About the course

‘Digital commons: Strategic design for society’ is an advanced Master course about designing for digital societal development. The course introduces the students to how design methods and tools can be used strategically to address societal challenges in the context of the digital shift.

This course has a focus on using design in the broader context of sustainable societal development, and will use the lense of digital technologies and platforms to investigate new possibites for positive change. Students will get to apply and expand their skills and mindsets as designers through practical, exploratory projects where the design of digital serivces and interactions are put to use to work with a range of societal issues - including sustainability, power and equity, policies for urban- development, innovation and knowledge, welfare and public services, and citizen participation. Alongside these practice-led projects the course will offer a selection of theoretical and inspirational lectures and seminars on topics such as technology critique, political science, sociology, studies of everyday life. Through this course students will also learn about theories and methods from the field of strategic design and get practical experience from applying these in design projects. Dan Hill describes strategic design as follows:

"Strategic Design takes the core principles of contemporary design practice – user research and ethnography, agile development, iterative prototyping, participation and co-design, stewardship, working across networks, scales and timeframes – and then it points this toolkit at ethical concerns, addressing systemic change within complex systems, and broader societal outcomes.” Dan Hill (2019)

A particular focus for the course is exploring how digital services can be designed to expand and enhance social infrastructures for everyday life. Social infrastructures are the common spaces, facilities and insitutions that enable social life and participation in society. Key examples include both formal institutions like libraries, museums, public pools, culture venues, parks, playgrounds, and sports-halls, as well as more informal structures like street-corners, cafes, and organisations and clubs that contribute to socially resilient and sustainable cities and communities (Klinenberg, 2018). Today, our use of social infrastructures are increasingly interwoven with digital platforms, as forms of digital commons, engendering new forms of practices, functions, and possibilities. In this course we will investigate how digital tools and means may be used to strengthen and enhance social infrastructures and thereby contribute to societal development. We will also explore and conceptualise a broader understanding of digital commons as social infrastructure by designing and developing protoypes and interventions that help us examine the digital shift in society thorugh citizen-led participation and user-experience. Through the projects in the course students will use design methods to develop strategic interventions in the world today, as prototypes and pilot-projects.

The course brings together research-initiatives at AHO with ongoing society development-projects. The ‘Digital Commons: Strategic design for society’ course is organised together with the research-group Digital Urban Living / Digital commons and is a part of D-Box, the National Centre for Transforming Public Services (a collaboration between AHO, BI and DOGA). Key partners and collaborators from these research-groups and networks will be involved in the course. This course builds in part on the series of courses organised by Digital Urban Living over the past years, and will continue our exploration of many of the themes addressed in here, including digital society, sharing culture, inclusion, social sustainabiliy and trust.