Co-Design Research
Co-designing is designing together with your user(s) to better include their perspective, experience and better define their needs. By constantly testing with and talking to the user(s), the end product will be better implemented and meet the expectations. The user(s) have to be involved during all phases of the design process to help make the best design decisions for the end product.  
Co-design around the world
Co-designing started in Scandinavia around 1970. There was a lack of involvement of primary users in major decision implementation/ development for new products, architecture, healthcare etc. The focus with co-design was now more on personal experience instead of firm-view, which created a new value to products/services.   
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Co-design is now a common practice all over the world and is used when the design challenge is very complex to understand. It is useful to use co-design to involve your end-user and get feedback before major design decisions. They will know better what you are designing for (the design challenge), whether the design is usable for them (prototyping) and if they would indeed use it (market expectations). Great insight can be given that designers might overlook because it is a whole other perspective. In a way, co-design is always useful. Getting the opinion of your end-user and stakeholders is very valuable, however, when the group you are designing for is very large it might not be the best way to go. User testing and survey might be better to get a bigger feedback group later in the design process.  
Existing Co-design Research
To get some inspiration research was done on other co-designs. One research was found on people with speech disorders ordering in restaurants. The methods used in this co-design, for creating a better environment in restaurants, was to sit together with the stakeholders (catering staff, speech experts, person with speech disorder and friends/ family of them). They actively got involved in finding the solution to the problem(s) by tools like listening to personal stories and brainstorms. This method and tools could be used in designing our product as well by listening to personal stories of the participant and brainstorming together with stakeholders like caregiver, participant, and audience. 
Another research was found on people with aphasia speaking in groups. This relates to the participant's problem of being understandable in front of a group. In the research, it was concluded that two tools for participation worked very well: floor transfer (getting the opportunity to talk) and question-answer series (sequences of yes/no type questions). The method used to come to these conclusions was communication analysis. This might be a good method for the project as well to find out when and why the participant is inaudible. Also, the conclusion might be something to inform the audience about or in a way signal them. 
Human Centred Design
Human-centred design (HCD) describes a design process in which users are considered at all steps of the design process. In this case, ‘user’ should be interpreted to mean not just the primary user, but all humans that interact with the product. Taking these users into consideration can involve a number of participatory research methods that help to understand the users and the context in which they use products. HCD ideally allows designers to create a product that is more suited to the target group’s needs, making it almost inevitable when designing for a specific user. 
Human-centered design should not be understood, in the context of co-design, as designing a product based on an idea that the user already has in mind, because this prevents a broad design process that considers problems or solutions that the users had not thought about when they came up with the idea. 
In terms of design ethics, HCD is a double-edged sword, because the participatory nature may create increased expectations for a product that might be perceived as specifically tailored and therefore magnitudes better than existing products. Therefore, expectation management is absolutely essential from the very start of the design process.  
Another ethical consideration is that a product could create a dependency. For instance, a product aimed to help with a certain motor function could end up having a negative effect when the user does not have the product available to them, at which point the motor function without the product may be reduced due to a lack of practice. Potential risks such as these show that long-term effects of the use of a product should also be kept in mind throughout the design process. 
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