Staging, co-creating and reframing: a framework to map a community-based project

The evolution and extension of the design domain over the last decades has shifted the focus from product to process, and opened the design process to new actors. The most commonly applied frameworks to map the design process, the Double Diamond and IDEO.org’s Design Thinking steps, include several phases and techniques that can support stakeholder inclusion, but they are represented as fundamentally linear processes. These models might be insufficient in the currently expanded design domain where the designer has the role of facilitator rather than expert and recursivity is essential. On the basis of a case study, this paper proposes a new design process of staging, co-creating and reframing that happens recursively over time and where framing is applied to redefine the problem based on each interaction with the stakeholders. In the case study, the framework is applied in a community building project carried out in Copenhagen. The design process is explained as it ran twice through the framework, involving various stakeholders through two workshops and a design game.