Walking the talk

Co-designing a co-design approach

Abstract

This paper examines challenges implementing co-design practices in a Vietnamese campus of an Australian University and presents a tailored professional development approach addressing foundational collaboration understandings within Vietnamese cultural contexts. After three years of operation, our learning design team faced persistent issues co-designing learning experiences with academics, revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of co-design principles within the team itself. Initial interventions failed because they employed didactic approaches that violated the collaborative principles they aimed to teach. Through practice-led research combining practitioner inquiry, collaborative auto-ethnography, and retrospective sensemaking, we identified two dysfunctional power dynamics: "power-for" relationships where learning designers acted as service providers, and "power-over" dynamics where designers dominated processes, rather than the "power-with" approach needed for true collaboration. Cultural factors, including Confucian values emphasising hierarchy and examination-oriented traditions, compounded these challenges. Our "Walking the Talk" intervention employed experiential role-playing activities, positioning learning designers as clients in interior design scenarios. This method successfully disrupted habitual practices, enabling participants to embody co-design principles rather than merely understanding them theoretically. Findings demonstrate that authentic collaboration requires deliberate cultivation in Vietnamese contexts, where social-political arrangements essential to co-design do not emerge organically. This research offers strategies for developing collaborative capabilities in hierarchical cultural contexts.