Centering humans or decentering services

In my day job, I’ve spent a lot of time working in co-design spaces, helping to involve people in shaping the services and systems that affect their lives. But recently, outside of work, I’ve been working on something closer to home—a community-led Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) initiative in my neighbourhood. As I’ve dived deeper into ABCD, I’ve found the overlaps with co-design both fruitful and, at times, challenging to my existing assumptions. What follows is some reflections that I am still working through myself. 

ABCD and co-design share a common goal: involving communities in shaping their futures. But the way they approach participation is different. Co-design typically seeks to involve users to design or improve services, while ABCD asks a more fundamental question: What if the community already has the assets it needs to thrive? This shift in focus has led me to rethink how I approach design and what it means to truly empower a community.

At the heart of ABCD is the idea that communities are asset-rich, not problem-laden. This is a significant shift from the deficit-based models that often dominate service provision. In ABCD, the goal isn’t to fix a community but to identify and leverage its strengths—its skills, relationships, and resources. This strengths-based approach is something we talk about a lot in co-design, but how often do we really interrogate what that means?

Co-design engages users in the design process to make services better, but if those services are still centred around fixing deficits, are we genuinely empowering people? ABCD pushes us to go deeper—to see community members as valuable contributors rather than as recipients of services. It’s not just about listening to what they need but about recognising the assets they already bring to the table.

A key tenet of ABCD is that well-meaning service providers can inadvertently disempower communities. By delivering services without asking for anything in return, people are placed in a passive role as recipients. This creates dependency rather than partnership.

ABCD asks us to reframe the relationship: What if we viewed local knowledge, skills, and relationships as just as valuable as professional expertise? When communities are seen as partners, not clients, the model shifts from top-down service delivery to reciprocal co-creation, where both sides bring value to the table. I don’t want to say this is a new idea for service providers or designers, but instead, highlight that it is an ongoing tension that we may not always adequately resolve. Are we talking the talk, while also subtly reinforcing the existing status quo.

This is not to say service providers do not have a key role to play. Communities often need external support, especially where inequality or resource constraints are barriers to thriving. However, ABCD encourages us to reconsider how services are designed. Rather than positioning providers as problem solvers, they should be enablers who augment community efforts rather than taking over.

Decentering service providers and recentering the community isn’t about dismissing the need for services but about shifting how they are deployed. It’s about finding ways to support community-led solutions without assuming control. This reframing allows services to fill gaps while strengthening the capacity of communities to shape their futures.

Do we need to centre the human or decentre the service?

In the design world, we often hear about human-centred or user-centred design, where the goal is to bring the user's voice into the process to improve their experience. While this is a positive shift from traditional top-down approaches, it still tends to centre the service provider. Even though the system may be improved, the power largely stays with the designer or provider. Additionally, human-centred design seems to focus more on individuals rather than communities. Perhaps the better question isn't whether we're being human-centred enough, but whether we're actively decentring ourselves.

In contrast, community-centred approaches—like those in ABCD—flip this dynamic. They ask not just how the service can be improved but how the community can drive the process of its design, delivery, and evolution. This requires a real shift in power, decentralising control away from providers and embedding decision-making within the community itself. It also necessitates place-based approaches—designing for the specific needs of a community rather than scaling a standardised solution.

So what, if any, is the role of design? 

As someone who has spent years thinking about design as a method for solving problems, ABCD has led me to reconsider what design is really about. Design isn’t about fixing what's broken—it’s about exploring possibilities. Designers ask, “What if it worked like this?” and create prototypes to help communities experiment with and refine these possibilities.

Instead of starting with the assumption that something needs to be fixed, we ask: “How do we move towards our preferred future?” Communities are already equipped with many of the assets they need; the designer’s role is to hold space for exploration, helping people envision and test what their future could look like.

Everyone has the capacity to do this, but our culture as trained us out of thinking this way. As designers, we can help people rediscover their innate imagination, to make it safe to imagine and experiment, and to create tangible steps toward those imagined futures. I often say, “my job is to help people who think that they are not creative, be creative.” Designs role is to help communities translate their assets into action by creating environments and social infrastructure where people can prototype, iterate, and learn.

One key difference between many community-based approaches and design, which I’m keen to explore further, is the use of materiality. Community-building and development approaches tend to revolve around dialogue and questions, which are powerful in their own right. However, co-design methods often introduce making, drawing, craft, and the use of materials. I’ve witnessed how these tangible activities can break people out of rigid, habitual ways of thinking and provide a language for new ways of being together. This blend of physical and creative engagement helps people connect in ways that pure dialogue may not.

Over time, the goal is to embed these skills within the community so that they can continue this work on their own. The designer moves from problem-solver to enabler of possibility—helping others gain the capacity to explore their potential and navigate the complexities of change. It’s a relational role, one that requires deep listening, humility, and a willingness to step back as others step forward.

Centering relationships

One of the key differences between ABCD and more traditional service delivery is its emphasis on specific, local relationships. Service providers often work at scale, which means relying on standardisation and broad community engagement strategies. But communities aren’t homogenous, and what works in one place may not work in another.

ABCD pushes us to go deeper. Instead of engaging with a generic “community,” it asks us to build specific, reciprocal relationships that are rooted in place. This place-based approach recognises that communities have different assets and needs and requires a more tailored, adaptable approach to design. I have seen co-design build relationships quickly, I think that’s one of it’s key strengths. But for the full impact of that strength to be realised we need to think of co-designers as more than representatives of the community we are serving, but as ongoing reciprocal relationships that remain important beyond the design phase.

How do we start?

Shifting towards a more community-centred, asset-based approach is not without its challenges. The systems we operate within—particularly in community services—are often (over)regulated, requiring compliance and standardisation. Moreover, people working in these sectors are often time-poor, leaving little room for the deep, relational work that ABCD requires.

So how can we make this shift? One approach might be to rethink the metrics we use to measure success. Instead of focusing on outputs like service delivery numbers or user satisfaction, what if we started measuring the strength of local relationships or a community’s capacity to generate its own solutions? This is obviously much easier said than done, and risk adverse funders and government are slow to move. We may need prototypes that show this working in action to get buy-in, and this — of course, is hard to do within our resource-constrained sector.

Another step is to invest in frontline staff. These are the people who often have the relational skills needed for ABCD but may lack the time and flexibility to use them. By giving them the tools, training, and, most importantly, the space to build relationships, service providers can take a step towards decentralising power and recentring the community. Again, easier said than done. But there are small meaningful steps we can take in this direction.

In closing, I don’t want to pretend that what I’ve written here is new and that there aren’t smart people thinking about this in community and service provider circles. And there are tensions between the way we’d like to see things work and how they are currently funded and monitored that will be very challenging to resolve. Instead I offer this as a way of thinking out loud in the hope that we can continue a productive conversation and identify some meaningful ways to move in the strengths-based direction that I think most people working in the sector want to see.