Work Package 3 - The Research
"The Impact Compass is a board-game-based design method that brings together policymakers, researchers, and communities to co-create solutions for complex social issues. Developed in Coventry, it breaks down barriers to participation by making systemic thinking accessible to people of all backgrounds. Through collaborative play, participants identify challenges, share lived experiences, and uncover opportunities for change. Unlike traditional consultation, the Compass fosters genuine co-creation, flattening hierarchies and building trust. It enables inclusive, meaningful dialogue where every voice matters—helping to shape systems that are more just, responsive, and grounded in real-world insight."
Adela Glyn-Davies - Associate Professor in Design and Global Sustainable Development
Short video by Sherrie Edgar
Sherrie (local multi-media artist) attended our research workshop and helped make this short video with Adela which explains all about the Impact Compass
The Impact Compass:
A Systemic Design Method for Co-design between policymakers, communities and researchers.The Impact Compass is a game-based systemic design method developed to facilitate collaborative engagement among policymakers, local communities, and academic researchers.
Created and implemented in Coventry (UK) as part of the funded CollaborAction project (University of Warwick, 2025), the Impact Compass utilises a board-game format to surface system maps, identify pain points, uncover barriers and enablers, and develop shared narratives for future systemic interventions. Designed for participatory, cross-sectoral sensemaking, it enables equitable participation from diverse stakeholders to co-produce contextual knowledge and actionable insights for systemic change.
Crucially, the Impact Compass addresses persistent barriers to participation in co-design workshops, particularly those stemming from disparities in technical knowledge and educational background. In line with emerging participatory systemic design approaches (Jones et al. 2025), the method succeeded in creating a shared language across differences, fostering deeper, more accessible forms of collaborative dialogue. Moreover, the tool explicitly challenged the normative power imbalances often seen in public sector co-design, where community participants are typically treated as peripheral advisors rather than core contributors (Chen et.al. 2024) whilst academic researchers struggle to diffuse their work into applied policy design.
The Impact Compass positioned all stakeholders, particularly communities most affected by systemic policies, as central actors whose insights were vital to envisioning just and responsive systems.
In this respect, the method moved collaboration beyond mere consultation toward genuine co-creation, building system narratives grounded in lived experience and shared reflection. Board games have increasingly been used in participatory design research to facilitate dialogue, externalise tacit knowledge, and flatten hierarchical structures (Korotovskaia, 2022).
The Impact Compass built on this tradition, combining game mechanics with systemic inquiry to create a participatory environment where complex systemic relationships could be collaboratively mapped and negotiated. The decision to adopt a board-game structure was underpinned by its capacity to democratise systemic inquiry. Games provide an accessible, intuitive shared framework that does not depend on participants’ prior familiarity with technical, academic, or policymaking discourses (Vervoort, 2020). This design principle was particularly important for reducing barriers that typically inhibit inclusive systemic dialogue and for engaging participants across diverse educational, linguistic, and professional backgrounds.
Structure and Components
The Impact Compass was structured around a board divided into circular thematic zones, each representing a systemic lens (e.g., governance, policy, communities, academia, barriers, enablers etc). Players moved through the zones, prompted by question cards and tokens representing different system elements.
Each thematic zone encouraged participants to consider multiple perspectives and interdependencies, fostering relational systems thinking. Tokens and cards functioned as conversational mediators, helping externalise assumptions and surface otherwise latent or tacit knowledge. This game architecture was grounded in experiential learning principles and systemic inquiry practices (Jones & van Ael, 2022).
Workshop Format
The session opened with a framing conversation to establish shared goals, ethical protocols, and inclusive ground rules. Participants were divided into mixed groups including policymakers, academic researchers, and community members.
As they progressed through the Impact Compass, groups collaboratively identified systemic pain points, surfaced areas of leverage, and mapped enablers and barriers to change.
The workshop structure alternated between guided exploration and open-ended dialogue, balancing playfulness with critical inquiry. The facilitator acted as a neutral stewards of the process, ensuring inclusive participation, capturing emerging insights, and supporting the group in building their collective systems map. These practices align with contemporary participatory design frameworks that emphasise iterative reflection, co-creation, and participant-led authorship (Whicher, 2024, Frediani & Bhan, 2023).
Application in Coventry
The deployment of the Impact Compass in Coventry took place across a series of workshops in 2025, involving stakeholders across multiple sectors: city council members, housing and health service providers, local community representatives, and academic researchers.
The board-game structure enabled participants to articulate institutional constraints, experiential knowledge, and systemic tensions collaboratively and without intimidation. Importantly, the design made the discussions participant-led rather than expert-driven, helping to counter traditional knowledge hierarchies in policy innovation processes (Frediani & Bhan, 2023).
The Coventry session demonstrated that co-design could be understood not only as a method for producing artefacts, but also as a catalyst for less tangible but equally crucial outcomes: the cultivation of trust, open dialogue, and an commitment to systemic change. These intangible outcomes are especially interesting for further study in environments characterised by institutional inequity and civic mistrust.
Results and Future Iterations
The initial deployment of the Impact Compass in Coventry yielded outcomes that affirmed the potential of method’ in fostering systemic dialogue and inclusive engagement.
Participants reported a strong sense of mutual learning, with many expressing that the tool enabled them to see their own roles within the system differently, not only in terms of institutional functions, but also in relation to the lived experiences of others within the ecosystem. For example, policymakers noted the value of hearing directly from community members in a non-adversarial format.
The visual systems maps co-created during the workshops highlighted shared pain points, such as disconnects between service provision and lived needs, communication gaps between institutions and communities, and structural inertia within governance models.
These maps also revealed previously unarticulated enablers, such as local trust networks, cultural mediators, and moments of informal collaboration, that offered potential leverage points for future intervention. Beyond these outputs, the sessions produced high levels of participant commitment, with several stakeholders initiating follow-up conversations and expressing interest in using the Impact Compass within their own organisational or civic settings.
These results underscore the Impact Compass’s dual function: as both a tool for collaborative system analysis and a process for building the relational foundations necessary for long-term systemic change. However, several limitations and areas for further development were also identified. Some participants found certain elements of the game less intuitive than others and visual elemenst were challenged to be further iterated and specified. Additionally, while the tool succeeded in flattening hierarchies in the room, questions remain about how insights generated through the game translate into institutional action beyond the workshop setting.
In the next iteration, the Impact Compass will undergo further testing across different contexts , including grassroots-led spaces and policy forums, to refine its adaptability and assess its transferability.
Planned developments include:
Modular flexibility, potential digital integrations such as AR, embedded feedback loops for follow-ups, a potential for expanded facilitation and guidance. Overall, The next phase aims to consolidate the Impact Compass as a replicable and scalable tool for participatory systemic design, while continuing to foreground trust, accessibility, and collective authorship as core principles. As future iterations unfold, the method will remain committed to challenging extractive research dynamics and fostering environments where all participants, especially those structurally marginalised, can shape not only the systems being analysed, but also the futures those systems make possible.