Co-design workshops seek solutions to complex, multi-stakeholder issues. These ephemeral encounters bring together designers and uninitiated individuals who embark in a facilitated process that mobilizes a range of simplified design tools and methods. Despite co-design's benefits in terms of representation and acceptability, these workshops also come with limitations and often fall short of their intended goals. Proceeding from stylized facts informed by both our experience and the literature, this study investigates why co-design struggles at maintaining engagement and fails to consistently deliver innovative output regardless of the number of participants involved. Namely, we employ a model-building strategy to illuminate the main knowledge dynamics during workshops and to highlight a constrained ‘reactive expansion’ mechanism that explains known co-design's shortcomings. Implications for workshop facilitation and planning are offered in closing. • Despite its popularity, co-design comes with many downsides and shortcomings. • The difficulty to sustain engagement and to yield innovative outputs stands out. • This model-based study highlights knowledge dynamics to explain these shortcomings. • It shows a closed knowledge system that limits expansion, learning, and innovation. • The model's conditions and facilitation implications are also presented.
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