Dean Johnson
Introduction
This sketch comes from a presentation by Dean Johnson, UQ Co-Design Lecturer, developed as teaching material for a third-year undergraduate co-design course within UQ's School of Design — a course I have been part of as a teaching staff member for four years. Dean brings decades of real-world co-design practice internationally, working on complex societal challenges. This deceptively simple 2×2 maps the conditions required for generative creative work.
📷 Sketchbook note— sketch of the Safety × Challenge 2x2 matrix
What & Why
The four quadrants map different combinations of safety and challenge within a group setting. The key insight is that generative work — solutions that go beyond the obvious — requires both high safety and high challenge simultaneously. Neither alone is sufficient.
This reminds me of the Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908): performance peaks at an optimal level of arousal, with flat thinking at one end and shutdown at the other. What Dean's quadrant adds is a spatial and social translation of that curve — moving it from individual psychology into the conditions of a group.
What strikes me further is that the "safety" axis is not just psychological comfort — it maps directly onto what Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) describes as necessary for group cohesion. You cannot push creative challenge without first establishing who we are together.
I'm noting this here because I can see it connecting forward — particularly to my development of SIMCO. But at the time, it was simply a clarity moment in an enjoyable course. It has also been fun to play with AI to combine and visualise these models together — something worth continuing as a way of working through connections.
Diagram 1 — The Yerkes-Dodson Law
Why this matters for co-design specifically: co-design requires genuine design cognition and process — the "design" in the title is not decorative. It should not be, though often is, consultation with a design veneer. The "co" speaks to the essential need for people with different knowledge and perspectives to come together to create solutions that none could reach alone. As a practitioner I see this collapse happen regularly. Social Identity Theory and Social Identity Leadership (Haslam, Reicher & Platow, 2011) explain the mechanism — shared identity is what allows a group to become greater than the sum of its parts (Lewin, 1951), and what makes genuine creative risk-taking possible. Without sufficient stretch, co-design produces existing opinions, not new ones.
Diagram 2 — Applied to Co-Design
The Social Identity Thread
I am working on co-design facilitation as a form of Social Identity Leadership — the facilitator's role is not just to manage process but to actively cultivate the shared identity that makes genuine creative work possible.
The right-hand page of the sketch is where this enters. The depth of shared identity in a group changes how safety and challenge play out. Low shared identity with high challenge and people shut down — there isn't enough "us" yet to make risk-taking feel safe. The same challenge that would be generative for a cohesive group tips into anxiety. High shared identity with low challenge produces the opposite problem: the group has the cohesion to go deeper but nothing to push against. They stay comfortable, and obvious.
The calibration required isn't just about activity design. It's about reading where a group actually is in its identity formation and adjusting accordingly. The same level of challenge lands differently depending on how much shared "us" is present.
This is a design problem before it's a facilitation problem. What I am working towards is understanding what Identity Facilitation actually looks like in co-design practice — how a facilitator might deliberately sequence the conditions, building safety and shared identity first through specific methods and tools, then escalating challenge through divergence, reframing, and convergence, to navigate a group into the Creative Zone. The question is not just when to push but with what — which design methods build identity conditions, and which escalate creative challenge in a way the group can hold. This sketch is an early attempt to map that out. What I can say is that without that deliberate scaffolding, a facilitator — however well-intentioned — either pushes challenge without the right conditions and tips the group into anxiety, or keeps things too safe and never gets past obvious outputs.
Diagram 3 — The (Social Identity) Facilitator's Path
Connected Concepts
The following constructs sit underneath this sketch and will develop further across the sketchbook:
Psychological Safety (Edmondson, 1999) — necessary but not sufficient; safety without challenge produces comfortable but obvious work.
Trust — the interpersonal condition that determines whether challenge feels productive or threatening.
Identity-Based Motivation — shared identity is what makes stretch feel worthwhile rather than exposing.
Group Identification (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) — the depth of shared "us" mediates how the same conditions land differently across groups.
Divergence / Convergence / Reframing — the design process constructs that give an Identity Facilitator the tools to hold safety and challenge simultaneously.
Yerkes-Dodson Law (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908) — the inverted-U between arousal and performance. Johnson's matrix is Yerkes-Dodson with safety added as a second axis, and social identity as the variable that shifts where the peak falls.
Tags: Identity-Formation Processes · Psychological Safety · Trust · Identity-Based Motivation · Creative Collaboration Mechanics · Divergence · Reframing · Convergence
Until next time — together in creative challenge,
Sophie