GOVERNANCE, MONETIZATION, AND SCALING
Designing with care for the challenges in governance, monetization, scale.
- Platform designs can ensure the governance by the community itself is key as non-community members lack the shared needs, values and concerns of communities, particularly where sharing commodities have greater social value than monetary value.
- By allowing flexibility of governance in tool design, designers would support initiatives changing their rules based on learning from each other.
- Designers may play a key role in creating transparent documentation of the process and reusable design materials (e.g., templates, worksheets, how-to guides), valuing the new forms of thinking and interactions around money. Those can be adapted repeatedly across various instances of platform coops in their cultural, linguistic, and geographical contexts.
- Designers can embed fun, care, and convenience into their platforms as mechanisms to reciprocate the hard work of volunteerism with a sense of solidarity and collectivism.
- Designers may critically assess the conditions and boundaries of scale for sharing initiatives and coops and outline their potential harms and benefits for the community members.
- Designers should account for longer turn-around design cycles and consider time-limited engagement in the community and levels of engagement of their stakeholders.
INCLUSION & JUSTICE
Designing for overcoming digital exclusion and social injustice.
- Designers can help redistribute the position of power to influence decision-making at the design phases, and they can work explicitly not to exclude the most underprivileged ones.
- Designers can help coops adapt their systems in other localities and contexts of use and help design systems that are for both digital and non-digital communities.
- Designers can help coops adapt their systems in other localities and contexts of use and help design systems that are for both digital and non-digital communities.
- Designers can help create a balance between customization and appeal for underprivileged coops so that they get more help from the ones that are already well off.
- To aid decentralisation and the move from capitalist to cooperative design, designers may formulate their design goals accommodating concepts like anonymity or flexible options for digital and non-digital needs for inclusion.
- Designers can employ an ecosystems-focused cooperativism stance to support inclusion, equity, and justice. They can cooperate with each other to build actionable and open design systems and for valuing good practices.
This work was supported by the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich grant No. FK-20-021.
