The Social Design Workflow

The Social Design Toolkit offers a new design workflow that combines methods from Cultural Anthropology, Design Thinking, Participatory Design, User Experience Design, and Cultural Dimensions Theory. However, instead of investing itself too heavily in any of these, this workflow attempts to liberate its methods by providing opportunities for these disciplines to overlap.

The following steps will walk you through this process (click each step to view in detail):

Phase 1 | Identification

Step 1 | Identify the Problem

Try to figure out who has a need, what that need is, and why you should solve it.

Step 2 | Identify the Constraints

Placing the project within constraints will help you define the scope of what is plausible.

Step 3 | Identify the Stakeholders

Identify the stakeholders affected by the project.

Phase 2 | Preconception

Step 4 | Check your Biases

Begin by looking over Hofstede’s dimensions of culture and, for each of these, list 3-4 assumptions you have about stakeholder values.

Step 5 | Assumption Personas

Next, take one of your assumptions from each of these dimensions and group them together into a persona.

Phase 3 | Realization

Step 6 | Participatory Design Thinking

The Participatory Design Thinking model is a hybridization of Participatory Design methods with the Design Thinking workflow.

Step 7 | Reflect

At the end of your project, you should revisit the assumptions you made in Phase 2 and reflect on where you were right, where you were wrong, what methods were successful, and what you might do differently next time.

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