Reflections on co-creation: an open source approach to co-creation

Co-creation is a term that spans disciplinary boundaries including design, performance studies, marketing, and business, yet it is often used without awareness of these related disciplinary counterparts. This paper reflects on some of the various definitions of ‘cocreation’ within academic literature, distilling them into a set of cohesive attributes. Cocreation has relevance to the design sector and beyond, particularly when it is understood and considered in the light of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, which has close links to many of the underlying principles of co-creation. This alignment, we argue, draws on the strengths of co-creation and can lead to a wider understanding and adoption of applied co-creation practices throughout the design community, Creative Industries, HCI, and management fields.