Lost in Co-X: Interpretations of Co-design and Co-creation

In the last decade, co-design and co-creation are terms that appear widely in scientific literature, in professional magazines, websites of product development companies, design research and market research agencies and even public organisations’ reports. We have noticed that the terms are often tangled. The objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship of co-design and co-creation in the context of design and design research. We aim to make sense of the background and use of the terms to show similarities and differences between them. We review literature and discuss recent cases to demonstrate the spectrum of co-X. Our main aim is to clarify the co-terms for our design students in the rapidly evolving design research field.