Penny Hagan

Auckland Co-Design Lab

Dr. Penny Hagen assists organisations, teams and communities to take a participatory and systems-orientated approach to wellbeing. Penny has supported cross sector teams and communities across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia to respond to complex social issues by connecting policy and evidence to the lived realities and aspirations of communities.

Penny has a PhD in participatory design and her practice integrates approaches from wellbeing, health, design, youth development, systems and evaluation disciplines. Penny is currently the Director of The Auckland Co-design Lab (The Lab), a unique learning and innovation collaboration between local and central government. The Lab is based in The Southern Initiative in South Auckland (Auckland Council) with a focus on design for equity and intergenerational wellbeing.

The Lab experiments with and shares what more collaborative, participatory, and placebased ways of working in the public sector look like, working alongside rangatahi (young people) and whānau (families) to demonstrate and develop practice-based evidence about how we collectively activate the conditions for wellbeing in place.