Resourcing of Experience in Co-Design

Involving different people is fundamental in today’s multi-stakeholder endeavours, but the process through which people’s experiences are being resourced in co-creation has gained little attention. As rich involvement of various stakeholders is an increasingly essential skill of designers, knowledge to benefit its cultivation is expected to be highly valuable in contemporary multi-cultural design work. This paper approaches the study of the involvement of various stakeholders in design projects through a lens of resourcing experience. Building from G. H. Mead’s pragmatist theory, we devise an analytical framework for the study of articulated experience in situated interaction. We situate our exploration of resourcing of participant experience in the DTRS11 dataset covering a concept design project by a European Car Manufacturer conducting workshops in China and project meetings in both China and Scandinavia. By identifying ways in which experience is resourced in specific design interactions, the paper illustrates resourcing to be responsive, conceptual and habitual. The paper concludes by pinpointing strategic means that design teams may use in order to enable rich involvement and resourcing of experience in their interactions with co-designers.