6. Co-Design and Constraints

🎯 Learning Outcomes	📍 Guiding Questions
Use co-design principles to make more relevant and context-aware design decisions Identify key constraints that shape what is possible in your training Make informed trade-offs based on context, priorities, and available resources Create opportunities for meaningful participant contribution in your design Avoid extractive or tokenistic participation practices	Who is currently shaping your training, and who should be involved? What constraints most strongly affect your design decisions? What trade-offs are you making, and why? How can participants meaningfully influence the training design? How will you make sure participants have real influence, not just provide input?

You have already analysed your learners, their context, and what they bring to the training. But understanding alone is not enough. The question now is: what do you do differently because of what you know?

Many training designs default to ideal conditions, fixed content, and one-way delivery — even when the designer knows these do not match reality. This lesson introduces co-design and constraints as lenses for making design decisions that reflect your actual situation.

Why this matters¶

Training does not happen in a vacuum. It happens inside organisations, communities, and systems with real limitations — limited time, unreliable internet, power dynamics between participants, institutional rules about what can be taught and how. If your design ignores these realities, it will break on contact with them.

Co-design is how you bring those realities into the design process itself. Rather than designing alone and hoping for the best, you involve the people who will participate in or be affected by the training. They help shape what the training will be and how it works — which topics to prioritise, how sessions are structured, what format suits the group.

Co-design

Participants help shape what the training will be and how it works. This means involving them in decisions about focus, structure, format, and priorities — not just asking for feedback after everything has been decided.

This is different from what happens within activities during the training itself. In the next lesson, you will see how learners can contribute their knowledge and experience during activities — what we call co-creation. For now, the focus is on the design process: who shapes the training, under what constraints, and with what trade-offs.

Constraints as design conditions¶

Constraints are not obstacles to work around — they are conditions to design within. Treating them as part of the brief, rather than problems to solve later, leads to more realistic and more effective training.

The constraints that matter most vary by context, but they typically fall into a few categories:

Time and scheduling — how much time learners have, when they are available, competing demands on their attention
Technology and infrastructure — internet reliability, device access, software availability, physical space
Language and communication — whether materials need translation, whether participants share a common working language, literacy levels
Institutional dynamics — who has authority over curriculum, what topics are sensitive, what approval processes exist
Power and social dynamics — relationships between participants, between participants and facilitators, between the training team and the community

What constraints are you designing within?

Look at your system map from Lesson 1. Which actors, resources, or relationships create constraints on your training? Which of these constraints have you been treating as problems to solve rather than conditions to design within?

Making trade-offs explicit¶

Every design involves trade-offs. You cannot cover everything in the time available. You cannot make every activity work for every connectivity level. You cannot give participants full control over every decision and still deliver a coherent programme.

The danger is not in making trade-offs — it is in making them invisibly, without acknowledging what you are giving up. When trade-offs are invisible, they tend to favour the designer's assumptions over the learners' realities.

A useful method: for each major design decision, write down what you chose, what you did not choose, and why. This does not need to be elaborate — a sentence for each is enough. The act of making it explicit forces you to check whether the trade-off is justified.

Trade-offs in practice

A team designing data analysis training for community health workers has three days. They originally planned to cover both spreadsheet skills and basic statistical interpretation. After mapping constraints — participants have limited computer access between sessions, and the statistical content requires spreadsheet proficiency as a foundation — they cut the statistics module entirely. They document the trade-off: "We chose depth in spreadsheets over breadth across both topics, because participants cannot practise statistics without first being confident with spreadsheets. Statistics moves to a follow-up session." The cut is painful but honest.

Designing with participants, not just for them¶

Co-design means participants have real influence over decisions that matter. This sounds straightforward, but in practice it is easy to slip into tokenistic participation — asking for input with no intention of changing anything, or offering choices that do not meaningfully affect the training.

Start by clarifying what decisions participants can actually influence. Be honest about the boundaries. If the funder has already fixed the topic, say so — and then identify where genuine choice exists. Perhaps participants can influence which aspects of the topic get the most time, what examples are used, how groups are formed, or what format the final output takes.

Then choose co-design methods that fit your constraints:

Pre-session consultations — short conversations or surveys to understand priorities and surface constraints you may have missed
Example gathering — ask participants to bring cases, problems, or questions from their own work
Feedback on drafts — share activity outlines and ask what would make them more useful
In-session adaptation — build in decision points where participants can redirect the session based on what is emerging

The key test is: can you point to a specific design decision that changed because of participant input? If not, the co-design may be more performative than substantive.

Participation is not always welcome

Not all participants want to co-design. Some are exhausted by consultation processes that never lead to change. Some have been asked to contribute their expertise for free too many times. Before inviting participation, consider whether you are offering something genuinely valuable in return — and whether the people you are asking have reason to trust the process.

Ensuring participation is meaningful¶

Meaningful participation requires more than good intentions. Check that:

Participants influence something that actually matters to them — not just minor details
Their input visibly shapes the training — they can see the connection between what they said and what was designed
The process does not extract knowledge or labour without reciprocity
You are transparent about what is and is not negotiable

If participants contribute their expertise, local knowledge, or time to your design process, they should benefit from it. This might mean access to the finished materials, acknowledgement of their contribution, or simply a training that is genuinely more useful to them because they shaped it.

Red flags: when participation becomes extractive

Watch for these patterns in your own design process:

You asked for input but had already finalised the design — the consultation was performative
Participants contributed local knowledge that improved your training, but received no credit or access to the resulting materials
You offered a choice between options that don't meaningfully differ
The participation process cost participants time or effort without a clear benefit to them

If any of these apply, revisit your co-design plan.

In practice¶

👉 Activity 7: Co-Design Plan — Map who should be involved in your design decisions, identify your key constraints, and plan how you will involve participants meaningfully.

👉 Come back to Activity 1: System Map

what to do: Add the key constraints and power dynamics you have identified in this lesson. Mark which relationships in your system create design constraints, and note any actors who should be involved in co-design but are not yet included.

Key takeaway

Constraints are not design failures — they are the design brief. A training that works within real conditions is more valuable than one that assumes ideal ones.

Before you move on¶

You should now have:

a clear picture of who is shaping your training and who else should be involved
a map of the key constraints affecting your design choices
explicit trade-offs with reasoning for each
a plan for meaningful participant involvement in your design process