Developing metrics to assess technology-enabled creative co-design sessions

Users, customers and clients are playing an increasingly important role in the design process as part of recent trends towards ‘co-creation’ and ‘co-design’. Co-design sessions seem to be an important part of the co-design process but can be challenging for designers, for whom collaborating with people not trained in design is a new activity. There are a number of tools and approaches that might help overcome such challenges but to evaluate these tools we need some performance metrics for co-design sessions. This paper reports on the development of a novel set of quantitative metrics that can be used to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of co- design sessions. Building on existing metrics found in the academic literature, the new metrics cover activities such as idea generation, idea filtering, and progress on project tasks. Future work will see these metrics applied to real-life case studies as part of the SPARK project (www.spark- project.net).