voice, (see figure 1). These approaches are related but distinct, and yet in practice the terms get used loosely.

Figure 1 Participatory Action Research: A collaborative research approach that actively involves community members as co-researchers in identifying problems, developing research questions, collecting and analyzing data, and using findings to inform action and advance social change. Youth Participatory Action Research: A form of participatory action research that positions young people as active researchers and decision-makers in investigating issues that affect their lives, generating knowledge, and developing solutions that contribute to meaningful change. Consultation: A process of seeking feedback, perspectives, or expertise from individuals or communities to inform decisions, policies, or practices, while final decision-making authority typically remains with the organization leading the process.  Community Engagement: A broad approach to involving community members in identifying priorities, sharing perspectives, informing decisions, and contributing to initiatives that affect their communities. Youth Voice: The ideas, perspectives, experiences, and contributions of young people that inform or influence decisions, policies, programs, and practices that affect their lives.

Wordsmithing the perfect definition is one thing, but the bulk of our efforts at Siegel are focused on a different kind of precision: what kind of co-design we mean, who holds power, and what decisions are actually open to being shaped.

Looking Beyond the Usual Assumptions About Co-Design

In my particular area of research, education technology (EdTech), co-design is often framed as a way to build better, more usable, and more equitable tools. But our learnings have led us to ask whether community voice is also shaping how research, practice, and policy are developed, rather than being limited to product feedback, narrative, or advocacy efforts.

Leanlab Education’s AGILE Network, for example, brings schools, educators, and EdTech companies together to research real classroom challenges and develop and validate potential solutions. Rather than waiting until a tool is ready for feedback, this model creates opportunities for educators to help shape the tool in an ongoing way and the evidence needed to understand whether a solution works.

Some of the most consequential EdTech decisions happen after a tool is designed, such as: whether it is adopted, how it is evaluated, how harms are reported, and who has the authority to revise or reject its use. Meaningful co-design raises questions about how community input continues to inform these decisions over time.

Transcend’s Rural Career-Connected Collaborative offers one example of an ongoing design process, where rural school systems and communities work to strengthen career-connected learning in their local contexts. Transcend’s emerging lessons suggest that even when a project begins with a focused goal, designing well requires looking at the broader student experience to identify where change is most needed. As communities move between research, design, and implementation, structured design kits help communities translate broad ambitions, such as internships or mentorship, into research-backed programs. Communities then adapt those ingredients to address local needs and practical considerations such as transportation, scheduling, and employer partnerships, showing how structured guidance can inform a design without determining every decision in advance.

If co-design helps shape the interface of a tool but not the conditions under which it is adopted, governed, or rejected, we may be missing some of the most important questions.

Transcend’s work in career-connected learning illustrates this. A research-backed program still needs to account for local assets, school structures, transportation, and relationships with community partners to work for students. The design challenge is not simply to create a strong model, but to understand what that model needs to look like in a particular community.

Our Questions Around Co-Design

As an inquiry-based philanthropy, we begin all of our explorations with a set of questions: 

Question 1: Who is being treated as an expert?
Are students, families, educators, workers, or communities shaping the work from the beginning, or only reacting to decisions already made?

Question 2: What power is actually being shared?
Is participation limited to feedback, or do participants have influence over problem definition, design choices, implementation, evaluation, and revision?

Question 3: What is the object of co-design?
Are people co-designing a product, a policy, a service, a learning environment, a governance process, or an entire system?

Question 4: What counts as evidence that co-design worked?
Are we measuring usability, adoption, student outcomes, belonging, trust, reduced harm, community capacity, or something else?

Question 5: What conditions make co-design possible?
What time, resources, relationships, facilitation, compensation, and institutional commitments are needed for co-design to be more than symbolic engagement?

Structuring our Exploration: Perspectives on Co-Design

Recently, we brought together grantees for a two-day intensive to explore what meaningful co-design looks like in practice, the values and principles that underpin it, and what it might take to build an ecosystem-wide theory of change.

To help ground that conversation, we surveyed practitioners working across education and technology to understand how they define co-design today, what they see as essential to doing it well, and where shared language, stronger practices, or further inquiry might be needed.

Their responses offer a starting point, not a final word. Below, we’ve summarized what we heard across three questions:

• Collaborative Partnership: Co-design is fundamentally defined as designing with users rather than for them, shifting the role of end-users from passive testers or consultants to active, influential partners throughout the entire development process.
• Early Involvement: The process requires engaging stakeholders from the very beginning to help define problems, generate ideas, and make decisions, ensuring their lived experiences, local context, and needs are integrated before key design choices are finalized.
• Integrated Expertise: Effective co-design combines the professional or technical expertise of developers with the unique lived experience of end-users, treating both as essential components to build solutions that are meaningful, contextual, and impactful.
• Empowerment and Accountability: True co-design provides users with genuine decision-making authority and ensures they see how their contributions—which should be valued and compensated—directly influence the development of products, services, or programs.

• Inclusive Collaboration: Effective co-design involves identifying and engaging key stakeholders—specifically teachers, students, and families—early and consistently. It requires leveling power dynamics to ensure those most impacted have genuine agency and influence over the solutions being developed.
• Iterative Process: Successful design relies on ongoing, cyclical feedback loops rather than a single touchpoint. This includes prototyping, observing actual user experiences, and demonstrating a willingness to redesign based on collaborative brainstorming and critical reflection.
• Authenticity and Respect: Engagement must be meaningful and honest, with clear goals and boundaries. Participants should be treated as competent experts in their own lived experiences, avoiding performative participation and ensuring their time is valued through well-planned, purposeful interactions.
• Transparency and Ownership: True co-design creates shared ownership of the end product. It involves not only listening to and integrating diverse voices but also reporting back to participants on how their contributions directly shaped the outcomes.

• Target audience and purpose: Principles should empower researchers, developers, students, teachers, families, and funders to establish shared expectations, create accountability, and set a baseline quality for co-design processes in education technology.
• Operationalizing and scaling: The field needs to move beyond superficial feedback loops toward more rigorous, high-volume co-design practices that are integrated throughout the development lifecycle rather than used as a marketing buzzword.
• Market and organizational alignment: Establishing these standards can help shift market incentives, influence investment requirements, and ensure that diverse, cross-functional teams prioritize user-centered design over purely solution-oriented development.

We’ll share more of what emerged from the convening as we continue exploring these questions with our grantees and the broader field. For now, we’re starting with what practitioners already know, where their perspectives converge, and what we still need to understand together.