Who’s the expert?

As co-production partners we see ourselves as facilitators supporting the experts to design exceptional services. But, who are the experts? There are two broad categories of expert: experts through lived experience and experts through professional experience.

Experts through lived experience

The lived experience of your service users is best understood by your service users. They have in-depth experience of the challenge they face. They understand the pitfalls of trying to navigate the day-to-day in the face of this challenge. Their expertise, gained through lived experience, cannot be matched, neither by data analysis nor through anthropological observation. And so, the first expert to include within service improvement is the expert through lived experience.

Experts through professional experience

The knowledge and skillset of your team together with specialists in areas of design or engineering, say, has been gained over many years. It is unfair to expect your experts through lived experience to design a solution to the challenge your service seeks to overcome without the input of experts through professional experience. Your professionals understand the constraints under which they work and they have access to cutting edge knowledge that allows them to understand the capabilities of the technology available to them. And so, the second group of experts to include within service improvement is the expert through professional experience.

Co-production facilitators

The role of co-production facilitators, together with service designers and user researchers, is to create an environment where all the experts are able to contribute their knowledge to a project equitably. This means creating safe spaces, pulling in relevant expertise at relevant points and being adept at communication to ensure all experts are able to collaborate and use the shared tools at their disposal effectively.

In a future post we will look at what co-production is vs. what it isn’t to dispel the myths that surround the sector. We will also look at a related sector that is prominent within the South American service design community, but rarely discussed outside of Spanish speaking research communities, called tecnologia social. Tecnologia social, presents another methodology for elevating expertise through lived experience to the same plane as expertise through professional experience and provides a framework for using this shared knowledge effectively to solve social and environmental challenges.