Introduction

When we first gathered as a team to construct the Creative Citizen project proposal, the terms co-production, co-creation and co-design were new to several round the table. The team's designers, for whom this was a well-understood way of working in partnership with individuals and communities to design a new building, service or product, initially brought these concepts forward. Other team members were familiar with the approach from working on community arts and media projects. But for some the approach was new and while it raised questions about objectivity in research, along with some ethical issues, we agreed that co-production would be fundamental to the team's work.

An approach based upon co-production felt right because creative citizenship involves shared goals and collaborative methods. We wanted to understand the different forms, meanings and value of civic creativity, but we also wanted to test ways of growing the potential of creative citizens. Co-production allowed us to work in partnership with communities on creative projects useful to them, whilst also contributing to the research team's insights gained through other methods, including interviews, observation, textual analysis and surveys. This range of methods also had the merit of drawing upon the research traditions of a multidisciplinary group. By focusing on the mutual benefits of co-production, we were responding to ‘a criticism that research conducted in communities often fails to meaningfully include communities in its design and undertaking’ (Durose et al, 2007).

The literature in design has much to say about co-production, co-design and co-creation, but surprisingly little to say about the perspectives of participants and the communities themselves (Durham Community Research Team, 2011). In light of this, we present here a series of informal conversations, articulating the views of our community partners or ‘creative citizens’ in their role as co-producers of the project. These conversations highlight various methodological and practical factors that helped or hindered them through the creative process and point to ways in which academic researchers might better support their community partners in future.

Terms of engagement

During the research we used the terms co-creation, co-design and co-production interchangeably. In the literature, co-creation usually refers to collective creativity in general, co-design to collective creativity as applied to the design process (Sanders and Stappers, 2008) and co-production to citizens playing an active role in producing goods and services of consequence to them (Ostrom, 1996).