Final Master Project

This project is part of my Industrial Design master thesis, conducted in the Systemic Change research group. Systemic Change considers the role of design in societal challenges by studying the impact of interventions on community-level ecosystems (TU/e, 2022). During my master’s, I have been coached by Caroline Hummels in the Transforming Practices research group. The Transforming Practices framework aims at tackling societal challenges by helping multistakeholder teams to research, design and innovate transformative practices, which are inherently wicked and systemic. This is in line with my professional Identity and vision as I prefer to design for the transformation of ecosystems and feel the responsibility to design innovative experiences to educate and support people.

Final Master Project at Rathenau Instituut

During my FMP, I have contributed to the Towards a socially responsible metaverse project of the Rathenau Instituut. The goal of this project by Rathenau Instituut is to stimulate public debate on a socially responsible interpretation of the metaverse. My internship supervisor was Mariëtte van Huijstee, the coordinator of this team.

My project

Development

The client

About the Rathenau Instituut

The Rathenau Instituut is an independent research institute that studies the impact of science, innovation and technology on society. The institute is mandated to inform politics and the public about these issues. The institute owes its name to Gerhart Rathenau, inter alia former director of Philips’ Physics Lab (Natlab) in Eindhoven, who in 1979 led the Commission Rathenau to lead an investigation into the social impact of the computer chip. Since October 2022, Eefje Cuppen is the director of the Rathenau Instituut. In her work on participatory multi-modelling as a professor of Governance of Sustainability at the University of Leiden, she states that to support policy and decision-making on sustainability, it is important to involve citizens and stakeholders in these processes. This vision is in line with my professional identity and vision. The work program for the coming 2 years consists of four themes: Digitalisation, Climate, Health and Knowledge for Transitions. In addition, the Rathenau Instituut has the formal task to inform policy and society about the functioning of the scientific system.

Design Opportunity for Rathenau Instituut

The team working on the Towards a socially responsible metaverse project encountered challenges in designing a workshop for citizens of Rotterdam at Immersive Tech Week. They were eager to use design methods, however, they are not trained as a designer. Therefore, they asked me to join the team as of October 2022. In this way, I was able to get to know the Rathenau Instituut (by for example making a poster for a conference) and its challenges as well as what I can mean for them as a designer. Besides, this internship gave me 3 months to formulate a proposal for my FMP, which is of relevance for the Rathenau Instituut, the design research community and the required level for a master’s graduation.

iterative process for developing the metaverse workshop

Expertise Areas
in relation to my Final Master Project

Creativity and Aesthetics

I used a variety of creative techniques, such as low-fi prototyping, to challenge my perspective and refine ideas. In this project, I made prototypes to communicate my ideas and thoughts with the client. This was important to the progress because there was no common vocabulary or experience to discuss the design options (yet). Working it out enabled an iterative process.

User and Society

Designing for citizen participation has been contributing to my development of the expertise area of User and Society. I had to take into account the variation in the participants' frame of reference and knowledge of the metaverse. This was important to allow everyone to participate because inclusive research practices of public organisations will contribute to more social justice.

Business and Entrepreneurship

Designing for and with a client has been contributing to my development of the expertise area of Business and Entrepreneurship. Working with a team and being in the office every week allowed me to experience how the company operates, what their mission is and what role design research could play in it. My project aims to provide information from a case study on the metaverse with a transdisciplinary perspective as a way to connect the theory and practice of citizen participation. These insights have been compiled into a dialogue toolbox tailored to the Rathenau Instituut’s needs.

Technology and Realization

In the first phase of the metaverse workshop, participants become familiar with the metaverse. Participants can add a digital layer over reality by placing an engraved plexiglass on top of a photograph. The engraved plexiglasses are designed in Illustrator Adobe and made with a laser cutter. The black tokens of the dialogue toolbox are also laser cut but instead exist of wood. Plotting the dialogue options is done on a tablecloth, which has a round design printed on it. The other attributes are handmade.

Math, Data and Computing

The research by Rathenau Instituut on immersive technologies (e.g. VR, AR) and harmful online mechanisms exposes societal risks. In the workshop with experts, we explored those risks, such as the use of data in shared public space in a future metaverse. The Rathenau Instituut wants to explore in a participatory manner what a metaverse according to public values would look like. The workshop format is developed to have this discussion.

Feedback from collegues

An important component of Brigitte’s internship was to help us design a workshop format that would enable laypeople to discuss the societal impact of ‘the metaverse’: a vision of our digital environment of the future using technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. But how to discuss this highly technical subject with people without knowledge of the metaverse? Brigitte had a genius idea: to use a picture of a daily scene in a public space (eg: a picture of a city market square with people and buildings on it) and overlay this picture with engraved glasses to simulate a digital layer over this reality: one with factual information about the buildings, and one with personal information about the people on the picture. This proved to be a low-tech visualization of what augmented reality technology could do in the future and a great way to start discussing the opportunities and risks of this technology with laypeople. Since November 2022, we have already used this method in several venues: during the VR days in Rotterdam in November 2022, during the European Commission’s Citizen’s Panel on Virtual Worlds in Brussels in February 2023, and during RightsCon, the international conference on human rights and technology in Costa Rica in June 2023. And we will most likely use it multiple times after, for instance, when our institute is visited by an external evaluation committee end of June 2023, to help them get acquainted with our work. All in all, Brigitte’s creativity, knowledge of design and skills have been a great contribution to our institute’s toolbox to discuss highly technical topics with people from diverse backgrounds. Well done Brigitte! Dr. Mariëtte van Huijstee, Research Coordinator and Brigitte’s supervisor

My project

This research used a mix of methods to come to new insights around citizen and stakeholder dialogues on immersive technologies, ultimately to design a design research proposal for supporting citizen participation projects within organisations such as the Rathenau Instituut.

Ethnography study

How could the Rathenau Instituut engage with citizens on complex
and unfamiliar issues?

In the first part of my internship, I explored which design methods suit the dialogue projects of the Rathenau Instituut and co-developed a workshop approach for the metaverse project. I noted comments, course of action and activities in a notebook that I always carried with me. Working with a team and being in the office every week allowed me to experience how the company operates, what its mission is and what role design research could play in it.

The created workshop format for the Rathenau Institute consists of three parts: (1) conceptualisation, (2) personal experience and (3) shared experience. The workshop format is designed to encourage open-endedness, generosity, comparison of scenarios and critical thinking among participants. I chose these characteristics because I wanted to become more comfortable with prototyping design interventions whereby ‘participants casts their experience forward in ways that can answer to the experience of others, and they likewise, so as to achieve a correspondence that goes beyond what any of them could have imagined at the outset, and that in turn allows them to carry on their lives together’ (Ingold, 2018, p. 64). These design interventions support minor gestures or ‘little disturbances or distractions where things veer off course, opening experience to potential variation’ (Ingold, 2018, p. 66).

Personal experience drawing a digital layer on reality during the metaverse workshop.

Toolbox

How could the Rathenau Instituut engage with citizens on complex
and unfamiliar issues?

Researchers from the Rathenau Instituut should be able to engage with citizens on complex and unfamiliar issues. In an iterative process, I worked with researchers to explore what they would need to work with the previously developed workshop format themselves. A key insight I gained is that they find it difficult to assess whether their project is suitable for this format or if another design method might be more appropriate. Therefore, I used the theory by Fung (2006) on citizen participation and combined that with methods of design fields related to public organisations to create a toolbox.

To make it manageable for the users of the toolbox, I have divided the relevant design methods into 2 design domains: social design and service design.

Service design

Service Design is a practice to develop or improve services. It often focuses on a specific target group for which the service is being developed. An example of service design is the internal research at the Rathenau Instituut of the ontwerpend onderzoek team (design research project group) in the months of February to May 2023. I was part of this team and prepared the biweekly sessions. In total, 6 researchers and I have formulated personas based on interviews about the barriers colleagues face in applying design methods at the Rathenau Instituut. This information could be used to adjust the structure, resources or communication of research projects to accommodate design research methods. The 5-step Design Thinking method fits in with Rathenau Institute projects that focus on Service Design.

Social design

Social Design is a practice for exploring social issues. These issues are not easy to solve because there is no consensus on how to address the issue or there is little knowledge available about the issue. Social Design methods are therefore suitable for dealing with issues that are complex and contain conflicting interests or values. Additionally, Social Design methods are often used to map underlying socio-technical relationships that indicate the impact of a technology or innovation on society. The workshop format developed during the first part of my master’s thesis applies Social Design methods.

Toolbox: The Journey towards Dialogue

The dialogue toolbox is designed to help researchers choose between social and service design methods. When choosing Social Design, it is recommended to use the workshop format and when choosing service design it is recommended to go through the five-step design thinking process. This is done to make the step to design research as small as possible.

The journey towards dialogue consists of 3 dimensions which are plotted on a round tablecloth by the researchers of the project team. The dimensions are (1) the impact of citizen participation on a research project, (2) the approach of participant selection and (3) the impact of data on decision-making. Each dimension has 4-5 options to choose from. By moving the tokens with the options closer to the centre, it can be indicated that that option is considered more relevant for that project. Ultimately, a project team ends up with 3 features from each dimension that need to occur in the dialogue session with citizens and serve as guidelines for picking a design method. The toolbox is ready to use!