For Purpose Lunch & Learn
Cultivating the conditions for co-design to create meaningful impact
When: 12-1pm, 15 August 2025
Where: online
About this event
Organisations are increasingly adopting co-design to tackle complex challenges and include otherwise excluded voices in meaningful ways. For public and community organisations, this can transform relationships and lead to more sustainable outcomes. Building these capabilities requires cultural change, leadership commitment, and systems that support collaboration. What does it take to truly build the skills and conditions to create the changes the world needs?
Emma shared practical insights about how organisations can cultivate the conditions needed for co-design to flourish and create meaningful impact.
💡 Our highlights from the session:
- Cultivating conditions for co-design means starting with principles and mindsets, building skills through practice, persevering through barriers, and gradually shifting from expert-led approaches to reflective, participatory practice that grows into a wider movement.
- Emma has developed some really great tools and frameworks for understanding and developing co-design capabilities. She walked us through Shades of co-design – a framework for thinking through how we’re approaching co-design through the lenses of scale (how big), design (how wide), and ‘the co part’ (how deep).
- We all had the opportunity to assess our co-design capability using another framework Emma created - the Co-Design Maturity model. It’s such a useful tool for helping people and organisations see what co-design really takes, check their skills and readiness, and find ways to grow, so co-design can thrive and spread more widely. You can see the results of the self-assessment we completed during the session in the slides attached with this email. Feel free to share this quiz with a colleague or collaborator to spark further discussion and reflection.
About Emma
Born and raised in Aotearoa, Emma has worked in the Pacific, Europe and Asia. From her home base in the hills of Wurundjeri Country (Melbourne, Australia), Emma focuses on supporting designers, researchers, public servants and other changemakers to co-create more compassionate and equitable policies, services and programmes.
For more than a decade, Emma led award-winning strategic design and social innovation projects with public purpose organisations, following prior experience in language teaching, film production and cultural governance. An Honorary Fellow at The University of Melbourne, she has a PhD in community wellbeing and local government, and a co-edited book on the politics of cultural measurement.
About New Know How
New Know How provides training, coaching, mentoring and learning partnerships for individuals and organisations. They create safe and engaging spaces for professional development. New Know How learning programs and resources are informed by extensive experience in co-design facilitation, capability building, and community-engaged practice.
Connect with Emma:
- New Know How
- Join one of Emma’s upcoming training opportunities:
