So one of the most important things we learn to do, and quest to, is to widen our design imaginations. Here's an example. Adam is frustrated by lab meetings, she has a science lab. He wants them to be more respectful, more charitable, and he sees some status games crowding that out. Adams thought a little bit about social networks and a little bit about events. So his first idea is to get people to ask their questions of the presenter anonymously. shipper, Cluedo status games, or other incentives, reputational incentives. But if Adam had a different background, he might have a better idea. If Adam was a game designer, he might make lab meetings into a kind of cooperative game where the presenter needs to satisfactorily answer three audience questions to win. And the questions need to be tough. If Adam had a background designing rituals or as a camp counselor, he might put some kind of group bonding activity like trust fall at the beginning of the event. If Adam had a background in organizational design, he might design the q&a Part of the lab meeting as a series of one on ones. In quest two, we want to teach you to think of all of these possibilities immediately. And to have a good intuition, but how to adapt them and combine them so that they fit the original context. So they fit so they still fit into the context of a lab meeting. and support the value you've, you're working to port very well. To do this, we'll teach you to think like a game designer, sometimes Irish shield designer and mechanism designer, and so on. And to fold your ideas, ideas of these various sorts, in into social designs of various kinds. For instance, Adams lab buddies might not be up for calling a new style of lab meeting again, or thinking about how to win. With the same design that would work as a game can be implemented as a worksheet that doesn't look like a game at all. Or worksheet that appears to merely be tracking for instance, the toughness of the questions asked and the success of the response. In general, we'll make the best social designs if we give ourselves a great freedom, and space of imagination, if we turn a lab meeting into a game or ritual, organization, brainstorm about these other modes. And then fold the features we've come up with back into what fits in a lab meeting. And this is what you learn how to do in quest two
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it's clear that different designers have different sensibilities, we often celebrate this fact that we can recognize a chair designed by Herman Miller or computer designed by Johnny Ive. But, but in social design there's a kind of a danger, it is in the idiosyncrasies of different designers, which is that any particular designer will miss most of the possibilities to make a space good for value. Some social designers focus a lot on mechanism and incentives, they miss opportunities to use other features that aren't quick to their hand features like pacing and timing or setting a scene. Someone who's trying to create a space for vulnerability using only incentives will struggle, compared to someone who's good. Who's better with with timings and settings. Because social design is so new, And there's so few comprehensive programs for it. Almost everyone is missing one of the, one of these tools that they would need. Does that in space, that's conducive to the values and their design, the values they aim to design around, so far as we know, the school for social designs quest two is the only social design program that focuses on this problem. We do this by focusing on different aspects of social design that you might otherwise overlook, in turn, just as in a visual design program they might focus on color. And then on layout information hierarchy, And so on. We've broken down. Factors of social design into five chapters.
Something I forgot to say on our call, maybe it's obvious—it's often necessary to move to a more flexible domain (usually the domain of rituals or games), to think about improving a system for a value. Once you have a "gamified" version of the lab meeting that is better for the value, you can port the new features back to the original domain.
To take my suggestion as an example ("presenter must advance across the room by answering 3 questions from 3 people satisfactorily"), you could port this by sending an email before the lab meeting with a little worksheet for tracking this, saying "I've been thinking about our lab meetings and I want to start tracking some data, and looking at different ways we might think of what the goal is. Today, I'm going to be using this worksheet to track a potential goal. I thought I'd let you all know in case you want to use it too.".