A good social designer searches a very large space of imagined designs, detecting problems with them, vectoring towards better designs.
This requires a breadth of imagination few currently have—the designer must sometimes imagine things that are more like mechanisms, sometimes things that are more like group games, sometimes more like rituals, and so on. Something like a group voting process is likely to be all three.
<aside> 🔻 Social designers must be good at imagining...
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These are the Human Systems "Structural Features"
It also requires an awareness of problems that few people even think about. Sometimes a design will have perverse incentives—a mechanism design problem. For instance, your group voting process could incentivize people to conspire secretly before the vote. Alternatively, perhaps your voting process is just not engaging for people—more of a game or experience design problem. Maybe it's super fun, but doesn't ****create a thoughtful space of deliberation, one of the ****values that are its *raison d'etre—*this is a values-based design problem.
<aside> 🔻 Social designers must be able to foresee and solve problems of...
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Human Systems trainings focus more on the latter two columns, because that's what's been missing from design curriculums. We are working to include more in the first two though.