Co-production is potentially transformative and its power comes from re-framing the problem and re-establishing relationships to enable more holistic and people-centred approaches.

Co-production can also tackle the lack of trust between some users and professionals, a dependency culture where people look to the state to solve their problems and a culture of expertise where professionals are trained to be the sole source of solutions. At its best, co-production can build people’s capacity to live the life they want, in the community where they live.

The aim of this special issue of CoDesign is to interrogate design that takes as its primary driver social issues, its main consideration social impact and its main objective social change (Gamman and Thorpe 2006). The concept of social responsibility, the notion that an individual, a group of individuals or an organisation (or organisations) has responsibility to society, whilst topical, has been around as long as humanity.