The AC-DC* Project

A PhD Research Programme | University of Queensland | 2025–2028

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AC-DC (Advancing Co-Design Clarity) is a PhD research project at the University of Queensland that sits at the intersection of psychology, design, and health research. The project examines how co-design methods support collaboration and innovation and develops and tests theory-informed tools that help make collaborative processes clearer and methods easier to use in practice

image: authors own sketch notes

What is Co-Design in Health Research?

Co-design refers to collaborative approaches that bring together patients, practitioners, researchers, and communities to help shape health services and research. Rather than designing solutions for people, co-design aims to design with them, drawing on different forms of expertise and lived experience.

In health research, co-design is increasingly used for several reasons. Some of these are to:

• Improve legitimacy by ensuring decisions are informed by lived experience
• Reduce research waste by aligning research with real needs and priorities
• Support innovation by bringing diverse perspectives into problem-solving
• Improve implementation by building shared ownership of solutions

Over the past two decades these motivations have contributed to rapid growth in co-design across health systems. Funding bodies increasingly encourage or require participatory approaches, and the number of co-design projects and publications has expanded significantly.

Despite this growth, there remains limited clarity about how co-design actually works in practice. Part of this conceptual ambiguity stems from the fact that co-design is not a single method but an umbrella term encompassing many different traditions, frameworks, and workshop activities.

The aim of this research is to bring greater clarity to the field by examining how different co-design methods are used in practice and by developing psychologically informed, theory-driven approaches to understanding and supporting the group processes that shape collaboration in health research.

*(It’s a working title that I hope is memorable!)

The Research Problem

Recent mapping efforts, including the European Health CASCADE programme, have catalogued hundreds of co-design activities and methods across the literature. While this work has improved visibility of the field, it also highlights a persistent challenge.

Many co-design studies describe the methods used only briefly, providing limited detail about how group interactions are structured. Without clearer specification of these social and procedural elements, it becomes difficult to compare studies or accumulate knowledge about what works and why.

In short, the field contains many methods but relatively little explanation of the mechanisms through which those methods shape collaboration and outcomes.

The Central Idea

This project approaches co-design methods as structured configurations of tasks, roles, and interactions that organise how groups work together.

Drawing on the Social Identity Approach in social and organisational psychology, the research examines how methods influence group processes such as:

• trust and engagement
• participation and voice
• influence and legitimacy
• creative problem solving

The central proposition is simple:

Method design structures group processes → Group processes shape participation → Participation influences creative and social outcomes.

By making these relationships explicit, the project aims to strengthen the methodological foundations of co-design in health research.

Research Programme

The research is organised into a programme of studies that will run until 2028:

Study 1 — Integrated Synthesis of Co-Design Methods

Study 2 — Practitioner Perspectives

Study 3 — Identity-Informed Method Design

Development of a Social Identity–informed set of co-design methods that explicitly structure collaborative group processes.

Study 4 — Experimental Testing

Empirical testing of whether identity-informed methods influence participation patterns, perceived legitimacy, and creative outputs.

Study 5 — Applied Pilot

Testing the approach alongside a live co-design project in health research

Intended Contribution

The project aims to contribute to co-design research in three ways:

Theoretical

Clarifying the social mechanisms that underpin collaborative design processes.

Methodological

Developing clearer, theory-informed method structures for co-design practice.

Empirical

Testing how different method designs influence participation and creative outcomes.

Ultimately, the goal is to support more rigorous and effective co-design practices in health research and service innovation