Participatory Design for Cryptoeconomic Systems

Or “How to include stakeholders of cryptoeconomic systems in the design process, from concept to delivery.”

I currently have two pillars in my craft as a design strategist at ConsenSys:

Employing game design theory and practice in cryptoeconomic systems. Fomenting participatory design as one of our team’s core practices.

You can read more about the first pillar in my article about our experiments in levels and flow (as part of an ongoing series I just started). However, in this particular article I’m going to introduce my forays into participatory design at ConsenSys.

What is participatory design?

Participatory design is characterized by an opening of the design process to non-designers. It is an active creation of spaces, moments, and methods that fosters and empowers users during the design process. In other words, the users get a say in what is being created by and for them.

This is by no means a new idea, and in fact started during the 1960s in Scandinavia, under the name of “cooperative design.”

In an article I love on the history of design thinking (a concept that I might write about in another article), Jo Szczepanska describes the rise of cooperative design quite nicely:

Instead of being closed off and selective, here designers played the role of facilitators or guides, with everyone from experts to workers and inhabitants co-designing products and services they would want to use. Many highly innovative projects […] were developed to help workers, unions, workplaces and even government departments tackle the changing workplace environment as a reaction to the introduction of new technologies.

Years later, cooperative design came to America, and for some obscure reasons, got a new name: participatory design.

But how does participatory design have anything to do with cryptoeconomics?

What does participatory design look like in cryptoeconomic system design?

I’ve been introducing participatory design in all the different concentric circles of the production of cryptoeconomic systems. My objective is to break down the circumferences of each circle as much as possible.

I’ve so far deployed participatory design in cryptoeconomic systems in four ways: developer workshops, facilitation tools and frameworks, in-person simulations with final users, and stakeholder workshops. You can expect an article with the specifics of each one very, very, soon, but for now, let’s look at a summary of each one.