Co-design starter kit

The Redesigning Equality and Scientific Excellence Together (RESET) project involves seven large multidisciplinary universities from Europe. RESET will address the challenge of Gender Equality (GE) in Research Institutions, with the objective to design and implement a user-centered, impact-driven and inclusive vision of scientific excellence and to achieve a structural and cultural change in partner universities. For this purpose, RESET experiments with and develops a “co-design approach”, an innovative approach for addressing gender equality in higher education institutions. Co-design enables the RESET consortium to politically frame and sustainably implement gender and diversity-friendly practices in the work environment. Mainstreaming the co-design approach as an institutional practice for efficient gender equality policy-making and greater stakeholder engagement and support will underpin high-quality and high-impact actions.
This deliverable contains the co-design starter kit (D9.2), part of Work Package 9 – Manage RESET and ensure the quality of its implementation. The purpose of the deliverable is to introduce co-design, including its theoretical background, principles, and practices as well as to offer support for its implementation. The latter is achieved by discussing aspects relating to how to take the context into account in co-design in different contexts as well as by offering a set of tools (example methods) to use within
different co-design practices. This starter kit is based on decades of research on participatory, userand human-centered design with different computing and design disciplines. Initial empirical research has also already been conducted in RESET partner universities on contextual factors shaping co-design of gender equality, from which some empirical insights are presented.
In Part A, this starter kit contains a conceptual framework that discusses the background, principles, and practices of co-design as well as its context-sensitivity. Part B contains altogether 16 tools derived from the literature on co—design, categorized into different practices of co-design: 1) Understanding and sensitizing with the topic; 2) From insights to ideas; 3) Creating design solutions; and 4) Reflecting on and evaluating the designs. For each practice, four example tools are provided, aiming at showing versatility in the method repertoire than can be used. These are complemented with a section on considerations of context. For each method, it is emphasized that tailoring and modification can be done whenever needed. For each method, it is important to acknowledge that familiarizing with the method in more detail is always needed before its use. This document contains only a limited overview of each
method. After the tools, a set of questions with which to reflect on and prepare for the contextual aspects intermingled with co-design of gender equality are presented. This co-design starter kit is a workin-progress and closely interwoven with the ongoing work of the RESET project. It will be enriched as the project evolves during the next three years timespan.