A Co-design Framework for Belfast

The Belfast Community Planning Partnership is pleased to share its Co-design Framework for Belfast.

Co-design is a specific methodology for involving residents and service users. Used in certain circumstances, it brings people with lived experience, professional expertise and public service providers together, as equal collaborators. The co-design process ensures that we learn from each other, which helps us design better programmes or solutions to make things better.

This framework provides a practical guide to working collaboratively to co-design policies, strategies and projects across the city with residents and service users.

The Framework is best viewed online using this link. However, we have also provided a printable PDF.

The origins of the Co-design Framework are rooted in the Community Planning Partnership’s (CPP) commitment to strengthening how we engage, involve and work collaboratively with partners, people and communities across the city.

The CPP created a cross-sectoral Steering Group to explore how co-design principles could enhance our community planning work, recognising the unique role of our VCSE [voluntary, community and social enterprise] organisations within community planning and in supporting effective community engagement. Together, this small steering group began unpicking the challenges and opportunities of co-design. One of the first things they discovered was the desire and ambition for greater community engagement and participation. However, perhaps not unsurprisingly, there was also a lack of clarity about what co-design meant and what is needed to make it work.

We knew we needed to develop a simple and easy to use guide that could be used by the CPP, and its partner organisations, to understand, adopt and apply co-design moving forward.

We worked with Involve and Community Places to develop the framework and, in keeping with the principles of co-design, used interactive workshops involving residents and partners to shape and inform the framework. These workshops helped clarify and identify good practice and proved invaluable on our journey. You can read the workshop reports by clicking on the links on the right of this page, or if viewing on a mobile device, scroll down below.