We all want better social systems! We want social networks rich in meaningful relationships, organizations which allow for great individual agency, political institutions that produce great collective decisions, and so on.
But to get there, we must face two big challenges: one is about design criteria, the other is about imagination.
Better Criteria
When designing for an individual, it might be enough to focus on their goals (Jobs to Be Done), feelings (âcalmâ design, âdelightfulâ interactions, and most UX design), or life situation (Personas).
This isnât good enough for social systems. To design a good social environment, you need to understand how people want to live and relate with others. In our terminology, you need to understand their values. You need to know what they find meaningful.
Many designers can guess othersâ goals and feelings, can empathize about them, and can design for them. But few can see other people and social environments in terms of values. Doing this often requires a shift in how you see yourselfâif you see yourself mostly in terms of goals, or in terms of feelings, learning to see yourself in values can be life-changing. And you need to do this, to collect good values from users.
We tackle this problem in Quest 1 atÂ
Broader Imagination
Most people, even leading designers (inventors of voting systems, social networks, etc) can only imagine changing their designs in certain ways. Other changes donât occur to them.
So, when designers at Facebook think about harassment or spam, they mostly think about exclusion (âBad Actorsâ). They miss other kinds of changes, because they havenât trained their design imagination. For instance
- New Kinds of Relationships. Imagine a buddy system, with shared responsibility for posts.
- Settings for Posting. Or giving posters a clearer sense of their likely audience, and how much time that audience will spend with the post.
- Legitimation Changes. Or peer-to-peer fact checking, the staged release of posts, or posts with clear criteria that determine their level of visibility, which the audience can engage with.
Whatâs true for social networks is just as true for dinner parties or voting systems. Dinner hosts think about setting, but not â for instance â how topics get picked. Designers of voting systems think about incentives, but not about the settings which would lead to more thoughtful votes, or about relationship types aside from voter and proposer.
In Quest 2, we overcome this lack of imagination with specificity and breadth of prototypes.
- Specificity. We get nerdy about how environments affect people. For instance, speaking honestly might be harder in noisy rooms or with little time. Why is that? Perhaps because honesty involves reflecting, and this requires time and quiet. Honesty may also be difficult between online âcreatorsâ and their audience. Why? Perhaps honesty requires more nuanced relationships, like mentor, confidant, etc. In an exercise called âAction Mapsâ, we break values like honesty into small necessary actions we call âhard stepsâ. These show why a value is hard in one environment, but not another.
- Breadth of Prototypes. We develop your design imagination by focusing on different areas in turn, and you make a prototypes and play design games in each area. Youâll take a value that you care about (e.g., a type of curiosity you value) and make many separate prototypes and designs. First, youâll study the kinds of relationships that foster it; then, what settings and timings support your kind of curiosity; which kinds of social network shapes and information flows support it; what kinds of people support it; and finally, what incentives support your value and what might undermine it.
This Program Meets Your Life and Work
We've structured our program so it can work with your existing design projects.
The problem of design criteria â the focus of Quest 1 â is closely related to user research. In this quest, youâll take a population you want to serve, and learn where they can live by their values, and where their values are suppressed. Youâll learn to write their values, and your own, unambiguously. Then, in Quest 2, youâll build your design imagination. Youâll use games and make interpersonal simulations of your ideas, zooming in on designs that support the values youâve collected. Finally, in Quest 3, youâll do a full design, of something you intend to implement.
This all requires user research techniques that will be new to you, and more prototyping than you might expect â but we believe it will accelerate your design project overall, for an investment of only a couple hours a week.
If you use the textbook as part ofÂ