[Full disclosure: I started graduate school with Gunnar Swanson in 1990. Gunnar and I stay in communication. I became friends with Garry vanPatter and Elizabeth Pastor in 2003. One of my former students is an employee at Humantific.
Against my own best interest, I'll add that I think that Gunnar and Garry both share an attraction to controversy, each in their own way.]

[More disclosure] My faculty colleagues and I have attended several rounds of NextD Workshops starting in 2003. I can attest that a NextD workshop is not like any webinar that I have experienced. These are workshop where people learn skills by doing. Since 2005, we have embedded NextD values, processes, and process skills into our design curricula at Indiana University Herron School. Some say I drank a lot of NextD's Kool-Aid. I'd say that Herron's students who practice what we learn from Garry and Elizabeth demonstrate some pretty powerful transferrable, scalable skills that are founded on a people-centered value system. Beyond the workshop, the NextD interviews and other resources provide a meaningful reference to designers and design educators. Garry's message in 2002 (?) that design and design ed is/was on a burning platform resonated with me.

On the broader topic of CO-CREATION in design:

In my graduate seminar Intro to Design Thinking, students read several journal articles considering what is design (Heskett, Farson), followed by a few articles about what is a discipline in general and what might be a discipline of design specifically (Cross). In the end we look at competencies of design in practice (Conley).
While shaping our ideas of design, we discuss perspectives in F.A. Salustri and N.L. Eng 2007: Design as...: Thinking of what design might be, Journal of Design Principles and Practices, 1:1(19-28), 2007.

I also teach the co-requisite seminar Intro to People-Centered Design. To start, I ask students to consider their own learning and thinking styles as well as work process preferences. As part of that examination, students conduct David Kolb's Learning Style Inventory and Min Basadur's / NextD's Process Role Preference Profile. The first goal is to ask students to consider how people-centered perspectives affect their own lives. As we think about how the notion of people-centeredness changes values in design, we look at how it changes the process of design. We examine how people-centered values in design creates new design practices. All of these ideas come together in the article Sanders, E. 2006: Scaffolds for Building Everyday Creativity, Design for Effective Communications: Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning. Jorge Frascara (Ed.) Allworth Press, New York, New York, 2006.

At the time of her writing, Sanders' ideas and practices were well defined, documented and disseminated.

While I did not perform a Google Scholar search, I'm going to assume that Liz Sanders is not the first to advance Co-Creation in design. The term might first (a big guess) have come out of the Scandinavian 'school.' Given the Scandinavian early focus on collaboration between labor and management, it is pretty safe to assume that the origins of Co-Creation practices were not in marketing.

Sanders further differentiates between Participatory Design and Co-Creation Design. For anyone interested in learning more about WHAT is Co-Creation, read more of Sander's writing. I highly recommend Sanders, E. 2006: Design Research in 2006, Design Research Quarterly, 1:1, 2006. Ken was/is on the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal.

For anyone interested in learning more about HOW one might practice Co-Creation, consider learning about the kinds of design methods informed by Sanders (convivial tools, MakeTools) and others. For anyone interested in learning more about HOW one might facilitate Co-Creation Design as group processes for innovation, consider learning more about Garry and Elizabeth's work through NextD.

Work in these participatory and/or co-design contexts requires thought and action that leaves behind notions of designers & clients and communicators & audiences. To function in a Design 4.0+ context requires People (with a capital P) to regard one another as equal stake holders. In the context of the undergrad and grad design programs at Herron, work takes place in communities (not organizations or institutions). When working as people with people to design for positive outcomes in a barely framed issue space, it is important to establish a designing approach built with shared frameworks. The notion of designer/client just doesn't work when their is no client and where every person involved holds a slightly different (but equal) stake and is the owner of their own part of the problem/opportunity.

What my students and I continue to learn is that designing in these ways in these spaces requires a significant VALUES SHIFT. It doesn't sound like a big deal to say that one is designing WITH instead of FOR. However, all of the theory, process, method in the world is worthless until one actually embraces a truly empathetic perspective. It is very easy to say, "Ahh! Yes, empathy for people." It is a very different thing to truly BELIEVE and ACT on the belief that people-centered approaches and people-centered values shape all aspects of design. As soon as one does this, one needs specialized processes, specialized skills for participating in the process, specialized methods for performing (researching, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating)+(generating, conceptualizing, optimizing, implementing) within the process. We think and practice with insights and tools gained from Sanders, NextD and many many others (Papanek, foremost).

These are things that anyone can learn to do. These are also things that one can develop. These are things that one can teach. See one, do one, teach one.

Many of our students' graduate thesis work involves designing new (or advancing existing) frameworks, processes, process skills, and methods for doing co-creation. Our graduate student (MFA 2010) Susana La Luz-Houchin just presented her thesis research "Interest-based Converge Process: Facilitating Negotiation in Collaborative Design" at the DESIRE Network International Conference on Creativity and Innovation in Design, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Susana's interest tracks back directly to NextD's articulation of intentionality in process skills.

I once heard someone ask, "What happens to the Designer when everyone is a designer?" The more interesting question today is, "What happens to design when everyone involved is a Person?"

Best regards,
Christopher Vice, Associate Professor, Design Leadership + Design Thinking
Indiana University Herron School

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I include PORTIONS of Fil's message
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Date:    Thu, 24 Nov 2011 23:40:37 -0500
From:    "Filippo A. Salustri" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching CoCreation Now

All,

I didn't diss NextD.  I didn't diss GK.  I dissed only the document.
I read it carefully; I studied the images; I got nothing useful out of it
at all - or at least nothing that I could identify and that I didn't
already know.
Maybe I'm just being an "engineer", but if a student of mine provided me
with such a document under any rubric I might use, it would get an F.

. . . [middle section extracted]

A very quick scan of google scholar tells me "co-creation" is a marketing
thing, not a design thing.  It would appear to involve some kind of
collaboration between a firm and a customer.  Wow.  As far as I know,
that's been going on for years at least.  If they mean something different,
they should have said so.

I wish I got it.  As Fox Mulder would say, "I want to believe."  But this
document has not given me anything to go on.

Sorry folks.
Cheers.
Fil