Cards FOR HUMANITY

Adversarial Design is a type of design that evokes and engages political issues, and Agonism is a political theory that emphasizes potentially positive aspects of certain forms of political conflict. Wicked Problems often are political, and with them at the core of our design, we certainly needed to know how to emphasize the positives of disagreement.

The point of Bohm Dialogue is not to defend your own opinions or to make trades of information and influence others, but to listen with sympathy and interest and to understand others’ positions and to be open to changing your own point of view.

Bohm emphasized that in order to create a coherent culture, it required dialogue between different subcultures where they could share their own meanings in order to create new meanings together.

Critical Design is an attitude. In can be speculative, conceptual, provocative, and itcan be darkly satirical. It’s not looking for a solution as much as it’s looking to identify a problem and provoke discussion. Critical Design asks, “What if?”, but it isn’t asking about benefits the future could bring like an orthodox design method would. It’s asking “What if we allow this problem to keep going unchecked?”, creating often satirically horrific visions of the future.

Co-design is an approach to design that’s concerned with getting stakeholders (such as community members) involved as equal collaborators. Co-design prizes lived experience and the perspective of every end-user it can get its hands on as it tries to design a solution that actually functions intuitively for the people it’s intended for.

Design Thinking is a non-linear process that involves many iterations of an idea, and often many ideas themselves. It allows for a robust ideation process that overlaps with its other phases which include emphasizing, defining, prototyping, and testing. Design thinking circles back on itself frequently, allowing for free and grand ideation without constraint (otherwise known as spitballin’).

Game Theory is a quantitative way of examining social interaction, and can also provide theoretical insights on cooperation. Using Game Theory’s Shapley Value, (the method of dividing up costs in cooperative games), alongside socially critical design philosophies like adversarial design and critical design, can illustrate where we fall short in collaboration and fair contributions.

Game Theory gave us our definition of a game as "any interaction between people in which each person’s payoff is affected by the decisions made by others".

Gamification is the process of adding game mechanics into concepts, designs, and environments that are traditionally not games. Gamification can make these environments more engaging and can allow for more directed outcomes by setting up conditions of play (aka.. The Rules of The Game).

Just like the name implies, Participatory Action Research (PAR) emphasizes participation and action. It seeks to make sense of the world through collective efforts to transform it. PAR’s main tenet of collective inquiry aims to lead to social change through experimentation grounded in experience and social history.

The Pluriverse is a condition in which many worlds fit in. Based on Arturto Escobar’s 2018 book, Designs for the Pluriverse, the concept of the Pluriverse embraces the notion of differences – biological difference, cultural difference, ontological difference. Designing for the Pluriverse is about creating cultural meanings and practices, experiences, and particular ways of living.