Co-design is a set of methods and a mindset that I was introduced to very early in my education. And I was introduced to it through Liz Sanders, who has been my professor for many years now in both undergrad and graduate school.

And I always really aligned with co-design in both methods and mindset, maybe very much before I understood the co-design could even be a mindset, co-design is why I came back to school. I truly love it, and I intend to use it in my career as much as possible, wherever feasible. And what we do as facilitators in a co-design session, is design a research session so that we are lifting up and harnessing the lived experiences of the individuals invited into the session. This can look like a bunch of different ways. There's a bunch of different methods. But they all are about bringing people into the design process, and through a range of different levels of creativity, asking people to imagine or recount their experiences, or their futures, or their past. So I'm kind of obsessed with co-design. So I already knew that this research was definitely going to include co-design. That's kind of what I came to grad school to do, was do co-design.

But I knew that there was going to be an opportunity within sexual and reproductive experiences, to use co-design to allow people to creatively engage with their thoughts around the topic. We think a lot about it, we talk about it sometimes. We hear a lot about sexual reproductive health and experiences, but it's not very common that you get to creatively engage with the topic. And so I felt like co-design could offer so much in this space. And it would also offer the mindset side of co-design, I felt like because the topic is so awkward, it can be very uncomfortable for a lot of people—co-design can allow the facilitator to create a safer space. At least that's how I think about it. That's how I use co-design.

And then when it comes to speculative design, I was introduced to the topic through my professor David Staley. And it was in a seminar class. And I was super excited about the class because I love science fiction, I love speculative fiction. But it completely opened my eyes to what design could do with speculation.

So because I love co-design so much, I was immediately thinking, how can I combine speculative design and co-design and make something new, make something better, maybe? And what would that look like in a research session. I felt like by combining speculative design and co-design, that both kinds of methods could become greater than each one individually.

So usually, speculative design is done by designers. It is maybe more in the art space. It is usually more about one person or a few designers thinking about futures and imagining them using the design process. And I was very curious about why we have yet to regularly bring in many participants into the speculative design process, and how maybe the outcomes of speculative design could be far more interesting, and far more valuable if co-design is there.

So by using speculative design, we were able to think about the future, but in a very productive way. So we were using these future imaginations using speculative design methods, along with co-design methods to imagine, but also to make—so making and imagining living together. We weren't just talking, we really made real stuff. And we talked about that stuff as well. But I wanted that space. I wanted there to be an opportunity. This was a space that I didn't feel like we had enough of and that design research and my ability and experience could offer that space to people to think about their futures to take control of their futures.