👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 [Analysis] Participatory design for cryptoeconomic systems – Andrea Morales

Participatory design, also known as cooperative design, is characterized by an opening of the design process to non-designers. Instead of being closed off and selective, designers play the role of facilitators or guides, with everyone from experts to workers and inhabitants co-designing products and services they would want to use. Participatory design allows you to check your assumptions with your actual users and stakeholders, understand user behaviors and confirm game theoretic design hypotheses. Participatory design in cryptoeconomic systems can be deployed in four ways:

• Developer workshops – These are multi-day sessions where whole development teams work on cryptoeconomic system design, including developers, designers, product owners, and whoever else is important in the strategic development of the system. This is uncommon in crypto as the design of such systems is usually owned by developers and economists only.
• Facilitation tools and frameworks – Tools such as systems maps (used to break down the functional parts of the system) and flow-charts divided by each of the stages (helps show the interactions in a customer's journey) are helpful for helping everyone understand the discussion.
• In-person simulations with final users – During in-person simulations people take on various roles and explore winning strategies and difficulties. This is useful for finding edge cases and working out the kinks of the system.
• Stakeholder workshops – Stakeholders are people who make-or-break your system or are even potential competitors of it. Having them participate brings in a much needed perspective on the system.