CoCreation Lab

Our goal is to increase the impact of our designs by opening them to different forms of collaborations and storytelling. On this platform, you can reach out to any designer to inquire about one of their designs as an off-the-shelf product or access their documentation to produce it yourself. Even better — remix our open designs, riff on them, make them weird and wonderful in your own way. Just give the author a shout-out for the original work, and tell us how it went. We love a good plot twist.

1. The Design Problem

In early 2026, I was informed that I was meant to teach Studio III, the third design studio class in the Design and Innovation Program at RPI’s Science and Technology Department.

The course was to address to issue of complexity in design from any perspective. Previous instructors have teach the class around access and resilience . I have decided to go with collaboration, or cooperation, or participation. At the beginning, I was not sure.

At the same time, the course was to teach students how to design their portfolios as they enter the job market. There was tension the center of the class, tat between your voice as designers and the fact that design ls always done in collaboration.

2. Putting Together a Team!

To address this design problem, i reach out to Codigo Libre.

I have already collaborated with them in a previous project that you can check in this platform. This project was also about participatory design, so I wanted to bring their perspectives as practitioners.

I wanted they to help me not only with the design of the platform but also with the design of the class as some of its objectives were ment to be embedded in the platform. Student have to format images as jpeg in order to upload them, for example. This kinds of restraint were meant to help students navigate the distance between plans and their enactments on-the-ground.

3. Designing Collaboration in Collaboration

An important goal o Co-Creation Lab was to think about collaboration in collaboration. We all agreed that collaboration is better learned in practice. Our meetings address the design of the platform but the many ways we can craft learning moments at different pints of the interaction with them.

Moments of design became, educational opportunities but also lecture examples to further discuss with students.

4. Testing and Debugging

After the platform was ready to use, we start the process of testing and debugging. As an alpha tester, i was charged with using the platform and documenting errors or bugs in it. I was to take a picture of the error, document what happened for the error message to appear, and add both the image and description in a google share document for Mari, the team’s web developer to address during the week.

The more test the product, the better it gets.

5. Discussing the Future: Repair and Maintenance

We have design this space tinking about a community, But what kind of community is this? We are recursive, we are constantly rethingking our infrrastrucrures, the future of the co-creation lab is open to collaboration but also it needs it.

6. Crafting the Design Story

After a few months of working on this project but before it culminates. i started thinking about the Co-Creation Lab’s design story. We discussed many things in our meeting but a central topic through the process was collaboration. Collaboration also is what had brought us together.

Collaboration also was to topic of the class. So it made sense to center the story on that topic. this also would allow me to use the lab as an example in one of my lectures about forms of collaboration in design.

I wanted to show that this design process did not happened entirely on the web. this website is meant to host tangible products that more often than not are connected to the internet or are the outcomes of computational processes.

Design Stories

Platforms Without Borders - The Podcast

Co-Creation Lab