Facilitating co-design in healthcare: a collaborative autoethnography of personalities, power, and competing priorities
Evonne Miller, Carrie Hayter, Helen Manchester · CoDesign · 2025
This collective autoethnography documents the experiences of co-design facilitators, exploring the challenges, tensions, priorities, and practices encountered in the field. While co-design is celebrated for its ability to democratise design processes and engage marginalised communities, the facilitator experience is underexplored. Our study adopts a three person collaborative autoethnography (CAE) approach. It reveals how CAE can support facilitators to affectively explore their experiences. In this case the process illuminated issues of privilege, power and positionality, and how these elements intersect with the realities of representation and marginalisation within co-design process.