Social design is something we all do. When you host a dinner or start an organization, you think how the dinner should flow, and what the roles should be in the organization. That's social design. When you build an app and decide how moderation or signups should work—that's social design too.
The practices in this textbook are meant to work with a social design project of yours. You'll need a project you care about. You could redesign
<aside> ☝ What kind of projects work?
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Designers want to make their designs good for people. So, they need clear ideas about what's good for who. We use values—your own and other people's—as design criteria. To do this, you need to get much more specific ****about values. You need to interview people whose lives will be touched by your project, and collect their values.
<aside> 📦 Writing and interrogating your own values
You'll find evidence of them
<aside> 📦 Gather values from others
Values Elicitation Technique (VETing)
Our VETing interviews can be intimate, but this step is just as important for students with larger-scale projects. For example, Will from even.com led a major redesign of his app, away from the user-goal of getting a low-cost loan, towards a set of articulated user-values of becoming financially empowered. Our methods allowed even.com to name what financial empowerment means for users, to make their redesign testable, and those values monitorable in user surveys and dashboards.
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<aside> 📦 Finding the "hard steps" of living by a value
When are you best able to be honest, bold, creative, etc? When does it become impossible?
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<aside> 🎒 In The School for Social Design, we organize practice sessions to get good at the interviewing process, and support you to interview a population you're concerned with. This takes up the first month of the program. It involves weekly meetings with your guide, a few group sessions, 2-3 meetings with mentors, and possibly a transformative experience.
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To imagine better social designs, conventional methods of sketching, brainstorming, and prototyping aren't enough. As you learn, you'll imagine radical new approaches to your project.
<aside> 📦 Intuiting how values can be supported
Sketch many ways to support a value, focused on different "hard steps".
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<aside> 📦 Embedded prototyping
We'll help you make quick experiences, games, and structured interactions for a test population, to explore how a set of constraints affects a value.
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<aside> 📦 Extending your design considerations
Every designer tends towards imagining some kinds of solutions, but not others. (For instance, blockchain and mechanism designers tend to focus on incentives, and miss other ways to support values—like relationship structures, theatrical elements, and legitimation processes.)
So—to round out your imagination—we'll make you focus on design directions you don't naturally consider: some of your design sketches will focus on the kinds of relationships that foster that value; some, on what settings and timings support it; which kinds of social network shapes and legitimation processes support it; and finally, which incentives might support or undermine it.
Situation Salvage: Legitimation
Situation Salvage: Relationships
Chapter 5. Funnels, Tubes, and Spaces
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<aside> 🎒 In The School for Social Design, this imagination phase takes six weeks of sketching and prototyping. You'll meet with mentors to try other design directions. You'll test prototypes that help with particular hard steps.
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If you work in a team, or need to attract people into your system, you'll need to make the case for the values you picked, and show that your design is uniquely suited to support them.
<aside> 📦 Writing values clearly (so they serve as design criteria) and databasing them
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<aside> 📦 Illustrating the difference between values and norms, ideologies, goals, etc
Group Practice: Out of Character
Game: 👺 Out of Character w. Ideological Commitments
Situation Salvage for Beginners
Group Practice: 📬 Guess My Motive
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