Co-design community has developed a variety of tools for staging encounters with users to inform and inspire design. Currently, more effort is invested in collaborative design and facilitating human-centredness as a strategy. Within this setting, the ENCORE (engaging co-design research) team members share the passion for creative collaborative design. The point of departure for the research on what we call co-design, is somewhere in between user-centred design, design for experiences and empathic design, and their experimentation in varying contexts. The Encore keywords, in addition to co-design, are thus empathy, experiences, empowering, engagement, and exploration. The team’s research approach is known to be creative, rigorous, and visionary. Encore team has good international relations to similar groups abroad.

Encore builds largely on industrial design but is applying the competence in novel contexts such as user experience in organisations, service design, organizational change and social innovation. The passion for searching, applying and spreading of design thinking and making is in the core of encore. One of our future aims is rethinking what artistic and the so-called designerly aspects and activities as results could mean in encore team, education, and research. The team also initiates and contributes to strengthen the interaction with research and education.