There is a concept gaining traction in community engagement practice that offers a useful lens for understanding what makes the best university-community partnerships work. It is the idea of the “third space” — a zone of collaboration that exists between the university’s world and the community’s world, belonging fully to neither but drawing on the strengths of both.
In the third space, hierarchies are flattened. Expertise is understood to be distributed — the academic holds research knowledge; the community member holds lived knowledge; and both are needed to understand and address complex problems. The third space is where co-design happens: the collaborative creation of solutions by the people who will use them, supported by people with the technical skills to make them real.
What Is Co-Design, Really?
Co-design is often misunderstood. It is not consultation — the practice of asking communities what they think after the important decisions have already been made. It is not participation — inviting communities to join a process that has been designed without them. True co-design means communities are involved from the very beginning: in identifying the problem, framing the question, designing the approach, interpreting the findings, and determining how they will be acted upon.
This is a more demanding standard than most organisations — including most universities — are used to meeting. It requires genuine humility from researchers and institutional leaders. It requires patience, because building the trust needed for authentic co-design takes time. And it requires a willingness to let go of control — to accept that the community may define the problem differently than the academic expected, and to follow where that leads.
Why Co-Design Produces Better Outcomes
The evidence for the superiority of co-designed interventions is compelling. Research consistently shows that programs developed with input from intended beneficiaries are more likely to be taken up, more likely to be sustained, and more likely to produce the outcomes they aim for. This is not surprising. People are more likely to engage with solutions they have helped shape, and solutions shaped by people with direct experience of a problem are more likely to address its actual causes.
In the health sector, co-designed services consistently show better uptake among populations that traditional top-down services have failed to reach. In education, co-designed curricula that reflect the experiences and aspirations of students — particularly First Nations students — show dramatically better engagement and completion rates. In community development, co-designed neighbourhood plans generate stronger community ownership and longer-term implementation than expert-driven plans.
The Practical Challenges
For universities, co-design presents genuine practical challenges. Research ethics processes were designed for a world where researchers maintain clear control over their methodologies — but co-design is inherently adaptive and emergent. Grant funding timelines are typically fixed — but co-design processes take as long as they take. Publication pressures reward individual academic authors — but co-design produces collective work that is difficult to attribute.
None of these challenges are insurmountable, but they do require institutions to make deliberate changes to their systems and incentives. Universities that are serious about co-design are creating flexible ethical review pathways for participatory research, establishing internal seed funds that allow co-design processes to begin before external funding is secured, and developing new authorship and recognition practices that acknowledge community contributions to shared knowledge.
Co-Design as a Values Statement
Ultimately, co-design is more than a methodology. It is a values statement about the relationship between universities and the communities they serve. It says: we do not presume to have all the answers. We believe that knowledge is not the exclusive property of the academy. We are here to work alongside you, not on you or for you.
That is a genuinely radical claim for institutions with centuries of tradition as repositories of authoritative knowledge. But it is a claim that more and more Australian universities are making — and backing up with structural change. The third space is being built, one partnership at a time.