A good social designer searches a very large space of imagined designs, detecting problems with them, vectoring towards better designs.
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This requires a breadth of imagination few currently have—the designer must sometimes imagine things that are more like mechanisms, sometimes things that are more like group games, sometimes more like rituals, and so on. Something like a group voting process is likely to be all three.
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It also requires an awareness of problems that few people even think about. Sometimes a design will have perverse incentives—a mechanism design problem. For instance, your group voting process could incentivize people to conspire secretly before the vote. Alternatively, perhaps your voting process is just not engaging for people—more of a game or experience design problem. Maybe it's super fun, but doesn't create a thoughtful space of deliberation, one of the values that are its raison d'etat—this is a values-based design problem.
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And, a social designer makes space for many types of people, people who struggle to live by many types of values. To make a space that doesn't suppress those types of meaning, they'll need to recognize values besides their own, and the hard steps of living by them.
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Finally, most social designers will start with room-scale versions of their designs, and then work towards larger scales which have their own challenges.
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Few have all these skills yet. No training program really takes this on. (Not even ours).
- One thing we can do is find people who compliment our skills and work together. At we'll help you find those people. For free.Social Design Club/Cooperative
- And if you can invest in a more directed learning experience, the will give you three quests for learning values-based design and finding a crew with which you can continue to learn.School for Social Design