Radical Redesigns - An Outline for a Meetup Event

<aside> 🏙️ This is an event outline used at The School for Social Design and their textbook Values-Based Social Design.

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“Radical Redesigns” is structure you can do at your meetup. Organizers can join this facebook group.

At each meeting, the group starts with a societal institution—like voting, organizational hierarchy, private property, social networks, or media—and they redesign it using a few different lenses. Ideally, members read this short or this longer intro essay before the meeting, so everyone’s familiar with the three lenses.

• Lens 1: Decision-making
• Lens 2: Deal-making
• Lens 3: Culture-shaping

To summarize, institutions must be robust against three kinds of failure. First, if they produce unjustifiable outcomes, they fail at decision-making, and lose legitimacy. Second, if their incentives are gamed, they fail at deal-making, and end up rewarding fraud, defection, or bad actors. Finally, if they undermine the values they depend on, they fail at culture-shaping, and participation becomes meaningless, performative, or careerist.

The event unfolds in four stages:

1. The whole group brainstorms to find problems with the institution across all lenses. (20 minutes)
2. Participants split up into three subgroups, each of which plays games to practice using one lens for analysis and redesign. (1 hour)
3. The group reshuffles into teams with representation from each lens/subgroup. Redesigns are made. (40 minutes)
4. Each group presents. (30 minutes)

Besides the essay linked above, all facilitators need are the games which each subgroup uses to practice their lens.