New Know How

Who we are

New Know How was launched in 2025 to bring together work previously carried out under the banners of Emma Blomkamp and CoDesignCo. It is proudly a heart-based business, meaning its primary purpose is to build the skills the world needs, rather than to maximise profit. Its work sits at the intersection of co-design, capability building, and community-engaged practice.

Co-design is a process of designing policies, services, or solutions together with the people who will be affected by them, rather than on their behalf. New Know How's programs are grounded in this approach, creating spaces for professional development that honour different ways of knowing and support practitioners to lead inclusive, collaborative processes.

New Know How is led by Dr Emma Blomkamp, an internationally recognised expert in co-design facilitation and capability building who has worked with public purpose organisations, designers, and changemakers since 2012. Emma is supported by a core team and a network of collaborators. New Know How serves purpose-driven individuals and organisations across the public, community, and social enterprise sectors, including designers, researchers, public servants, and community organisations.

What we do

New Know How provides training, coaching, mentoring, and learning partnerships that help individuals and organisations improve the outcomes of their policies, services, and systems. Its approach combines skills building, critical reflection, and practical guidance, and is designed so that participants develop capabilities that benefit multiple projects and careers over time, rather than just one engagement.

Programs and partnerships support clients to:

• build skills, knowledge, and understanding in co-design and inclusive engagement
• facilitate critical reflection on their practice and approaches
• improve project outcomes through early community input and participatory methods
• strengthen organisational capability to meet consultation and engagement requirements
• collaborate more effectively across teams and with external partners

New Know How has worked across a wide range of sectors and contexts. Examples of client work include supporting a community services provider to develop an innovative pilot addressing homelessness caused by family violence, helping a health research team plan vaccination service delivery with and for young people with intellectual disability, supporting a social enterprise to respectfully engage First Nations employees and health workers across the country to co-create digital products and campaigns, upskilling public servants to lead innovative employment projects with businesses and industry groups, and helping a regional university build the capacity of hundreds of staff to design transformative teaching and learning policies and practices.