A phenomenology of co-designing services: the craft of embodying, enacting and entangling design

Co-design is commonly discussed as a generic method to develop empathetic connections and understandings of people and their contexts. In this use, mastering the craft of co-design had inadvertently isolated the method from the practitioner, fragmenting its process as a series of static events or staged workshops. To counteract this occurrence, our paper 're-entangles' codesigning back into its lived and enacted contexts. We see co-designing as an embodied process of discovery and actualization, and it is an integral, on-going activity of designing services. Codesigning catalyses a transformative process in revealing and unlocking tacit knowledge, moving people along on a journey to 'make real' what proposed services might be like in the future. Codesigning plays a critical role especially when it involves the very people who are enmeshed in the realization of the proposed services itself. As such, our case study of a weekend Ordnance Survey Geovation camp, pays closer attention to how this took place and discusses the transformative process that was central to it. By taking a phenomenological perspective and building on a seminal anthropologists' work, Tim Ingold, our paper counters the limitations in service design that tends to see its process as a contained series of fixed interactions or systemized process of methods. Instead, we open it up to designing that is being and becoming, that is constantly transforming and connecting multiple entanglements.