The Weaponisation of Co-Design
Excerpts from the Nadia Book:
A Continuance from “Marie, What the F*ck are you Doing?”
Why is the bureaucracy and political class so adverse to CoDesign?
The answer surely lies in the Nadia book.
#CoDesign was dumped following the #Nadia project: with the Nadia project having itself been dumped by the bureaucracy in an attempt to deflect attention from the exploding unlawful deadly RoboDebt crisis.
Perhaps in some dark corners of the bureaucracy and government, there are bureaucrats and politicians who never again want to cede or even share design direction with people with disability for fear of what might happen. Fear of radical ideas born of real-world experience. Fear of the unknown. Fear of another Nadia?
Notwithstanding the shrill political parroting of CoDesign, CoDesign mysteriously disappeared from NDIA corporate documents. Eventually the NDIA was caught out, forced to revert by the JSCNDIS. This is quite extraordinary when you think about it.
Then the NDISReview came along, marketing itself as a CoDesign exercise, when it was in fact all along a Treasury directed exercise with pre-determined outcomes, that were market-tested on how to ‘sell’ the unpalatable outcomes BEFORE the NDISReview reported.
The NDISReview fanfare included town hall tours, podcasts, and Zoom information sessions: not to CoDesign, but to tell people what had already been decided ahead of time.
And just like that, before the NDISReview was completed, the NDIS Bill was already drafted: a Bill incompatible with Human rights and with ZERO reference to CoDesign.
People would never get the opportunity to CoDesign the new legislation: of course, the government and bureaucracy had never intended that to happen.
This NDIS Bill was held secret, with certain stakeholders muzzled by NDAs. Then the bureaucracy magic'd up some sort of wet lettuce MOU saying, OK, OK, we PROMISE to do CoDesign on SOME bits.
I will continue to give this warning.
Without understanding the whole, the end-to-end, it is impossible to ‘co-design’ some bits of a complex servicing system, without causing damage to the whole.
CoDesign has been weaponised by the bureaucracy, in an attempt to control, distract and deflect: agreeing to ‘selected’ activities or areas and passing this off as CoDesign. In a complex system, this is the height of reckless incompetence.
CoDesign is the only way to understand the human experience and dimensions of risk and innovation, in complex servicing systems.
CoDesign is not about how things look, but how things work.
CoDesign is not event driven. And nor is CoDesign a pick-list of features or topics. What the NDIA parrots as CoDesign is obfuscation, confusion, and distraction. I find it very concerning, that bureaucrats and politicians parrot about CoDesign, without understanding what it is, nor apparently working with people who are experts in the field with experience.
As I wrote in the Nadia book, above all other public sector capability deficits, the lack of understanding of complex systems and the lack of understanding of the role of CoDesign in crafting policy and servicing interventions in these systems, is the greatest capability deficit and the greatest risk in public administration.
CoDesign by its very nature, challenges the status quo and the assumptions and biases through which the status quo survives.
The following are excerpts from several areas of the Nadia book dealing with CoDesign, politics and deviance. Other sections of the Nadia book go into the actual detail of the CoDesign process, the insights that were unlocked, and what was achieved. My methodology, CoDesign for AI © is also described.
All up, CoDesign is examined in over 130 pages throughout the Nadia book.
EXCERPT: CHAPTER 5: WHAT IS CO-DESIGN?
Many people ask, ‘what is co-design’. This has become somewhat of a consultant marketing buzzword, but in reality, it is not really appreciated nor practiced by most organisations. And as we’ll see, the concept of co-design has become politically weaponised by the bureaucracy and the government.
However, co-design has been around for decades, similar to the practice of concurrent engineering in the engineering field, undertaken to achieve a more holistic design through early involvement of participants, a cross-functional team approach, and the simultaneous work on different phases of product development. These three characteristics of concurrent engineering are evident throughout the Nadia project.
Yet some people and consultants would have us believe that human centred co-design is a recent trend to do with apps and websites.
The way I explain co-design in general, is through the analogy of the NASA space programs.
Throughout these most incredible episodes of human endeavour, the extreme conditions of space complex servicing systems provide insights for servicing and accessibility design innovations on earth. The fragile human is literally at the centre.
We can all remember that iconic photograph of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon. An image of sheer vulnerability and isolation. And for me, that image of Buzz Aldrin is the epitome of co-design.
A fragile human augmented and life-supported by technologies that did not exist just a few short years earlier.
How do you design something that has never been designed before? Where assumptions are upended; innovation is catalysed at the edge; belief systems and doctrine challenged.
On the moon, the astronauts are analogous to people with disability. They can’t see, hear, breathe, or move without support; and they can’t talk to anyone in real time, sometimes not at all. Indeed, digital humans are already being co-designed to assist astronauts on future Mars missions.
From such complex servicing systems, there are far reaching lessons on design, culture, politics, and leadership, to be drawn from not only the successes but also from the catastrophic disasters NASA has suffered.
Following the Challenger disaster, the Space Shuttle program was paused – not stopped – with extensive design review led by the very people who would be on the very next shuttle. The astronauts.
By the people who literally had the most at stake.
The recovery of the NASA Space Shuttle program was only possible because of the explicit direction from co-design led by the astronauts. The Challenger case study not only provides a prism through which co-design is examined, but contemporaneously reveals the devastating impact of a culture of normalised deviance. The horrific impact of a toxic culture and politics on co-design and ethics is further explored in Part VI: Culture of Bigotry and Exclusion.
I challenge people to look to these tangential domains of complex servicing systems.
When considered through this analogy, co-design can be appreciated for what it is. A strategic function. A function that informs risk in decision making. A function that specifically works to challenge assumptions and expose bias. Co-design is pivotal to ethics.
But there is indeed a much larger question as to why co-design is so anathema in government, and for that matter healthcare and access to justice.
The flat-earth digital strategies of the past twenty-five years created the devastation of confusopoly. Digital strategies that automated everything, standardised everything, and treated people like silent machines.
The human was intentionally removed from the loop. Co-design reverses all that: it brings back the human dimension and is centred on it. Examined in Chapter 15: On the Basis of Trust, we see that co-design changes everything, including changing our understanding of what it means to trust.
This was one of the great lessons from the Challenger case study. The first Shuttle re-launch following the Challenger disaster, was all about trust, because the very people who had the most at stake – the astronauts on that shuttle – had been involved in the redesign.
This Challenger extreme level of trust, is just as important to interactions between people with disability and their families with government. These interactions are life changing and can certainly be life threatening. And in every way, people with disability and their families have the most at risk and therefore the most to contribute to design.
So why would anyone believe that design by bureaucrats, who have little at stake, is inherently a more trustworthy approach over co-design led by people with disability?
I was shocked at how ferociously the bureaucracy and the political domains resisted this Copernican Moment, that co-design led by people with disability had revealed.
Quite simply, what all people really want and need is to understand and to be understood in their own context. This is a universal desire and human right across all servicing settings: disability, healthcare, and access to justice.
The experience as expressed by people with disability and their families, not bureaucrats, was the need and desire to understand and to be understood in context, in all situations.
Are these principles really that radical?
But as we will see through this book, co-design was anathema to the bureaucracy and the government. And the only explanations for this are bigotry or ignorance or vested interests. Or all of these.
And this is why human rights was seen, and must continue to be seen, as the determinant of design. Co-design is a core strategic governance function in human servicing domains. Co-design informs risk in decision making, and is elemental to an ethics framework.
Without co-design, the human is out of the loop: the most significant cause of failure in servicing systems.
Co-design is not an activity to be outsourced to consultants via periodic reference groups. Co-design is not an IT function. User testing and hackathons are not co-design.
Co-design involves designing the service in context, led by people who have the expertise and lived experience to know what is being observed.
People who have the most at risk and the most to gain. Context means in the person’s environment, whether at home, in remote settings, with people who support them, at different times during the day. Consciously documenting the end-to-end.
Witnessing the emotions and frustrations and seeking to understand what is happening and why: not only to relieve suffering but to know that these experiences drive enormous but avoidable operational cost.
In the excellent work, An Introduction to Co-Design, Ingrid Burkett the leading social designer, explores co-design as a cultural shift:
‘Co-design is not just a set of new methods and approaches to add to our toolboxes. In my experience it potentially represents a cultural shift in service provision - that is, it changes what we mean by ʻserviceʼ, and it changes the roles and relationships between providers and users.
Any radical conceptions of co-design are built around a fundamental belief in the potential for positive change in even the most dire situations, and an equal faith that people have the capacity to participate in and direct change in their lives.’
‘... co-design involves a shift in the locus of responsibility and control so that ʻclientsʼ or users of services become active partners in designing, shaping and resourcing services, rather than being passive recipients of pre-determined services.’
The words ‘active partners...rather than being passive recipients of pre-determined services’ reflect the very purpose of the UNCRPD.
Ultimately, co-design is about culture, mindset, and attitudes as necessary conditions for systematic innovation, including with the most unlikely collaborators. Co-design is the only way to understand the human experience and dimensions of risk and innovation, in complex servicing systems.
Co-design is a most significant cultural shift and challenge to the status quo and vested interest paradigms.
Whether that is at NASA or healthcare, disability services or in the application of co-design to Artificial Intelligence servicing models.
Given the horrific history of people with disability being shut out, with the unsustainable human and economic costs and systemic failures, it is unfathomable that co-design has not been adopted in response as a system-wide capability.
Far worse as we will see, following the brief Nadia period of co-design, the bigoted culture at play would cause co-design to disappear altogether.
So this makes the innovations catalysed from the Nadia period of co-design all the more important to understand.
EXCERPT: CHAPTER 18: THE NORMALISATION OF EXCLUSION
And on the question of ‘what needs to change’ so that people with disability are no longer shut out from innovation, there is also much to be learned from the examination of the influence of culture on the normalisation of deviance at NASA that led to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
A catastrophic event, decades in the making, rooted in politics, culture, design and decision making.
Deep cultural change in order to take root, requires political and philosophical change, and enduring moral courage.
And what moves human endeavour forward, whether the Space Shuttle program or large-scale social reform, is what happens when things go wrong. And what happens when long-held doctrine is challenged.
In the Challenger case, design and manufacture was heavily shaped by political influence and this resulted in the need for O-rings joining sections of the rocket boosters that had been brought together following manufacture in geographically dispersed electoral areas. It would be the O-Rings that would fail catastrophically.
Compounding the design compromises, were decision makers ignoring technical advice regarding risk to launch. The night before the Challenger launch, the engineers provided advice to NASA management that the forecast temperature in the morning was for ice and too cold for launch. This would almost certainly cause O-ring failure.
In an environment of intensifying political and budgetary criticism, the technical advice was over-ridden by NASA management which proceeded to launch, resulting in the catastrophic loss of the Space Shuttle and crew.
Following the Challenger disaster, the Space Shuttle program was paused – not stopped – with extensive design review led by the very people who would be on the very next shuttle. The astronauts.
The people who had the most at stake in this complex servicing system.
The recovery of the NASA Space Shuttle program was only possible because of the explicit direction of co-design led by the astronauts and confronting the NASA culture of the ‘normalisation of deviance’.
Diane Vaughan’s insightful examination of the Challenger disaster in the book The Challenger Launch Decision proposed that:
‘...to locate the cause of the tragedy only in production pressures is to oversimplify and, indeed, distort what happened. Other factors, which received less attention in post tragedy accounts and thus disappeared from public memory, figured importantly in the disaster.’
These other factors included sociology, culture and:
‘...how deviance in organisations is transformed into acceptable behavior’.
And the story of what happened to Nadia has been similarly distorted by a culture of deviance: a culture that normalised and continues to normalise, exclusion. An ableist patriarchal eco-chamber culture that shut-down co-design and shut-out people with disability.
Strategic change will only be possible and enduring, when people with disability are the top decision makers, designers, and value creators in their own right in every domain. Where ethics and co-design are central to governance.
And as in the case of the Space Shuttle program, where design faults were known for many years, the design faults inherent in access to servicing have likewise been known and documented for decades.
The Nadia co-design exposed these systemic design faults which not only had gone unchallenged but were accepted by the bureaucratic culture that normalised exclusion.
In both the NASA and NDIS environments, critical design faults were known, tolerated, and normalised. And the devastating consequences in both environments were predicted. The Shuttle disaster was predicted and avoidable.
The NDIS failings were also avoidable and predicted by many commentators across the disability, academic and innovation sectors, myself included.
But unlike the NASA Shuttle program which continued with co-design, the Nadia project was shut down, and those who had the most at stake were shut out.
