From Post-it to checkout

MethodiekFabriek builds methods for co-creation and participation: ways to get a group of people to work something out together that still stands afterwards. Workshops, courses, tailored trajectories, and a network of places where that happens. The proceeds go to their non-profit parent.

The trouble with an offer like that: there’s a lot of it, and it overlaps. Someone looking for “something for a neighbourhood project with the city” doesn’t want to read thirty pages first.

We split the offer into four kinds — projects, courses, solutions, knowledge and stories — and gave each kind its own filters. Projects filter by sector, theme and type of assignment. Courses by length and type. Knowledge by theme and kind of post. Two clicks and you’re at the five things that matter to you, instead of the hundred that exist.

Underneath runs their approach in four phases: orientation, experiment, design, implementation. If you’d rather start at the beginning, you can.

MethodiekFabriek, its parent non-profit and the local workshop spaces don’t share a desk, but they do share a website. The CMS was built for that: several editors, each on their own part, without having to call each other to change a course date.

All those methods exist on paper too: the Participation Atlas, a book of canvases you pull out mid-session. They sell it themselves, through an order module on the site. Pick how many copies you want, fill in the delivery address, ask for an invoice if you need one, pay online.

Pricing comes in tiers: one atlas 35 euros, two 70, three 100, four 120. Order four and you pay twenty euros less than buying them one by one. That’s not an accident, it’s policy: they’d rather have the book on four tables than on one.

The site has been live on our hosting since the end of March 2022 and has simply been doing its job since. Design: Dear Brand (Els Verzele). Build and hosting: us.

It isn’t the only thing we made for this family — their parent organisation’s site and the Cokido platform come from the same years. Four years of working with people who do co-creation for a living does make you think about how you run your own meetings.