Our training and our professional culture leads us to think of the world through a rational, linguistic filter. We cling on to the idea that there is an objective reality 'out there' and that we have an impartial, objective standpoint. Of course, this account of how research works is now being challenged and we decided to take this challenge to an extreme. What if we abandoned our obsession with words and followed a visual narrative instead? What if a research project looked at the world through participants' eyes and embraced inter-subjectivity, visual narratives and associations rather than linguistics and deduction? What if we did research as photographers, not as researchers? Would it work? We shall undertake a real research study, for a real client, to find out.
A working definition of online co-creation is proposed, and a framework to map the emerging landscape of the discipline itself is provided in this paper. Two distinct types of online co-creation are established based on the degree of 'participant empowerment' they facilitate. Two case studies highlight the direct implications for practitioners when implementing either of the two types. The paper is based on the experience of having set-up and curated more than 25 online co-creation communities in the last three years.