Metro Futures: Experience-Centred Co-Design at Scale

This paper discusses how characteristics of experience-centred and collaborative design can be translated to larger scales. We describe Metro Futures, a region-wide public consultation on the design of new light rail trains, where we followed an experience-centred co-design approach supported by digital media and tools to develop findings with a core group of 20 'co-researchers' and similar to 4000 public participants. The paper discusses how the characteristics of a focus on experience, and collaborative design exploration were achieved with co-researchers and, at scale, through online and face-to-face interactions using various digital media and tools. Whilst not at the depth of smaller scales, there are opportunities to retain characteristics of experiencecentred co-design at scale to produce findings that can usefully inform ensuing design work, and avoid the averaging of public contributions often evident in large scale public consultations.