Built to Meet You Where You Are
Helping you assess your strengths to start or refine your co-design practice.
Survey Methodology
The Co-Design Maturity Survey is designed to meet you where you are—whether your team is just beginning to explore how to elevate your approach to students and teacher engagement or already deep in the work.
Developed by the team at Optimistic Design, this tool helps cross-functional edtech teams build innovative edtech products by understanding how co-design practices show up in their product development processes. It’s grounded in four core areas that shape effective co-design.
Your responses help surface patterns, highlight strengths, and pinpoint growth opportunities. The survey offers stage-based recommendations tailored to your team’s unique context—no jargon, just clear, meaningful next steps.
The foundation to any co-design practice is understanding how organizational culture nurtures co-design with students and teachers.
To build the co-design muscle, it is important to have a strong foundation in qualitative research focused on students who are furthest from opportunity. This enables the team to deeply understand teacher and student context on which to base the further co-design products.
Co-design involves engaging with students, educators, and caregivers throughout the product design process. In order to design “with” rather than “for”, a team needs to have structured ways of involving co-designers in their processes.
Lastly, the product feedback approach plays an important role in continued co-design with students, teachers and caregivers. It’s not just practices like usability testing, but rather the creation of a meaningful feedback loop.
Understanding Co-Design
Co-design is a creative and action oriented process that sits within the product design and development process. Students, teachers and caregivers are active participants in the design and research of the product with the product team when co-designing. They are engaged using participatory research approaches and not just by conducting interviews and user testing sessions. While engaging users in traditional user-centered research processes is essential to the design process, co-design goes a step beyond to ensure that students, teachers and caregivers' underlying needs, ideas and assets inform the design. Co-design can happen on a spectrum.
Observe, interview, test
Students, teachers and caregivers participate in sessions designed by the research teams. Scope of engagement is limited and predefined.
Collaborate together
Lived experts are active participants in developing ideas and making recommendations through a series of co-design workshops using participatory methods.
Make decisions together
Lived experts make decisions together with the research and design team at key moments with shared accountability using participatory methods.
Delegate control
Lived experts have decision making authority. There is a sincere commitment from the design and development team to implement what they decide.
Understanding our Frameworks
This survey is grounded in and adapted from liberatory and equity-centered design frameworks, which aim to shift power dynamics in the product development process. Rather than designing for users, these approaches prioritize designing with students and teachers—especially those most often excluded from decision-making.
How This Survey Works
This tool is meant to be simple, fast, and useful—just 12 minutes to get clarity on where your team stands and what to do next.
Take the survey
Answer questions across four core pillars that drive strong co-design practices—Organizational Culture, Research Approach, Co-Design Approach, and Feedback Approach.
See where you stand
Get a clear snapshot of where you are in each stage—highlighting strengths and areas to grow.
Get tailored next steps
Receive a prioritized list of actionable recommendations to strengthen your product thinking and co-design capacity.
Understanding Your Results:
We’ve developed a simple, intuitive scoring system to help you understand where you currently stand on your co-design journey. Based on your responses across the survey’s four key sections areas, your results fall into one of the following categories:
Beginning:
Just getting started with co-design
Developing:
Taking steps toward integration, with clear opportunities to grow.
Strengthening:
Actively applying co-design practices with increasing consistency.
Advancing:
Demonstrating strong, embedded co-design practices across your team.
Alongside your score, you'll receive a tailored checklist of recommended actions, prioritized based on your responses to highlight “quick wins” and key actions within the most relevant areas. These are designed to help you take meaningful next steps, starting from where you are.
As you review your results, we encourage you to walk through your checklist with your Gates Foundation PO. This can help surface shared priorities, identify areas for deeper support, and guide conversations around your team’s co-design goals.
Your customized checklist also includes helpful resources and opportunities to connect with our team or other learning partners in the AIMS/Encore community.
*Optimistic Design’s technical assistance will be available to AIMS/Encore teams through September 30, 2025.
