Following the ‘Open by Design’ webinar hosted by the Library’s Open Research team on 30 June, we’ve paired up with Alison Austin, product leader, facilitator & coach, to curate a selection of resources for researchers interested in embedding openness earlier in the design and development of digital research outputs.
While open research discussions often focus on the accessibility, reproducibility and reuse of research outputs, openness can also be considered within the design process itself. Many participatory and user-centred design approaches encourage decisions to be shaped collaboratively, made more transparent, and documented through design artefacts and activities, helping to make the reasoning behind an output more visible alongside the output itself.
These resources may also be useful to professional service teams looking to focus their improvement efforts on opportunities that enable researchers to achieve the most beneficial outcomes.
How to use these resources
The resources below are intended as a source of inspiration rather than a prescribed methodology. They showcase a range of participatory design approaches, facilitation techniques, product development practices and case studies that researchers may find useful when exploring how openness can be embedded into their own design and development processes.
Not every approach will be suitable for every project, and there is no single “correct” way to apply these ideas. Instead, we encourage readers to explore the resources selectively, adapting the concepts, methods and activities that seem most appropriate to their research context, stakeholders and objectives.
Collaborative design tools
- For inspiration: This Co-Design Toolkit was created to support community involvement in the co-design of early years services, but many of its activities are transferable to other research and design settings. Researchers may find it useful as a source of techniques for bringing less-heard voices into design processes and making participation in decision-making more visible and meaningful.
- Co-deisgn.tools hosts a collection of tools, methods and reflections drawn from more participatory and collaborative approaches to co-design. Researchers wishing to explore collaborative design more deeply may find it useful for understanding how participants can be involved as partners in shaping decisions and outcomes, rather than simply as subjects of consultation. The linked article, Co-design or Faux-design?, offers an interesting critique of performative participation, highlighting common situations where people are invited into a process but given little real influence over the result. These resources can help researchers reflect on the difference between consultation, collaboration and genuine co-design.
- This Open Design Kit contains a well-organised collection of activity templates that can help beginners identify opportunities to introduce collaborative design into their work. It is best used as a source of ideas and structure, as the descriptions are often brief and more developed examples of individual activities can usually be found elsewhere.
Workshop and facilitation methods
- SessionLab provides an extensive library of facilitation and workshop methods that can be adapted for research, engagement and co-design activities. It is a valuable source of ideas, although some methods are more robust and transferable than others, so researchers should apply their own judgement when selecting and adapting activities to their context.
- Similarly, Liberating Structures provides a rich set of facilitation patterns aimed at broadening participation, distributing influence, and surfacing less-heard perspectives. Researchers interested in more open and participatory approaches may find these structures useful when designing participatory research activities. As with SessionLab, the effectiveness of any pattern depends heavily on the skill and judgement of those facilitating the process.
- The Co-design workshop pocket facilitator’s guide offers a practical, step-by-step framework for planning and running collaborative design workshops. It helps facilitators engage participants effectively and generate ideas together – turning diverse perspectives into actionable outcomes.
Product Development Tools
- This product development blueprint by Hyperact offers a useful overview of the stages, principles and practices commonly involved in product development, without implying a single standardised process. For researchers interested in openness, it illustrates how evidence gathering, user research and decision-making are woven throughout product development, providing a model for documenting and explaining how key choices are made. A word of caution though: not all ideas are opportunities. Exploratory research and consultation with relevant specialists can help you distinguish between genuine digital research opportunities and untested assumptions.
- This UX research cheat sheet offers a useful high-level overview of where different user research techniques fit within the product development process. User research is a continuous activity throughout product development, helping teams understand user needs, validate ideas, and evaluate solutions from discovery and design through to delivery and iteration. Its value lies in ensuring decisions are informed by evidence rather than assumptions. By embedding user research throughout the lifecycle, teams can reduce risk, validate outcomes earlier, improve collaboration, and create products that better meet user needs and objectives.
- Opportunity Mapping is a product discovery technique that helps teams organise customer needs into a structured view of opportunities before deciding what to build. It helps to ensure product decisions are driven by customer outcomes and business goals, rather than assumptions or feature requests. It makes the prioritisation process more evidence-based and increases the likelihood of building high-impact solutions. In a research context, it could be used by professional service teams to help prioritise experiments and service improvements. It could also be useful in the early stages of digital research design, where there may be many different ways to support a desired outcome, and you need to decide which opportunities are most promising.
- This step-by-step guide to running a Design Sprint provides a practical introduction to a structured, time-boxed process for understanding a problem, generating ideas, prototyping potential solutions, and testing them with users before investing significant effort in delivery. For researchers, Design Sprints can be useful when there is a need to explore and validate ideas for a tool, service or intervention within a relatively short timeframe. By bringing together researchers, stakeholders and potential users, they can help challenge assumptions, generate evidence, and build confidence that a proposed solution addresses a genuine need before resources are committed to development. This can reduce risk, focus effort on the most promising opportunities, and provide a more robust foundation for subsequent funding applications, project planning or development work.
- This guide to co-design from the University of Cambridge’s Inclusive Design Toolkit provides a thoughtful introduction to the principles, strengths and limitations of involving users and stakeholders in design processes. Rather than focusing solely on workshop activities, it encourages readers to think critically about representation, participation and whose perspectives are shaping decisions. Researchers may find it particularly useful when planning participatory research or co-design activities, as it offers practical guidance while also highlighting the considerations needed to make participation meaningful and inclusive.
Case studies
- The Safer Parks case study describes how, with Research Software Engineer (RSE) support, Dr Anna Barker and her team were able to key user groups in the participatory design of an open data dashboard that aimed to make parks safer for women and girls. Here, openness in the design process meant involving stakeholders in the initial design; validating what was implemented through user testing; and communicating back to them how their input had influenced the design.
- This case study shows how user-centred design can be used to evaluate the outputs of a data-driven system, helping teams identify which information users actually find useful rather than simply presenting everything that is technically possible. By documenting how user research, design and data science informed those decisions, teams can provide a clearer rationale for why particular datasets, indicators or algorithm outputs were included, prioritised or excluded.
- This example of co-design in the process of developing a digital commons platform, like the Safer Parks example, highlights the importance of communicating back to stakeholders how they have influenced the design, and how this builds trust.
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