Lived experiences, and how they might facilitate co-creation

Read and reflect upon

How may lived experience be a tool in co-creation?

What are the possible strengths and drawbacks of using lived experiences?

What changes using lived experiences may be effected in public service culture?

Lived experience is about telling and communicating the insights and stories of individuals’ lives and their service experiences or an experienced deficit of particular type of services.  Community Reporting is an insight tool developed by the People’s Voice Media Institute, to engage different people in insight-gathering process by sharing their stories and co-curating them into findings. The method may be fits into the realms of participatory action research oriented towards learning-based change. Gathering and curating lived experience of service end-users by suing Community Reporting methodology has been proved by the CoSIE project pilots to be very useful for co-creation as a tool for insight, dialogue and reflection.

  1. Insight: Lived experiences serve as tool for insightby sharing peoples’ stories and by co-curating them together into more structured findings to inform service  and policy decisions.
  2. Reflection: Community Reporting supports people to reflect on their experiences and the experiences of others. This pro-active reflection provides people with the space and time to deep listening to more deeply understand how they and others experience the world, and thus supports people to identify how public (and other) services can be enhanced.
  3. Dialogue: Storytelling stimulates dialogue between different stakeholders and helps to communicate with decision-makers about contextually experienced needs. Lived experiences and reflective dialogues may be successfully used to engage people in conversations of change with their peers and other people beyond their peer groups.

Exercise listening:

Link to Rebecca film, more films?

CoSIE Learnings

Analysis of the lived stories made it startlingly apparent that many of our institutions and the ways in which they function are disconnected from people at a fundamental level. Public services across Europe are in need of re-humanisation. This has happened because of bureaucracy, depersonalisation and othering.

  • Bureaucracy – administrative processes create barriers to access and stop the service from working.
  • Depersonalisation – overly bureaucratic systems can lead to depersonalisation. When services are not customized to the people who are accessing them, they very rarely connect well with people or offer just and meaningful services.
  • Othering – A lack of personalization can lead to the ‘othering’ of people, which heightens power imbalances and blocks services from seeing the person they are supporting.

Co-creation and working with experiential knowledge/stories can act as a way of bringing humanity back to services.

Immerse yourself