Turning one team's research practice into a method anyone can use.

Leanlab Education runs codesign research: schools, edtech developers, and researchers building products together, with power shared between them instead of concentrated with whoever's funding the work.

It worked, but it only existed inside the organization. It was how this particular team did things, not something another organization could pick up and run. The job was to build the framework itself, not to write about codesign.

It had to work for three audiences. Educators and school leaders needed it approachable enough to act on without a research background. Edtech companies needed it concrete enough to fit how they actually build product. Other research organizations needed it credible, grounded in existing literature instead of invented.

The other risk was staying theoretical. A framework that describes a philosophy is easy to admire and impossible to run.

Before writing anything I audited the research process end to end, every part of it, including the steps nobody had needed to explain out loud before.

I split the practice into five stages (Cultivate, Engage, Design, Research, Produce) with three sub-steps under each, fifteen total, and defined what each one looks like when it goes well. It's modular on purpose, so an organization can run the whole thing or pull out the one stage they're stuck on.

The point was never to build from scratch. I went looking for literature, methods, and tools with research behind them that could plug into each step: Hall on the underlying structures of culture, the Research + Practice Collaboratory on building equity, Universal Design for Learning, and the compliance standards edtech partners work under like COPPA, FERPA, and the Student Privacy Pledge. Every sub-step points at the reading behind it.

The gaps were mostly the human parts. How do you create shared meaning between a district and a startup? How do you set conditions of success, or get to commitments people actually keep? I built those tools, alongside instruments Leanlab's researchers had made: Value Mapping, the Engage Toolkit, and Demystifying Jargon, on how codesign helps a room of specialists talk to each other.

All fifteen sub-steps follow the same structure: what it is, the goals it should produce, tools to do it, and references to go deeper. Once someone learns one sub-step they can navigate the rest.

The site runs on Leanlab's brand system, built to work more like a product than a publication. There's a custom icon for every stage and sub-step, twenty of them, color-coded by stage. Toolkits and articles sit up front instead of buried as downloads.

The framework gave Leanlab a defined position in a field where most organizations describe their approach in a paragraph. They can point at it, speak from it at conferences, and reference it in day-to-day research, and other organizations can actually use it.

It's been presented at ISTE, EdTechWeek, and ASU+GSV.