Integrating Theory in Co-design: An Abductive Approach

Abstract

Co-design empowers people, giving them a voice in social marketing program design; however, approaches have mostly excluded expert knowledge. An abductive approach to co-design allows for inclusion of expert knowledge, providing theoretical guidance while simultaneously investigating user views and ideas extending understanding beyond known effective approaches. We use the seven-step co-design framework and outline how an abductive inference can be applied to co-design. Social cognitive theory constructs were integrated into the seven-step co-design process. The abductive approach to co-design was tested in two co-design sessions involving 40 participants. Findings demonstrate that theory can be successfully integrated into the seven-step co-design process through utilization of theory-mapped activity cards. This article provides guidance on how theory can be incorporated into ideation and insight generation. Limitations and future research recommendations are provided.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 67 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.