Postgraduate Course: Co-Creation, Workshops and Facilitation (EFIE11530)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course focuses on developing the practical skills and experience to facilitate the involvement of multiple stakeholders and end-users in the co-creation of a service through participatory processes of research, design, and management.
This course extends any prior theoretical understanding of participatory practice, by focusing upon the pragmatic challenges of facilitating participation in a range of contexts and projects. The course will provide students with concrete experience of delivering, attending, reflecting and reporting on their own and others' participatory events. |
| Course description |
This 5-week elective course, outlined below, will provide hands-on, student-led experience of facilitating co-creation through a participatory workshop or event.
Weeks 1 and 2 will introduce students to key concepts of co-creation and participatory practice, through introductory lectures, engagement with readings, and case studies of participatory methods and design workshops. Students will also be allocated groups and topics for subsequent group work in which they will plan and facilitate a co-creation workshop for their peers and other students.
In Weeks 1 and 2 students will begin preparation and planning of their co-creation workshop following a detailed brief. With support from the teaching team, groups will work collaboratively to script their workshop, determine facilitator roles, and prepare and produce any materials they require for the workshop.
In Week 3, students will have the opportunity to pilot, test and iterate aspects of their workshop and facilitation with other groups.
In Week 4, students will then run a live version of their workshop, attended by peers and other students. Workshops will be facilitated independently, and will be recorded to enable documentation, data analysis, reporting and reflection on the activity. Students will also provide feedback to each other on their experiences as participants in each other's workshops.
In Week 5, each group will present reflections and key insights gained from their workshops, and receive feedback from the teaching team and classmates. This will serve as formative assessment, in preparation for the submission of a group report, and the individual reflective essay.
Groups will remain connected throughout the course, and will be expected to collaborate between timetabled session to prepare for co-creation activities, a group presentation, and final (assessed) report.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute delivers many of its courses in hybrid mode. This means that you may have some online students joining sessions for this course. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities.
Students should be aware that:
- Classrooms used in this course will have additional technology in place: in some cases, students might not be able to sit in areas away from microphones or outside the field of view of all cameras.
- All presentations, and whole class discussions will be recorded (see the Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom policies for more details).
You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, physical keyboard, and internet access.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 30 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 6,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 6,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 8,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
The course will be assessed by means of the following components:
1) Group Activity Documentation (25%)
Continuing to work together in groups, students will be expected to comprehensively describe, collate and analyse documentation from the co-creation activities they facilitated together.
Taken together, these will form the basis of a reflective report on their work, in the form of a slide deck (max of 25 pages, submitted as a PDF). They will be expected to highlight significant insights gained from their approach. An opportunity for formative assessment will be provided to each group ahead of submission.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 2, 3
2) Individual Reflective Essay (75%)
Reflecting on their groups' activity, students will be asked individually to write a reflective essay (max. 2000 words) reflecting on the challenges, and successes of the activities they facilitated, and outline how they would improve these for a future audience. They should particularly reflect on how their choice of methods, and facilitation techniques, effectively configured meaningful participation.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 3, 4 |
| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment(s) will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
Students will receive feedback at various points during the course:
- Through peer critique and from tutors throughout timetabled sessions. Tutors will provide direct feedback on plans and preparation ahead of each event / workshop. Students themselves will reflect and feedback on the workshops they attend.
- During group presentations students and tutors will support whole-class reflection on the successes and challenges of each approach (formative feedback).
- By written feedback on their group work (summative feedback). |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Apply co-creation approaches, and their purpose and importance in inclusive and participatory service design and management.
- Organise, prepare and facilitate bespoke co-creation activities related to contemporary social, economic and data-driven challenges.
- Analyse, reflect, communicate and report upon co-creation activities clearly.
- Recognise how and when different co-creation approaches and methods can configure different forms of participation.
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Reading List
Essential:
Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider, 2018. Facilitating Workshops (Chapter 10, This is Service Design Doing). O'Reilly Media.
Christopher A. Le Dantec and Sarah Fox. 2015. Strangers at the Gate: Gaining Access, Building Rapport, and Co-Constructing Community-Based Research. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1348-1358. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675147
Yngve Dahl and Kshitij Sharma. 2022. Six Facets of Facilitation: Participatory Design Facilitators' Perspectives on Their Role and Its Realization. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 484, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502013
Chris Elsden, Ella Tallyn, and Bettina Nissen. 2020. When Do Design Workshops Work (or Not)? In Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS' 20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 245-250. https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395856
John Vines, Rachel Clarke, Peter Wright, John McCarthy, and Patrick Olivier. 2013. Configuring participation: on how we involve people in design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 429-438. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2470716
Recommended:
Stephen P. Osborne, Greta Nasi and Madeline Powell, M. Beyond co-production: value creation and public services. Public Administration.
Jakub Trischler, Timo Dietrich and Sharyn Rundle-Thiele. 2019. Co-design: from expert- to user-driven ideas in public service design. Public Management Review, 21(11), 1595-1619. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2019.1619810
Christina Harrington, Sheena Erete, and Anne Marie Piper. 2019. Deconstructing Community-Based Collaborative Design: Towards More Equitable Participatory Design Engagements. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 216 (November 2019), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359318
Yngve Dahl, Kshitij Sharma, and Dag Svanæs. 2025. Facilitation Skills in Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 802, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713658
Further:
Jesper Simonsen and Toni Robertson (Eds.). 2012. Routledge international handbook of participatory design. Routledge.
Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer. Institutional ecology, 'translations', and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. Social studies of science, 19, 3, 387-420 https://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003001
Elizabeth B. N Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers. 2014. Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign, 10(1), 5-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183
Fred Dust. 2020. Making Conversation. Harper Collins. 2020.
ISBN: 9780062933904 https://www.harpercollins.com/products/making-conversation-fred-dust?variant=32117466071074 |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
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| Keywords | Co-Creation,Participatory Design,Co-Design,Facilitation Methods,Design Workshops |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Chris Elsden
Tel:
Email: chris.elsden@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr David Murphy
Tel:
Email: dmurphy7@ed.ac.uk |
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