Now—often these are good ways of thinking about a problem. But there are consequences to focusing so much on goals, incentives, or packaged experiences. Here are three:
- Agency. People driven by goals or incentives aren’t using their full agency. It’s the same when people are experiencing packaged “good experiences”. They also aren’t using their full agency.
- Meaning. When people are driven by goals and incentives, or piped through good experiences, there’s something missing—something meaningful to us. A goal-driven life misses space for values like creativity, honesty, civic responsibility, etc. These values give life meaning.
- Sociality. Finally, packaged experiences, goal-driven funnels, and incentives mechansms tend to be only superficially social: the user is isolated, connected to other via transactions like purchases, likes, and so on. No strong relationships.
So, the design method I'll describe tries to fill this hole—when you care about making things deeply social, high-agency, and values-driven.
Unused
Mechanism design, incentives design, or gamification. These approaches all focus on extrinsic motivation. What if, instead, we look for the deeper and nobler motives that underlie people's attempts to get upvotes, followers points, and so on.
Another reason you might try for upvotes, followers, or whatever is to legitimize yourself within a social space, to legitimate a social move you want to make—to get a company funded, to get a proposal accepted, etc.
Usually point systems or money aren't the right way to approach legitimation.
Often people think that the way to build relationships or become legitimate is to amass followers or points in your app. Sometimes this is even this process can even work
and at least. To a surge of use for an app, but pretty soon, even the people who have succeeded. And the rat race of accumulating money,
followers, or points discover they haven't built the relationships that they wanted and that their social moves are still not legitimate. And don't have the impact that they hoped they could have.
If I asking the new questions, instead of the old questions,
we can avoid this run around and give people directly what they want.
So every move that’s made in a social system has some rule that makes it legitimate. Actually, it has many such rules. Because you can go backwards from any move and see a whole chain of moves and rules that make the next move legitimate.
Only members can vote. But only applicants can become members. And only people with a recommendation can apply. Etc.
If we take a page from an app, we can look for the legitimation process behind each piece of information.
Here on twitter, these posts are a legitimate part of my feed because of someone I followed, at the bottom, and because the twitter algorithm has guessed that I like “funny tweets” and “tabletop role-playing games”.
But if I am on twitter to be vulnerable, or to be bold, the fact that my space is filled up with this information doesn’t help.
Side note on incentives
What exactly do you want to incentivize?
incentivize reviewers to approve only papers which subsequently do well. well, there's all sorts of game theory in thatincentivize authors to submit as many papers as possible.
It's much easier to think in terms of legitimation process maintaining kind of balance between quality and the amount of attention something's receiving as it moves upward, in terms of legitimation.
People whose attention is more constrained, such as journal editors and other scientists in the field will see things later. After more positive signals have been garnered
if we set up a legitimation process, so that there's a wide end of the funnel like university admissions more convincing someone to be an advisor it will remain democratic and accessible even at its later stages
this is hard to do, and science doesn't always succeed at it. But the incentives mindset doesn't make it any easier. In fact, the collapsing of an elaborate social process into a simple mechanism rules out most solutions
If you make these shifts and understanding the user you don't see people a stupid lazy and over committed to those needing space and stuck and wading through a lot of bad information. And that leads to a different set of questions.
Instead of looking for a smooth experience that can be incentivized, that saves time money. We look for a supportive container. We want to unstuck various steps in relationship formation and contribution and we want to surface the information that most helps people live by their values.
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So, VBSD is about using these kinds of practices to make a certain kind of space. A space where people can attend to what they value while they make choices, and where the various hard steps of living by their values become easier to take.
In our terminology, we use ritual, relationship building, and legitimation thinking. We iterate with space jams and social prototypes. Looking for a design that addresses some values cards and some hard steps.
What would things be like, if spaces came back, big time? If there were suddenly more space-making entrepreneurs, more people doing this kind of design, and if the best spaces were measured and rewarded, and rose to the top.
There was a time in our society before the current kinds of design took over, Before design was about achieving goals, delivering a packaged experience, or giving incentives.
Back then, spaces were stronger.
Religions were largely about making spaces.Local communities and local democracies were largely about making spaces.
The modern shift, towards funnels and tubes, has meant an overall decline in spaces. So much so, that we can equate modernism with a decay in spaces.
In this talk, I want to look at new way to design. One that starts with the opposite idea: that people in a supportive environment will build relationships, contribute, and can be clear and self-authoring.
- There are people who intuit the values of those around them.
- There are people who build spaces—who make research labs, festivals, introspective tools, games, art projects—all based on those values.
- There are people who know how to anticipate these problems—relationship building problems, container problems, legitimation problems.