Phase 1: Landscaping and Co-Design

Across this project, we’re committed to ensuring that sensitivity to power and context guide both our collaborative process and the final architecture and knowledge products we co-develop. We launched the collaborative project with an inception phase that allowed us to gather around the key values we wanted to uphold and ways of working that align with them. An interesting (and perhaps unsurprising) learning of the process is that the values we cohered around at project inception resonate strongly with the core principles that emerged as at the core of effective, inclusive knowledge exchange.

The landscaping phase allowed us to map the broader field of engagement, participation, and knowledge exchange in health research through a desktop review, a rapid survey, and a series of key informants interviews, developing a series of insights that framed the next phases of the project.

While designing a framework for practice across contexts, we were committed to ensuring the work was grounded in the deep insights that emerge from perspectives and practices in complex social contexts. To this end, the next phase of the project focused on learning from models of practice from around the world, focusing in particular on four priority geographies: South Africa, India, Brazil, and Kenya. In this phase, we produced 20 in-depth case studies with organisations that held promising insights through their innovative practices in context. The case studies included interviews but also some dialogue events with researchers, practitioners, and lived experience experts.

This was followed by a series of place-based design workshops in South Africa, India, and Brazil with representatives from the case study organisations and other key stakeholders. In the workshops, we worked to co-create the guiding principles and purposes of the Centres for Exchange model. We then worked to ground the principles in practice through the refinement of the project concept, architecture and strategies, which we refined through sense-checking webinars and workshops with diverse stakeholders.