Facilitate & Co-Design for All
Develop your facilitation superpower with inclusive design practices to engage diverse participants, navigate power dynamics, and lead meaningful conversations across cultures, generations, and backgrounds that foster collaboration and participation.
Service Design & Co-Design
Facilitate & Co-Design for All
Develop your facilitation superpower with inclusive design practices to engage diverse participants, navigate power dynamics, and lead meaningful conversations across cultures, generations, and backgrounds that foster collaboration and participation.
What if people of different ages, backgrounds, and levels of power could come together to shape the future? How might we facilitate spaces where they feel empowered to co-create across differences?
Facilitate and Co-design for All equips facilitators, leaders, and changemakers with the designer’s skill set—visualisation, systems thinking, inclusion, synthesis, empathy, observation, and more, to bring people together, surface diverse perspectives, and enable meaningful collaboration across differences.
Discover your facilitation profile using ThinkPlace’s Design Facilitators Profiler tool. Use insights to identify your facilitation superpower and partner profile, helping you engage participants more effectively and facilitate with greater impact.
Upcoming sessions
31 July, 2026
9:30am – 5:30pm SGT
SGD 650 per participant (excluding 9% GST)
Venue: In-person, Singapore, location TBA
Interested in bringing this workshop to your country? Please contact us at info@thinkplace.com.sg.
Who is this programme for and what will you learn
Designed for public and social sector professionals involved in facilitation, public engagement, stakeholder engagement, community engagement, and participatory decision-making, this programme is ideal for changemakers, leaders, and practitioners seeking to drive meaningful change, foster collaboration, and create greater impact within their organisations and communities.
Learning Outcomes
Gain a deeper understanding of your facilitation strengths and weakness using the ThinkPlace Design Facilitator Profile.
Gain skills in reframing and scoping problems and issues
that will guide project scoping or stakeholders engagement using ThinkPlace's Four Voices of Co-Design framework.
Learn and apply practical tools such as affinity mapping,
visual frameworks and storytelling approaches to help
facilitators transform complex conversations into shared
understanding.
Segment 1
Understanding your Design Facilitator Profile
Participants will be introduced to the ThinkPlace Design Facilitator Profile and complete a profiling activity to better understand their natural facilitation tendencies.
The profile explores six facilitation archetypes — Visualiser, Gardener, Sensemaker, Navigator, Observer, and Energiser — helping participants recognise their strengths, blind spots, and opportunities for growth.
They will reflect on how different facilitation styles can be applied across project, team, and stakeholder contexts to engage people more effectively.
Segment 2
Reframing Challenges and Aligning Stakeholders
A critical facilitation skill is helping teams define the right problem before jumping to solutions.
Stakeholders often enter conversations with preconceived solutions, differing priorities, and competing perspectives.
Participants will learn how to reframe challenges, uncover underlying needs, and facilitate productive conversations that move teams towards a shared understanding of the problem using the Four Voices of Co-Design framework.
Segment 3
Power Dynamics and Inclusive Facilitation
Facilitators often focus on what is being discussed, but equally important is understanding who is present, absent, and whose voices influence decisions. Participants will explore how power operates, and learn practical approaches for identifying participation barriers, navigating hierarchy, and creating conditions for more equitable dialogue.
Segment 4
Visual Thinking and Synthesis Skills
Design Facilitators help teams make sense of complexity, navigate diverse perspectives, and move towards collaborative decisions. This session introduces practical tools such as affinity mapping, visual frameworks, and storytelling approaches to transform complex conversations into shared understanding. Through hands-on exercises, participants will learn how to balance user needs, organisational realities, and implementation considerations to support clearer prioritisation and more effective decision-making.
Programme outline
Meet your trainer
Regional Director, ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia
Dr. Debbie Ng
Dr. Debbie Ng, PhD, is a distinguished design leader with over 18 years of experience driving transformative change across complex public and social challenges through human-centred design. As Regional Director of ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia, she collaborates with organisations across sectors to shape innovative, sustainable futures, leveraging design as a powerful force for social good. Debbie is a pioneer of the design thinking initiative in Singapore in 2007, and continued to serve under various capacities in the Public Service Division of the Prime Minister's Office, SPRING Singapore and Singapore Polytechnic.
Debbie excels in navigating intricate, multi-dimensional problems where solutions are ambiguous, applying her expertise in design leadership, complex systems thinking, ethnography, co-design, and service design.
Fueled by a deep commitment to empowering others, Debbie dedicates herself to building internal change and transformation teams and coaching leaders to be empathetic, creative and adaptive leaders.