How to prepare for your presentation at the Social Design Club

What is Social Design Club?

1. Select one element of a system you are designing.

Here is a list of the kinds of features we're thinking about. It should be:

• Specific and tightly scoped (adding a notification, or changing max group size, as opposed to creating a newsfeed or creating an entire event)
• Important to you and to how the system works as a whole
• Something you're open and curious about ('Hmm, I'm not sure if we should change this' as opposed to 'this is a core element we are very hesitant to mess with')

2. Create a story about how this feature failed

(or, if it hasn't yet, how it might fail in a way you are genuinely concerned about)

• Who was involved? What steps did they take?
• What was unexpected or challenging to anticipate?
• What happened, and what would you have liked to have happen?

3. Come up with 1-3 precise questions

—that you want to consider about the feature you chose.

Either pick your questions from the chart below, or...

Come with questions of similar specificity, e.g.,

• 'Should we open our retreat with a guided meditation or a visual overview of the weekend's schedule?'
• 'Should we add an edit button for tweets?'
• 'Should we make content moderation decisions publicly visible in an archive?'

4. Prepare a presentation (15-20 mins)

Including:

1. An overview of your system
   • What it is and what it does
   • The wider context it exists within (e.g. in order to explain his scientific collaboration community to us, Ben Reinhardt needed to explain how DARPA workshops are run and describe the cultural context of scientific researchers).
   • The status of the system (is it live? for how long? how many users? who?)
2. The specific element you chose and where it sits within the whole system (a screenshare demo is helpful here)