Assessment of the co-creative process

Co-creation in Design is a multi-disciplinary process where co-designers are not only trained professionals from different disciplines, but also members from the community with whom the co-design project is focused. Handling such multi-disciplinary, multi-personality and multi-cultural situations requires personal and professional development through reflective practice to understand one’s own experience. This technique has been traditionally called ‘the act of becoming aware’ (Schön, 1983). Experts in psychology, systems thinking, western and eastern medicine and design education were invited to share knowledge during workshops and a consequent review of inter-disciplinary literature resulted in a list of ‘inner values’, where the anticipation was that, when these inner values exist in a co-design team, they can lead to harmonious working and co-owned decisions during the co-design process (Vyas et.al., 2012) The inner values were then clearly defined using the inter- disciplinary literature and literature from positive psychology was used to convert the conceptual inner values into a practical research framework. This paper describes the application of the framework for research to generate empirical evidence that justifies the role and utility of the ‘inner values’ in the co-design process.