You can expect us to:

• Thoughtfully prepare for sessions.

• Give you a heads-up on what to expect and how you can prepare.

• Ask about your access needs and work hard to meet them.

• Work hard to balance and value all perspectives.

• Challenge the group to help the design get better.

• Take your feedback seriously, including about the process.

We’re not:

• Passive facilitators. We bring our expertise and we name behaviour that’s disrespectful.

• A big business with limitless resources.

• Available all times. We work on lots of projects, not just this one.

• Perfect. We make mistakes—spelling, facilitation or otherwise. We’re quick to take accountability.

• Doctors or health service providers. But we can provide peer support.

You come ready to contribute and help us make things. Not only criticise or say problems.

Just as we respect your experience (lived, living, through education, cultural knowledge or otherwise), we ask that you respect ours. As design professionals, as victim-survivors and as queer people.

You tell us what isn’t working about the process or the design so we can fix it.

We don’t expect you to:

• Be a visual designer or do visual design

• Have all the answers (we don’t either)

For this project we’ll bring our expertise in:

• Visual, communication and content design

• Designing for accessibility

• Plain English writing

• Website design

You might have these skills too, or, want to build them. Welcome.

Here are some of the standards and codes we work to:

• NSW Health’s Guide to Engaging Consumers, Carers and Communities (we made it)

• Design Justice Principles

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

• Research Justice: a Strategic Framework to Achieve Self-determination for Marginalized Communities

We work from our mindsets for co-design 🧠

Discover is about knowing what’s already working, what’s out there and what needs to change.

It’s also about knowing what we each bring and agreeing how we’ll work together.

Creating good design is about having boundaries and being clear about what we’re doing and why.

Define is also about agreeing on the principles to guide our design - for example, our tone, language and commitment to accessibility.

Develop ideas and make them better through conversations and using good design principles.

It helps to develop a few ideas and not try to find one perfect idea. There’s no such thing.

Design is about trying ideas out before we put them in place or publish them. This is called prototyping.

When prototyping we’re open to learning what is and isn’t working and making changes. That means not being too protective or stuck on our first ideas.

After we’ve learned what works we can start producing the design. This is when we start making it look fancier and creating strategies for publishing it in different ways.