Circulate Project: Design Canvas Digital Platforms for Research Communities

As part of the Circulate Project we designed a canvas (downloadable below) to help designers and companies discover the values within a particular resource community, understand which values should be made explicit and how they can be aligned with the affordances of the technologies. 

The canvas employs a Value Sensitive Design (VSD) framework that can help explore the values at stake, the affordances of technologies, and the motivations and interests of stakeholders. It relates to technological innovation, and the design of actual services and features of digital platforms for resource communities. As such, it can help structure the design process from the start. Alternatively, the canvas can be used during the design process to explore how various values found in a particular community relate to the features of a particular digital service. The six design dilemmas are meant to further explicate some of the tensions that may arise when encoding these values into a digital infrastructure.