type

Design Research
Field Study

method

Qualitative Interviews
Design Workshop

period

2018-2019

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Sharing economy services have become increasingly popular. In addition to various well-known for-profit activities in this space (e.g., ride and apartment sharing), many community groups and non-profit organizations offer collections of shared things (e.g., books, tools) that explicitly aim to benefit local communities. Both non-profit and for-profit approaches will see an increased use in the future. To support designers in devising new sharing economy services, in collaboration with colleagues from renowned design schools, I developed the Sharing Economy Design Cards, a design toolkit in the form of a card deck. This work presents two deployments of the cards: (1) in individual interviews with sixteen designers and sharing economy domain experts; and (2) in a series of design workshops adapting the Google Design Sprint format.

This work demonstrates that the use of the cards not only facilitates the creation of future sharing platforms and services in a collaborative setting, but also helps to evaluate existing sharing economy services as an individual activity. In particular, the Sharing Economy Design Cards provided hands-on guidance on different parts of the design process, namely (1) focused brainstorming, (2) prototyping activities, (3) advocating results to the stakeholders, (4) refining and detailing ideas, and (5) evaluating existing concepts. The cards also facilitated creating new design material to inform the decision-making, and enabled speculation on future-looking opportunities of their use beyond devising sharing economy services. 

Project in collaboration with Masako Kitazaki from TU Delft (The Netherlands), Will Odom from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (Canada), Jeremías Albano from University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Marc Langheinrich from USI Lugano (Switzerland).

Learn more and download the Sharing Economy Design Cards