Building solutions with people, not just for them.
Robust and effective services are built with the people who use them, not just for them. Macaulay Consulting facilitates collaborative, human-centred design processes that bring together service users, staff and stakeholders to create solutions grounded in real experience.
Co-design is not consultation. It is a structured process of building something together, where the people most affected by a service have genuine influence over how it is shaped. Done well, it produces solutions that work in practice because the practical realities are embedded from the start. It also produces something less tangible but equally valuable: shared ownership of what comes next.
Any organisation looking to design or redesign a service where the people affected need to be part of building it.
- Health, education and human services
- Government departments and agencies designing new programs
- Community sector organisations
- Child and youth focussed services
- 'For purpose' organisations
A co-design engagement typically combines:
- Project scoping and stakeholder mapping
- Recruitment design for participants with lived experience
- Service design and redesign processes
- Community and stakeholder consultation
- Synthesis of contributions into actionable design directions
- Prototyping and testing with end users
What this looks like in practice:
- A youth strategy shaped with the young people the strategy is for
- A service redesign with the people who use the service and the staff who deliver it
- A new program designed with community members from the outset
- A team culture framework co-developed with the team
Services that carry authority.
Co-design produces services that work because they are grounded in real experience. It also produces durable relationships between organisations and the communities they serve, and surfaces insights that no desk research or quantitative survey would have generated. The strategies, programs and services that emerge carry authority and meaning because they were built with the people closest to the work.
See how Caroline helped yourtown shape a youth strategy with the young people the organisation exists to support.
Read the case study →