CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts
I wrote an article in CoDesign that was published in April 2026. The article discusses City of We, a graphic design project that resulted in co-created outcomes through shared authorship and decision-making. The project is a public-facing, large-scale visual and spatial communication system developed in Greenville, North Carolina, from 2019 to 2022. The work remains installed throughout downtown Greenville.
In the article, I situate the work within participatory design and co-design disciplines, as community-based practices center collaborative, place-based initiatives that prioritize community interests. The case study demonstrates how these practices unfold in the context of our community (Greenville, NC) and I share the methods we used in the project. They include:
- Inviting diverse co-creators
- Community & Team mapping
- Goal-setting and sharing power
- Listening sessions as liberatory collaboration
- Co-creating project directives + Collective authorship
- Co-creating design concepts + Collaborative play
- Visual notetaking and Shared decision-making
- Thematic analysis & Negotiation
- Collaborative making & material production
- Collaborative assessment & project management
These methods show that participation and co-design are not single activities added to an otherwise conventional design process. They ask community members, project partners, and researchers to collaborate across the full arc of a project, from identifying goals and mapping relationships to making, interpreting, assessing, and sustaining the work. Sharing power throughout these stages created more opportunities for community knowledge to shape the outcome, but it also required continual negotiation around authorship, expectations, ethical boundaries, resources, and decision-making. The methods reveal how trust, learning, risk, and accountability operate within community-based practice.
As I reflected on the project while writing the paper, I began to see common groupings across its methods and results. Those patterns became four analytical inquiries: communication and relationship-building, knowledge-seeking and learning, play and risk-taking, and decision-making and assessment.
Using this lens, the paper concludes with four major takeaways:
- Relational labor functions as core design work;
- Unlearning and ethical boundary-setting reshape project trajectories;
- Play can operate as an equity strategy, but does have limits; and
- Long-term assessment and participation are essential for equitable practices.
These takeaways summarize the article’s findings, but they also gave me language for understanding how the project changed my own practice.
What the project changed in my thinking?
The longer I work in community-based design, the more I see how design practices must include other types of work that are beyond the graphic design traditions of composition, typography, production, and craft. Designers working with communities must also facilitate conversations, build relationships, navigate competing needs, coordinate participation, and create conditions for shared authorship and knowledge production.
Additionally, designers who aim to create work with communities that share goals of “creating belonging,” or “community ownership and inclusion,” must also recognize that these goals are not easily assessed through short-term metrics. They require long-term relationship-building, collaborative assessment, post-project management, and stewardship after a project is officially “complete.” These skills are rarely introduced as graphic design skills, yet they are increasingly important and relevant as designers choose to work within community-based contexts.
Key Takeaways
The labor and complexity of relational work
Communication and relationship-building is complex and labor-intensive. My project involved over 30 contributors, including artists, city officials, business owners, and community members, requiring continual negotiation as goals evolved. Substantial time was devoted to conversations, follow-ups, and coordination, which often exceeded the time spent on design. This is often overlooked and undervalued as design work in the field and in education. It’s a signifcant component of community-based design.
Confronting challenges that changed the project trajectory
Developing an inclusive narrative for a community-based project is easier said than done. When we realized that layering “story” onto our intervention could do more harm than good without appropriate historical and cultural grounding, we struggled with how to proceed. We asked: How could we identify a narrative broad enough to unify the project yet specific enough to be responsible? Following Liberatory Design’s call to practice self-awareness, challenge assumptions, and avoid reproducing oppressive narratives, we paused and reconsidered our approach. Ultimately, we separated playful engagement from the narrative work, allowing each to develop responsibly as a distinct project.
Creative courage and risk
Play created low-risk conditions for participation, enabling community members to contribute ideas, set directions, and engage in collaborative making. Improvisational prompts helped shift authority away from designers, allowing participants to establish community-generated rules that shaped the visual language and implementation strategy. However, during the public-facing co-creation workshops, many participants exercised limited interpretive risk and defaulted to execution rather than reinterpretation, suggesting that the workshop did not sufficiently invite open-ended authorship. In conclusion, we experienced different degrees of creative courage and risk in co-creation activities, based on the stakes of the contributions.
Assessing impact over time
This case demonstrates that short-term assessment is not sufficient for measuring impact in community-based work grounded in equity-oriented frameworks. In City of We, collaborative assessment revealed long-term impact that was not apparent at the time of installation, including increased activity and lingering, stronger feelings of ownership and inclusion, and perceptions of cultural enrichment. These findings validated earlier project decisions to slow the process, resist quick fixes, and prioritize shared power.
What the article contributed?
Based on the analytical framework that I created while writing this article, I contributed a flexible, practice-oriented approach to integrating community-based practices into communication design. Rather than prescribing a fixed process, the framework helps designers consider how relationship-building, learning, play, decision-making, and assessment operate within the specific context of a project.
As I work with community-based practices in design, I continue to learn from the communities I design with. It is a pleasure to work with these partners and communities and I hope to continue this work as long as I’m working in this field.
More than a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, these relational and context-specific forms of design work feel increasingly important to understand, teach, and support in design.
