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

Abstract

The extension of the design domain over the last decades has shifted the focus from products to processes and opened the design process to new actors. The most applied frameworks to map the design process include several phases and techniques that can support focusing on stakeholders, 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. Based on 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 in Copenhagen. The design process is explained as it ran twice through the framework, involving various stakeholders.