The Role of Human-Centred Design in Co-Creative Processes Between Public Authorities and Citizens – With Municipalities and Young People as an Example

Successfully engaging young people in societal development is a challenge faced by public authorities such as municipalities within the context of perceived erosion of the legitimacy of representative democracy and the shortcomings of its practices. The numbers of participation dwindle, while young people often don’t perceive the process as including or even open to them. The challenge is omnipresent, but some of the touchpoints are especially pertinent in the local arena as the actors are close to each other and the topics often of a tangible nature. This development is affected by a number of underlying trends and phenomena that impact the situation in different ways: Sustainable development is a pressing need in any development today, the actors impacting decision making are increasingly found outside the democratic arena, and the planning processes and dialogue channels of municipalities don’t meet the communication needs and participation preferences of the citizens – let alone the young. The young in turn may feel excluded and even lose hope in the future in the light of political, economical and ecological developments and the increasingly heated discussion around them. The ongoing digital transformation offers new tools and opportunities to augment the traditional processes with co-creative measures combining physical and virtual elements, but to be successful the processes require a buy-in from both sides – a change in municipal attitudes and acceptance of new methods and trust from the young that their voices and ideas are heard. The discussion in this paper is based on the frame of the Erasmus+ ReCoCreaYOUTH project, where two pilot processes, “Playful Democracy”, were realized in April 2024 and 2025 in two Finnish municipalities through a mix of physical and digital elements, incorporating also elements of gamification (Nordberg & Rautanen, forthcoming). The tentative results suggest a benefit to be made from employing a conscious design strategy to the process design. The municipalities have tried different ways of co-creation, typically as one-off events without a continuum in the development agenda, and face legal and normative restraints as well as the traditional governance culture that may resist change. This points towards another possible challenge: transforming a practice directed by the curriculum to designing actions under different sets of norms and regulation, including the governance culture of the responsible public actor. The feedback from the actors was encouraging even though the need for process development remained clear, and the assessment of the process against the criteria of democratic goods (Smith 2009, 2019 among others) suggested that co-creative processes answer to the majority of goods. Therefore, the discussion in this paper will focus on employing a specific design process to ensure that the needs and capacities of all actors are taken into account, and outline the criteria to design the whole process, physical and digital, in order to provide both clarity and transferability.