Social design cookbook & toolkit: Collaborative tools for designing social cooperation

Abstract

As the popularity of applying design principles to businesses, digital products or services grows, so does the number of design toolkits. However, they are not suitable for community, collaborative, multi-stakeholder projects.

The Master's thesis Social Design Cookbook & Toolkit: Collaborative Tools for Designing Social Cooperation examines how a carefully designed toolkit can help free association in a workshop environment to design social cooperation by providing frameworks. The paper discusses why designers need a completely different approach today than they did a few decades ago and applies the theory in practice in design projects Social Design Cookbook and the accompanying workshop toolkit.

The method and its toolkit result from a great number of workshops where they were tested live with a wide variety of participants. The outcome is the result of a long iteration process in which the developers and facilitators took into account the feedback from the participants when making decisions from the perspective of graphic design, usability and user experience.

Social Design Cookbook, the first project presented in this thesis, uncovers what it takes to organise successful and sustainable social initiatives. The book introduces Social Design Canvas, a tool to analyse and design new forms of social collaboration and cooperation, and demonstrates its use through several case studies.

Based on the workshops' experience, we have developed the Social Design Cookbook Toolkit, which, as an accompaniment to Social Design Canvas, is a set of physical cards that help designers be aware of different aspects they need to consider when creating their own collaborative design cooperation. In response to the pandemic and physical distancing, we finally developed a digital, interactive version that participants can use online - regardless of their locations.

The study demonstrates how employing participatory design methods and considering user needs during the process can result in a user-friendly, functioning outcome. Combining with designer expertise, the project is developed into an engaging, hands-on tool to inspire the audience to activism.