Dimeji Onafuwa Literature Revie€¦ · 1. Understanding the commons The meaning of commons 2....

ONAFUWA LITERATURE REVIEW. SPRING 2015

RE-COMMONSING:

DESIGN-ENABLED COMMUNITIES

Dimeji Onafuwa

Literature Review

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Understanding the commons

The meaning of commons

2. Initializing the commons

Theoretical & practical situation

3. Constructing the commons

Collaborative design & design scenarios

Negotiation and costs

From expert to collaborator

Crowd out effect and cognitive surplus

Adaptive muddling

Localization and cosmopolitan localism

Design principles

Social affordances

4. Maintaining the commons

Roles

Openness and reciprocity

5. Exiting the commons

Fairness

Copyright and patent laws

Influence of external regulation

Babelization & Balkanization

6. Articulating a research agenda

APPENDIX: Relationship to recommonsing

ONAFUWA LITERATURE REVIEW. SPRING 2015 01

RE-COMMONSING: DESIGN-ENABLED COMMUNITIES

Dimeji Onafuwa :: Carnegie Mellon School of Design

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is to review key literature on Design & Commoning by framing and scoping

the what, how, who, where and why of re-commonsing (a term I use to highlight different research

areas relevant to design and commoning). The key question considered is: What is design’s impact

on initializing, constructing, maintaining and contributing to a commons? Secondary questions

include: Are there benefits or costs to contributing to a commons or commons-based peer-to-peer

network? What are the implications of a participant leaving a commons? Where is recommonsing

situated theoretically and practically, and what is the agency of the designer/practitioner in situating the

commons? The research implication is for social designers, but it borrows from an array disciplines, and

exploring these questions leads us to ideas from Yochai Benkler, Elinor Ostrom, Clay Shirkey, Sherry

Turkle, Michel Bauwens and many others in the discourse.

My research focus is on common property as it affects community, from rental property (finding

pre-exisiting community in renters), to vacant lots in geographic communities (exploring how online

collaboration may begin to amplify community strength). In order to do that, we need take a brief look

at common-pool resources. Common-pool resources are those, naturally or artificially made, that may

stand the risk of being over-consumed or depleted. They may be improved with specified agreements for

management and use enforcement. The threat of over-consumption is what distinguishes common-pool

resources (CPRs) from public goods (products or services provided usually by the public sector to members

of a community/society). When a social enterprise partners with local government and community

residents to explore ways to reclaim publicly owned vacant lots, the value intent has to be realized from

this exploration. Overuse of these lots in ways that deplete their usefulness, such as using them as

dumping sites or walk-paths, eventually reduces the productive value of the communities within which

they exist. Hence, these vacant lots may be considered to be CPRs. The same agreements pertaining to

use and replenishing of CPRs also cover what are known as institutional commons. Institutional commons

ensure access and practice of use. Institutions can be seen as rules and conventions that control the

organization of human interaction. These rules and norms may even be property regimes and copyright

laws relating to open access that have emerged from the new online networked economy (Benkler,

133). In Making Commons, Anna Seravalli indicates other versions of commons that may regulate the


practice of use (with the overarching rules and regulations that govern collective access, management

and ownership) to socio-technical infrastructuring (with human/non-human actors supporting ideas of

such use practice) and combine them to allow for meta-level interventions that may support grassroots

social innovations (Seravalli, 65).

The ecologist Garrett Hardin explores individual influence in a commons by arguing that individual

interests deplete resources and privatization or governmental oversight are always needed to maintain

such resources through access limitation (Hardin 1968). However, other researchers like Yochai Benkler

and Elinor Ostrom evidenced that the solution to the overconsumption problem is not access limitation

by some external regulatory force, but is instead the designing of the right conditions for use. My doctoral

research will explore what such designing means to a commons and how it may be collaborative and

participatory. My research will draw examples from current work with a Pittsburgh Pennsylvania based

social enterprise (GTECH Strategies) as well as an on-going joint research project with the Human-

Computer Interaction Institute & the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University (which explores

online communities and information sharing around rental property). The review also draws examples

from real world cases like WikiLeaks, Waze, Wikipedia and Napster. The scope of the review however

excludes details from work on constitutional law, policy, and mass media studies.

1 UNDERSTANDING THE COMMONS

1.1 A QUESTION OF “WHAT?”

The Meaning of Commons (digital vs. physical; market vs. non-market)

Ostrom’s perspective views a commons as a physical resource (like a land resource) and the extent

of use and viability of that resource, while Benkler sees it in terms of the informational resources in a

networked economy and the underlying power dynamics relating to the hierarchy of use and exchange.

Physical commons thereby relate to physical property regimes (Seravalli) and digital commons relate

to certain aspects of the non-market networked information economy - one where social exchange

(negotiated social agreements) is the means of transaction. Collaboration and self-regulation are

considered to be very important to the formation of a commons. When commons are negotiated within

these two constraints, their meaning yields different interpretations that mirror our shifting technological

landscape. This collaboration and self-regulation is now evident in both online and physical communities.

Market based networked economies have physical property regimes that are financially transacted,


economic considerations based on the levels of supply and demand and financial prices for goods set

by the markets. Non-market based economies are especially familiar to commons-based peer-to-peer

information networks (the term networks is used to specify systems of human interaction that imply both

individual agency and structural patterns) (Benkler, 725). However, according to Benkler, a collaborative

commons may not always be in opposition to a market economy and may not always be saturated with

valuable goods and economically viable outcomes. Karl Polanyi’s claims that market societies (a phrase

he uses interchangeably for capitalism) are dis-embedded economic relations. By this he believes that

land, labor, and money are not true commodities that can be sold on the market. As a result, he attributes

them as false, with the purported free market economy constructed partly on these commodities. He

believes that calculations of such commodities should instead be embedded in social relations (Polanyi,

76). However, Polanyi fails to acknowledge that there is indeed a transactional element to social relations

as well as most forms of social exchange. As a result of this unacknowledged transactional element,

there exists a continuum between market and non-market based transactions with the spaces between

not as crisp as Yochai Benkler purports when he claims that social sharing is merely a reallocation of

excess capacity of sharable goods (Benkler, 114). For example, if an individual contributes information to

Waze, a commons-based traffic navigation tool by alerting others of traffic jams or of real time occurrence

of police sightings, she is rewarded with points or what Waze calls “road goodies” as a top app user

in her area. These accumulated points may be transacted for benefits like the capability to contribute

to the editing and modification of local maps. The Waze example indicates how gamification and social

transaction may in fact be used to design the right conditions for a commons-based platform to flourish.

It is clear that the awards and incentives shared here may present as something of transactional value.

2 INITIALIZING THE COMMONS

2.1 A QUESTION OF “WHERE?”

Theoretical & Practical Situation: The Swampy Lowlands of Problem Solving

Social complexity makes creating a commons a much more difficult proposition than designing tangible

interactions or enhancing user interface. The process bears no tested and true algorithm or step-by-

step guide (Kollock, 1996) but instead involves a combination of skill, social collaboration, reflection

and action. In Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön unpacks the theoretical space

defining the messy and confusing problems that defy technical solution as the “swampy lowland of


problem solving”(Schön, 3). These problems exemplify challenges for social designers who work within

communities and with socio-technical systems. Researchers believe that solving social problems

requires not just a mastery of skills but also a recognition of the contribution from fields ranging from

policy to business, design, anthropology and sociology. Schön distinguishes between this knowledge-

in-action (high-level expertise and spontaneous anticipation), reflection-in-action (felt-knowing,

or ability of the professional to think on their feet and on decisions and research experiments), and

reflection-on-action (practitioners’ analyses of the consequences of their design decisions). In essence,

reflection-in-action describes how the design researcher makes decisions in research experiments,

while reflection-on-action is a means of discussing how the program informs the overall experiment

and vice versa (Schön, 25-30). Exploring the design angle for investigating the recommonsing challenge

requires a combination of investigative speculation, a series of co-designed moves and reflections as

well as a practice-based, design research effort since “it is in the dialectic relationship between the

program and the engagements/experiments that the answers to research questions emerge” (Seravalli,

30). In essence the research question emerges at the intersections of reflection and action.

Fig. Shows the identified research space for exploring the recommonsing question: design-enabled communities. On the socio-technical side, Ezio Manzini believes that the penetration of society by

technical systems is leading to a deeper impact on the social systems within which they operate (16). On the social design side, designers must continue to readjust to changing times by focusing

less on project oriented goals that inevitably drive us toward delivering a specific product, but more on open-ended design processes that acknowledge the complexity of the problem and encourage

collaborative associations that allow groups of people make meaning of the places they collectively occupy.

SOCIAL DESIGN SOCIO-TECHNICAL AFFORDANCES

CO-DESIGN/PARTICIPATORY DESIGN

SKILL

REFLECTIONACTION

RESEARCH QUESTION SPACE


Reclaiming Vacant Lots

Using the example of the GTECH Strategies ReClaim project, collaborative spaces find the proper

intervention points that ensure community engagement and critical mass around active campaigns to

transform vacant lots into community gardens or social spaces. Ezio Manzini refers to these types of

social associations as collaborative associations - groups of people (co producers) working together as to

solve problems or present new opportunities (Manzini, 88). In this specific scenario, agents involved in the

early initiation phase include residents of the respective neighborhoods, GTECH project managers and

administrative staff as well as designers (communication, interaction and landscape designers) and other

participants like neighborhood representatives. These assemblies were held to determine where and

when to intervene in a specific neighborhood with vacant lots. As those ideas come to the surface through

various co-designing efforts, a very useful sketch-a-thon was organized to bring together designers and

residents. One session involved ten designers (landscape architects and architectural designers) and ten

residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside communities so that each designer could be paired with a community

ambassador. Through this process, the designers were not only able to reflect on their work in process,

they also had access to direct feedback from the residents with whom they were paired. These sketches

and ideas were then taken online in the form of a community facing website, Lots2Love, which shared

the newly reclaimed lot projects with the Northside community along with different ways the residents

could remain engaged in the respective projects while providing ideas for further improvement.

Fig. An assembly of residents working with designers through collaborative designs sessions.


3 CONSTRUCTING THE COMMONS

3.1 QUESTIONS OF “WHO AND HOW?”

Agency, Design Scenarios & Collaborative Contribution

Agency (the ability to act) and the agent (someone who acts to bring about change (Sen)) help frame

what autonomy means - for agency itself reflects a choice to act with autonomy (Ibrahim, 2007) as

well as potential future scenarios. Without agency, there is no power to act autonomously since agency

occupies the space between an individual’s autonomy as an ideal and actual freedom that person has

to act in his/her behalf. While Ostrom’s work never reflected online communities, many insights may

be drawn from her writing. A digital community is a relatively recent phenomenon since the Internet

itself has only been around for much less than a century. However, the same ideas of collaboration and

constraint may also be applied to the governance of a commons in this space. As we have affordances

in socio-material sense, we also have social affordances, or design mediated social interactions online

(Bradner 2001). A particularly interesting element of social design is in its reflective capabilities-- we see

ourselves as we peer through the lenses of social scripts/mediators. In essence there is no social design

without the ‘social.’ And that social can be extracted as the real within the ‘artificial’ through collaborative

contribution. As Paul Dourish denotes, “We participate, not live, in culture(s)” (Dourish, 2009). As we

participate, cultural innovation is derived from the convergence of the social and the technical (Manzini,

17). And as we gather both online and offline, we build relationships and form a set agreements that

constitute the basis of the new cultures we continue to create. We can, through design, know the more

acceptable conditions for this collective gathering, and through social affordances, interline the spaces

between online and offline versions of communities with the scripts that cause them to strengthen.

Schön’s ideas on the “swampy lowlands” reveals the agency of both the designer and the socio-material

assembly which inspires what he calls the design beyond design, i.e., exploring beyond the appearance

and interactions but into social systems and relationships. With this form of designing, the reconstituted

Fig 1. Hardin’s Game: Herders Dilemma Fig 2. Ostrom’s alternative solution (contract-enforced and self-run) - image credits: Governing the Commons, Ostrom


balance of power within networks of relationships (which for common-based networks exhibit flattened

hierarchies) allows each individual to be a participant in the design. Manuel Castells’ accounts of a shifting

of networked societies from vertical hierarchies to much flatter, loosely affiliated, social models (Castells,

18) in what he calls the radical decentralization. Castells believes in the locality of the reemergence of

the community, and that people tend to cluster in communities that generate a sense of belonging and

in many instances cultural identity (Castells, 60).

Yochai Benkler’s exploration of the identities of these communities in the networked public sphere

considers social economies based on reputation and reciprocity between individuals and especially

within larger groups. Benkler argues for group multilevel selection theory, which claims that the survival

of species is perpetuated on the group level and not on the individual level. The agency to construct

and manage the commons however resides with the individual participants. Ostrom observed this and

noted that even with well-established governance rules, the individuals that make up a community need

to make sure that all the systems of enforcement and monitoring are carried out within the group itself.

A good example is the1980s Toyota NUMI plants found in Benkler’s book The Penguin and the Leviathan.

Toyota’s market share and dominance increased over those of its competitors during the same period as

a result of design of collaborative environments (evidenced in smaller, more productive and autonomous

groups and leading to better problem solving and better products). He also shares the example of

collaborative structures on which the website Wikipedia was established. The platform allowed for the

multiplicative effect of group participation. Yochai Benkler touches on the designer/participant’s agency

but only from a high level perspective. He opposes the determinist argument that technology introduction

always results in an emergence of a social structure and considers the politics of such technology are

neutral at best. According to Benkler, positively networked economies are influenced by societal trends

and not so much by their underlying technology. He believes that when society itself changes because

of flattened hierarchy, it causes the human subject who is rarely influenced by the technology itself to act

with autonomy. In essence, technology is merely a tool for social networking and individual expression.

This Semi-Technodeterminism perspective gives little credence to agency of the technological object (or

interface), or even that of the designer or of the participants in the commons. According to Ezio Manzini,

as cultural identity continues to be remodeled from social and technological innovation, the role of the

designer must change and he/she must adapt to the changing landscape of collaborative designing.

The proliferation of Internet technology according to Benkler marks “neither a breakdown nor


transcendence, but represents an improvement....” In contrasting with Benkler’s optimism, Sherry Turkle’s

perspective of the paradox of the networked information economy is that technology doesn’t always

enhance our social relations but it in effect replaces it to the point that it mediates our social behaviors

and personalities in ways that are significant and dangerous. Technology changes those behaviors and

personalities and how we relate to others. Turkle’s viewpoint highlights agency of technology in ways that

the technology we design continues to design us. According to Turkle, technology gives us “illusions of

companionship without the demands of friendship” (Turkle, 2011). This raises questions about commons-

based platforms, our espoused theories (those versions of our selves we may be projecting online) and

theories-in-use (those versions that actually represent who we truly are). For example, are the online

communities we encounter extensions of “real” communities we participate in as part of our everyday

life. Another important implication is the potential shifting costs between different personalities we

manage (actual, anonymous or semi- or pseudo- anonymous) as the platform of use changes.

3.2 Negotiation & Costs

There are several other costs to consider when constructing a commons and measuring the benefits or

ramifications of contributing/not contributing to the commons: Opportunity cost (the cost of a foregone

alternative in light of the decision at hand), social costs (costs derivable from private transactions),

economic, and other transactional costs. Using game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma in Hardin’s

Tragedy of the Commons, Elinor Ostrom presents a way to navigate the costs of securing collaborative

agreements within an increasingly complex group and without a formalized central authority (in this

specific case cattle herders). Ostrom shares the dilemma of the Tragedy of the Commons to set the

scene, and she presents the challenges stemming from forcing uncooperative, uncommunicative

herders to share a field. In her experiment, when herders (numbered 1 and 2) act with a “cooperate”

strategy - one in which both herders have the opportunity for their cattle to graze at capacity - they obtain

10 units of profit each (seen in the diagram). When either acts with a “defect” strategy, they both earn

0 units of profit. When one acts to corporate and the other defects, the defector gets 11 units and the

cooperator gets -1. Her solution was to introduce a new cost measurement - the cost of enforcing the

agreement, depicted in e, and suggests that the herders must negotiate before placing their cattle in

the field for grazing. During negotiation, they discuss the various capacities for sharing grazing rights as

well as oversight mechanisms in order to ensure mutual accountability. Ostrom (1990) presented design

principles that govern the collaborative efforts within these grazing rights.


They are as follows:

Clearly defined group boundaries

Governance rules for collective goods should be matched to the local community’s needs

Members of the commons involved in setting the rules can participate in modifying them

The right of community members to establish their rules is respected by authority

Monitoring adherence to the rules is controlled by the participants themselves

A graduated system of sanctions is used

Members of the community have access to inexpensive conflict resolution mechanisms

Proposals that are not intended to benefit the whole may be refused

These rules allow all the herders to share in the benefits of grazing, as well as the distributed costs

of enforcement. Distributed costs may also be considered on a commons-based digital platform. The

Internet reduces transaction costs for corporations and distributes it over a large number of people. In

doing so, the structure invites many collaborators into a semi-regulated environment. Social exchange (as

opposed to economic transactional exchange) changes the calculations of these transaction costs since

the perceived benefits are not sharply delineated but rather involve more fluid obligations like goodwill

and continued membership in a social group. Social relations, according to Benkler are more important

than money in certain social interactions. Quoting Maurice Godelier, “The mark of the gift between close

friends and relatives… is not the absence of obligations but is the absence of calculation.”

The outcomes of social exchange are non-tangible goods such as information and culture. Benkler

doesn’t give account of what happens with excess non-tangible goods. He instead provides the formula

for calculating net value in a commons-based peer production economy as: net value of the information

produced by common-based social production and released freely to anyone = the total value of

information produced through property based system - dead-weight loss caused by the above-marginal-

cost pricing practices resultant from an intellectual property system.

NV = TV - (SP2-MC)

NV = Net value of information produced in common-based social production

TV = Total value of information produced through property based system


SP2 = Above marginal cost pricing (per unit)

MC = Marginal cost (per unit)

When discussing transaction costs, Benkler begins with a presentation of the different transactional

frameworks that may influence the delivery of a particular good or service (market-based, company-

based, delivery-based, etc). He then uses various frameworks collectively as a basis of explaining one that

has not recently been discussed in economics - the social transactional framework. Social transactions

are those that are not monetary but are based on social relationship and exchange.

Michael Bauwens perceives peer-to-peer production as one that uses distributed capital use-value (or the

utility of the consumable product) as the product itself. In essence, the utility of a peer-to-peer economy

is spread out within the community. In contrast, the market-based models of crowdsourcing ideas are

company-driven and the use-value is retained by the company (Bauwens, 2005). Benkler distinguishes

market-based transactional frameworks as those that tend to have clear/distinct demarcations or ‘crisply

delineated currency’ (Benkler, 109). The crispness can be deciphered between the value produced

and the costs of the good or service and is seen in the medium of exchange. He believes that social

exchange alters transaction cost calculations since it doesn’t require the same crispness at the margins

of transaction. For example, generosity often creates a debt of obligation or need for reciprocity, but

nothing is clear in terms of precise measurements of exchange requirements, nature of repayment, or

even the date of required repayment. The assumption exists that a generous action or social exchange

ensures a certain membership into a social strata. There is no definition of transactional parameters

needed for such exchange.

Both market and social exchange require initial (fixed) costs, but contrary to social exchange, market

transactions require ongoing measurements of the transaction costs. In peer-to-peer networks, individual

creativity levels and productive activities require enough freedom and communication to get the best

versions of group production and lower distributed marginal costs. Benkler believes that highly regulated

production costs may totally be replaced through social exchange. However, he fails to acknowledge that

in order to participate in social exchange, or to be a part of a social group, there are social costs that may

seem transactional as well.


3.2.1 Designer’s Role, Costs & Oversight: From Expert to Collaborator

According to Benkler, it may be difficult to dis-embed the “social” from market economies. Benkler’s

examination, however, doesn’t account for the problems arising from disparities between measurements

scarcity and abundance of contributed value. Clay Shirkey tackles this gap by introducing the theory

of Ronald Coase and the conclusion that when transaction costs hit a very low value (through social

exchange and other social mechanisms), managerial control is also drastically reduced and sellers can

seek out buyers directly without organizational intervention). Under this theory sellers will be able to

operate under what is called the Coasean floor with reduced managerial intervention and lowered

transactional costs (Shirkey, 248). Using the earlier example from Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the

Commons, a drastic reduction in the cost of enforcing the binding agreements may be brought about

by better communication and shared information. And when information is shared, it reduces the gap

between such information and managerial cost - in essence, the more the information and the better it

is, the less the management needs to maintain the commons. The less the marginal cost (i.e. per unit) of

the managerial oversight of the commons, the greater the shared value is for the whole. The advantage

brought about by this method is a participatory one with “the participants themselves design(ing) their

own contracts in light of the information they have at hand” (Ostrom, 17).

In his book, Design, When Everybody Designs, Ezio Manzini discusses how managerial control relates to

design’s relevance to a commons. He references the shift of design from the product centered activity

as rooted in the industrial age when design was only an expert activity (the result of which is a ‘finished’

product) to a co-creation and co-production process that is more collaborative in nature, bears deeper

application, and is geared towards sense making. In both the industrial and post-modern eras, the sole

purpose of system efficiency led to ideas with the core purpose of arriving at the best possible finished

product. Consequently, the lower level worker was often reduced to a dispensable component in the

organizational quest for efficiency. This idea has historically separated designing from management.

However, as the prevalence of design coalitions (by introducing tighter networks whose members

collaborate to achieve shared results) increases, managerial control reduces and the designer’s role

changes to that of a collaborator, trigger (introducing ideas within the coalition) and facilitator (helping

other participants best identify and utilize their skills, as well as identifying the technological, social

and economic conditions favorable to such coalition). These initiatives are carried out at the nodes in

the designed network. Some examples of these interventions include social resource mapping and

ethnographic analysis (Manzini, 50). Benkler believes that a network with peer-to-peer production and


less managerial oversight in effect decentralizes and continually disrupts conventional hierarchy as it

leaves individual participants with alternatives to the market production model that are centered around

active group participation instead of individual benefit (Benkler,148).

3.3 Crowd Out Effect and Cognitive Surplus

The reputation of the individual contributors within these decentralized networks, however, affects

their roles, responsibilities and power levels. Arazy et. al. (2013) conclude from empirical research on

Wikipedia’s access privileges and roles online, that trusted users are allowed to engage in more complex

and sensitive production related assignments, while novices or unregistered contributors merely able to

add content limited to subscription roles with little direct authority/ability to add new articles. Also, certain

roles are often assigned responsibilities that help to enforce Wikipedia’s policies on content sharing

through the curation of the content and the handling of disputes (Arazy et. al., 2013). In essence, people

in commons-based networked communities play different roles like editors, copywriters, subscribers,

gatekeepers (or watchdogs) based on the patterns and structures of activities within these communities

and networks.

The transaction costs to redistributing this capacity and spreading the marginal value derived by each

additional role in a market-based economy becomes significant when these costs become multiplicative

over several transactions. In collaborative environments however, value is distributed via a network effect.

Manzini defines a network effect as what happens in systems in which “an increase in (the) number of

participants leads to a direct increase in the value for other users.” (Manzini). A very useful example is the

Waze GPS navigation app recently purchased by Google. An increase in the number of users (or nodes)

for this tool leads to an increasingly better product that maximizes the benefit for everyone (the entire

network) involved. Expert design can facilitate these ideas by using tools that foster greater clarity and

visibility, and at the same time allow for greater collaboration while improving the general favorability of

the environment. Using the same Waze example, gamification tools and questions have been built into

the application to allow for greater ease of use and improved estimation. For example, users are rewarded

for contributing information about the presence of law enforcement officers, obstructive objects, as well

as stalled or stationary vehicles within a particular vicinity. The Edigs rental search app also incorporates

self-reporting interactions like an “improve utility estimate” tab into its design. These social and socio-

technical affordances potentially reduce costs for both tenants and landlords by closing the gap between

information and cost in ways that are further explained in later sections.


Specifically, the effects of transaction costs in communities within more orthodox economic systems

with fewer social exchange mechanisms are further aggravated by what is called the motivation crowding

out effect/phenomenon, which implies that an individual’s autonomy is threatened by a perception of

manipulation (either via threat of punishment or promise of reward). This results in more extrinsic rewards

overwhelming intrinsic ones (such as the pleasure and personal satisfaction derived from participating

in peer-to-peer production), and this may have negative effects on motivation (Benkler, 94). Online

collaboration on open source software production is one exception because of the formulated industry

practices that have continued to maintain the autonomy of decision making for software developers

(even if and when they are paid for their work).

While cost reduction is important in commons-based peer-to-peer networks, social exchange and social

reciprocity make measurement of this cost minimization difficult, especially online. Not only do these

non-market forms of exchange exist in close-knit communities with tightly defined boundaries, they

sometimes occur between strangers. But the argument that social exchange changes transaction cost

calculations that doesn’t require the same crispness at the margins of market based transactions has

been challenged because they limit such calculations to the inputs and outputs of social transactions

only. Clay Shirkey believes that excess value, or cognitive surplus, is often used for the benefit of

others due to human generosity that causes people to give these excess brain cycles for the benefit

of others. Shirkey also distinguishes the difference between communal value (created by participants

for participants) and civic value (created by participants for the benefit of the greater whole) (Shirkey,

Ted Talk, 2010). In supporting the idea of civic collaboration, Ezio Manzini shares that people who opt

to participate implicitly agree to the rules of the community. While their efforts may be scaled for the

benefit of the whole (as with a community garden (collective) versus a small flower bed (individual),

this new era allows for a high degree of connectivity. However, this heightened connectivity doesn’t

always lead to useful and positive collaboration because such collaborations tend to foster some of the

preexisting insular and exclusionary behaviors prevalent within certain groups (for example, within gangs

and ideologically driven online forums and groups). According to Ostrom, commons may have good

or bad outcomes depending on how they are designed, created or managed. Their positive value isn’t

inherent. (Ostrom 2007). An interesting future research angle is understanding ways to design a better

application of cognitive surplus for positive collaboration within communities that will go beyond social

calculations and sense of obligation.


3.4 Adaptive Muddling (Young and Kaplan, 2012, 1988), Localization, and

Cosmopolitan Localism (Manzini)

In presenting the concept of adaptive muddling, Young and Kaplan (1988) believe that once people’s

levels of commitment and involvement are captured, the larger challenge to decipher is that of focusing

their efforts into solving the large problems we face. To them, the scale of the problem has little to

do with how people react to solve them. They believe that when faced with a large problem, the best

approach is to break the issue down into tangible and actionable small-scale activities. The idea behind

adaptive muddling is to create a series of solution options since the concept of one solution might be

a little too risky. Young and Kaplan also believe that adaptive muddling empowers people to localize

the solutions and apply them at a much smaller scale. The difference between the adaptive muddling

approach and Ezio Manzini’s SLOC (small, local, open and connected) scenarios is that a distributed

global network of local participants exemplified in a SLOC scenario presents community scaled ideas

with global relevance. In essence, Manzini’s cosmopolitan localism refers to entities that are small and

local, but that do command a place for themselves in the global environment.

Manzini believes that when economies are localized, connected, small and respectful of different cultural

perspectives while actively acknowledging the validity of socio-technical systems, they become ripe for

successful innovation. With the changing landscape of what is local to encompass diversity, globalization

and connectedness, collaborative communities are rediscovering and reconstituting their idea of place.

Manzini sees cosmopolitan localism as the balance between open and local, meaning that it occupies the

space of being rooted in established local community while simultaneously being open to the external

globalized environment.

3.5 Kollock Principles & Design Oriented Scenarios

Peter Kollock (1998) emphasizes the sociological component of online social interactions by presenting

social problems as being often ignored by the software and online industry. He argues that a lot of

interaction designers are preoccupied with building a virtualized “space” but tend to overlook/ignore

the social interactions that make that space a place. Kollock believes that community isn’t something

that can be designed with set irrelevant laws. He feels that “there is no algorithm for community. That

is, there is no step-by-step recipe that can be followed that will guarantee a specific outcome. Building

community is a fundamentally different activity than writing computer code: code does not write back

and code does not respond strategically to one’s action” (Kollock, 2).


According to Kollock, “Common responses to the challenge of designing systems that support robust

social interaction include pretending this issue is not important, or that there is nothing one can do about

it, or that it is simply a user interface issue” (Kollock, 2). He references Axlerod’s (1984) ideas on selfless

behaviors by laying out both the conditions for cooperation as well as design principles for successful

communities. He starts by exploring continued interaction as useful in ensuring behaviors that are less

selfish. When people realize that they are bound to meet again, they act in favor of the group. Hence,

successful communities emphasize continued interaction. With this understanding, scripting behaviors

that ensure that participants stay engaged within the community in ways that allow non-calculated forms

of social obligation. Kollock’s second condition is that there should be a way for individuals to be able to

identify each other. This idea challenges the strain between participating in a commons and anonymity

and asks further questions about design’s role in ensuring that participants are identifiable. Applications

like Waze and Edigs allow options for semi or pseudo anonymity while Nextdoor prefers that participants

are fully identifiable to ensure feelings of mutual trust and reciprocity. A final condition Kollock presents

is that there should be a record of an individual’s past participation available to all other participants. In

essence, participation within the commons should be open and transparent. In discussing the principles

of governing commons, Kollock emphasizes the difference between online and physical communities.

He believes, however, that most of the governance principles could be translated into design principles

through slight modifications. Some of those modifications include ensuring that scarcity and risk are core

constrained designed into an online community through since according to him they are “an inevitable

part of the physical world”(Kollock 2). He further believes that an amount of risk is required for building

and developing of trust. This sentiment is also echoed by Paco Vinoly, the Vice President of Design at

Nextdoor during an interview I conducted with him. Vinoly believes that what distinguishes community

models of social exchange from crowdsourcing platforms is the element of trust. The proximity and the

identifiability available through Nextdoor builds a level of credibility that goes beyond online crowdsourcing

websites like Yelp, since conversations are based on mutual agreement. The scarcity drawn by Nextdoor

has to do with limits to access due to community boundaries. However, these boundaries should however

be continuously adjusted to ensure that the measurements are accurate.

In terms of design research, the importance is with understanding how design may influence community

and knowing when to flip the research inquiry by deriving useful knowledge from an exploration of

the creative process. This practice-based approach allows the researcher to explore tacit forms of

knowing through moves, counter-moves and improvisational decisions (Schön, 14). One of the ways to


explore this form of research is by negotiating design-oriented scenarios. The idea of a scenario carries

different interpretations. With respect to my research, design-oriented scenarios represent designed

communication artifacts and interactive tools that allow the conveyance of visions of futures that may

present options for initiating, negotiating and designing a commons. These future scenarios may be

possible, plausible or even merely desirable. Manzini defines design oriented scenarios as “a set of

motivated, structured visions that aim to catalyze the energy of the various actors involved in the design

process, generate a common vision, and hopefully cause their actions to converge in the same direction”

(Manzini, 130). These scenarios ask what if... questions around collaborative contribution. Different

scenario approaches are based on different theories of change or visions.

3.6 Social Affordances

Ezio Manzini refers to location based digital services that are scripted in social networking platforms/

mobile devices to integrate virtual and physical spaces by creating location-based social bridges. This

innovation presents an intriguing overlap between what’s happening in digital and physical spaces

alike, which in turn presents interesting ways commons may be formed and a geographic community’s

interests may be advanced through online collaboration tools. The reverse may also be true with

virtualized communities (for example, an online gaming community) having physical manifestations in the

real world, like Meet-Ups (Manzini, 81). While online social affordances manifest similarly to those offline,

these social affordances tend towards scripting behavior to specifically shape engagement (Boyd, 2011).

And when the online behaviors are exhibited in certain ways, the object oriented programming (OOP)

used to create many of the platforms used for social media sites and collaborative tools works in ways

that delegate morality through cascading affordances. The developer is empowered to use OOP to script

user behavior with minimum user awareness. These sites that drive the new web 2.0 technologies should

be considered as mediators and not mere tools for social connectedness since most of the interaction is

Fig. Sketch showing social scripts that may begin to provide recommonsing strategies for Edigs Rental App


with and through the interface. The platforms drive our behavior by filtering the types of information we

see and what layers of information structure are exposed to the public. Verbeek believes that a reduction

of technology to its non-technological elements like social organization has been very little or no value

to the discourse (Verbeek, 12). Technology goes beyond such a reduction. Interfaces, for example, are

curated reflections of our choices and narratives. These reflections are said to be curated because they

only present to us versions of alternatives from which to select. This raises a lot of questions about online

privacy versus anonymity. Privacy is the right for one to control one’s personal information whereas

anonymity reflects the inability to link a series of actions back to its originator. At the expense of ensuring

a commons-based online network economy, a lot of Internet privacy has been lost.

4 MAINTAINING THE COMMONS

4.1 QUESTION 4: HOW?

Designing for Collaborative Roles

Based on what he calls An Ecology of Collaborative Encounters, Ezio Manzini’s work with Carla Cipolla for

her doctoral thesis researched social innovation and the service economy by mapping out the different

levels of participation and engagement in a community. Considering cognitive surplus, in which everyone

has resources available and through collaborative organizations, designers must find ways in which

Fig. Showing some social affordances design scenarios including tips for potential patients, neighbor check-in logs and verifiable listings e.t.c.


these resources may be shared. In this way, producers and users can both be referred to as service

co-producers. Collaborative encounters are at different levels. They may be higher-level collaboration

between managers who are also service providers or at the opposite end of the spectrum the dialogists

who are co-designers and co-producers.

To map out participant involvement, a collaborative encounters table is divided into four quadrants with

vertical (the zone of active involvement) and horizontal (the zone of collaborative involvement) lines.

Quadrant A signifies low involvement for both zones. An example of this is a purely service transaction

such as purchasers at a farmers market. Quadrant B signifies low involvement in regards to practical

activities but collaboration needed in the designing and management of the co-designing assembly. An

example of this refers to a small-scale co-managed effort like a small apartment garden, or nursery in a

Fig. PI and IQ maps that present options for collaborative encounters. Credit: Ezio Manzini, 2015

QAFarmers Market

QBNursery in co-housing unit

QDSelf-driving car sharing

EDIGS

Self-serving food coop

QCCommunity Garden

GTECH Reclaim Projects

+

+

-

-

PI

QAFarmers Market

QBNursery in co-housing unit

QDSelf-driving car sharing

EDIGS

Self-serving food coop

QCCommunity Garden

GTECH Reclaim Projects

+

+

-

-

IQ

Research Interest


cohousing unit. Quadrant C refers to an engaged effort in practical activities to allow for collaboration with

other participants. This example maintains the benefits of emergent creative communities. An example

of this is one of GTECH strategies ambassador-driven reclaimed lot programs in the Pittsburgh Northside

neighborhoods. The final quadrant D is one that embodies collaboration that requires self-guided activities

such as do-it-yourself car sharing mechanisms. Quadrants C and D are the quadrants relevant to my

research. In order to better understand the lasting commitment to the collaborative encounter as well

as affective involvement, a second map is used to represent those two variables between the poles of

relational intensity which refers to the deepness of the interactions (horizontal) and social tie strength

which refers to the ties between individual participants (vertical). In terms of the quality of interactions

(or IQ for interaction quality), Manzini and Cipolla were able to identify four types of encounters in four

separate quadrants. Quadrant A refers to low relational intensity and weak ties. From an interaction

quality perspective, the zone will represent formalized service encounters such as checkout in a grocery

store. Quadrant B refers to high relational intensity and weak ties. While it requires more affective terms,

it has much less future commitment. An example is the encounter between a salesman and purchaser

at a farmers’ market. Quadrant C refers to high relational intensity and strong ties. This characterizes

traditional communities and grassroots collaborative organizations like the Fineview Citizens Council in

one of Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhoods. Quadrant D refers to the area of low relational intensity and

strong ties. This mode refers as an example to the collaboration levels in larger organizations.

4.2 Openness, Collaboration, Sharing, Reciprocity

Ezio Manzini perceives co-designing as a process that helps formalize multi-modal narratives among

individuals and groups (designers and non-designers alike). Co-designing is a dynamic (complex) process,

with interconnected and sometimes contradictory distributed networks, highly creative and involving

complex design activities. The efforts to improve the understanding of designing by the non-expert are

increasingly changing the role of the expert designer to that of a moderator or facilitator. He calls these

networks designing networks, and contrasts them with designing coalitions, tighter and strategically

designed arrangements that cause different actors within broader socio-technical spectrums to achieve

specific, clearly stated results (Manzini, 49). In The Penguin and the Leviathan, Benkler shares examples

of what he calls cooperative systems such as found within companies like CouchSurfing and Kiva.

Couchsurfing is a community of people with a shared interests like traveling and learning about other

cultures but being framed as a sharing community because of the community agreements like trust and

reciprocity (Benkler, 117).


5 EXITING THE COMMONS

5.1 QUESTION 5: WHEN?

A Question of Fairness

There is a challenge with what to do with free riders in attempting to maintain a commons and prevent

exiting. Using the example of Usenet (one of the Internet’s oldest network communication systems still

being used today), Peter Kollock presents Ostrom’s ideas on how to deal with fairness, and that groups

that are able to self-govern are held together by the previously mentioned design principles. Ruben van

Wendel de Joode, in discussing commons in open source communities, addressed Ostrom and Kollock’s

design principles by detailing the implications of breaking any one of the rules and the impact on fairness

and how that may lead to the Tragedy of the Commons.

Clearly defined boundaries ensure the exclusion of outsiders from reaping benefits of the commons

and preventing free riding. When the boundary is clearly defined, participants tend to communicate

more.

Governing rules matched to local needs. More complex communities find it increasingly difficult to

enforce the congruence between the rules and the need. A lack of adequate participation and collaborative

involvement leads to exiting.

Members are involved in setting the rules and in control of modifying them. A lack of adequate and

appropriate decision making mechanisms may lead to misfit and quicker exit.

Rule monitoring is controlled by participants. Rule monitoring is respected by authority. When

participants control the monitoring of the rules within a commons, the number of violations is reduced.

Also, the members of the commons are able to adjust unsustainable rules to better fit the needs of the

commons.

Proposals that do not benefit the whole are refused. There must be the presence of conflict

resolution mechanisms. Commons that do not have the right mechanisms for the airing of grievances

tend to lose participants. Without conflict resolution, the development and improvement of the resource

may be affected and it may eventually lead to the demise of the commons. When external authority

challenges the commons, this also indicates a lack of acceptance of the rules and might lead to failure of

the commons (van Wendel de Joode, 5).


5.2 Issues with Copyright and Patent Laws

Copyright and patent laws are examples of external forces that may affect peer-to-peer network

economies because they restrict not only the quantity, but also the quality of an innovation. Freedom

allows individuals to change the boundaries of a commons for problem solving through human action.

Ostrom and Dietz et. al., view this as the fundamental problem of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the

Commons. According to them, while Hardin was correct about concerns for overexploitation of common

resources by a few, Hardin erroneously believed that only centralized government and private property

can properly regulate the commons. On addressing the challenges of freedom to act amidst resource

limitation in the commons, he states, “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that

compels him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward

which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of

the commons” (Hardin, 1244). Mascular Olson also supported Hardin’s assertion by challenging the

possibility of individuals in a group with common interest acting to benefit the group (Olson, 1). Both

Olson and Hardin are believed to have inconclusive evidence on what happens when resources are held

within a commons, that “resource users themselves were trapped in a commons dilemma and could

never change the structure of the situation they faced by creating or modifying institutions.” They failed to

notice that many successful attempts to regulate commons are self-governed by the participants for the

participants (Dietz & Ostrom, 2003). Even areas of healthcare and pharmaceuticals are experiencing peer

production of drug research and development by commons-based producers who work in a non-market

environment to be able to discover new drugs that may be useful to individuals and companies that may

not be able to afford research. These new peer-based approaches help to bypass drug patents that can

monopolize in an effort to find alternative paths to innovation that will save lives. However with Federal

control of the healthcare legislation, it is difficult for these drugs to reach those that need them the most.

5.3 Influence of External Regulation

Commons sometimes encounter heavy legal and regulatory challenges. Information, knowledge, and

culture are being stymied by economic returns through the claims of ‘intellectual property’ rights by the

business class. The low initial capital costs as well as decentralized intelligence (with access to knowledge,

information an ideas readily available) of a networked information economy have combined to reduce the

barriers to entry for individual contributors. Yochai Benkler believes that individual contributors enter this

information economy for both evolutionary and cultural reasons. He considers humans as emotional and

rational beings, and we care about what is fair, right and normal, especially when it comes to intellectual


property. He argues that the human potential for cooperation is greater than originally believed by

many. A good example of this is Napster, an online community that was built around music sharing.

The Napster software created an Internet community virtually overnight with millions of subscribers

and contributors in a span of just three years. Napster not only distributed music access, the structure

of the technology itself is based on a distributed file sharing system which is an idea that implies flatter

hierarchies than traditional operating system in terms of file management. Napster’s meteoric growth led

to vigorous debates about issues of Internet piracy and copyright laws. Before Napster, collaboration was

one-way - information was sent, received, and stored only. Napster created the platform for peer-to-peer

information exchange (and sharing in particular) and disrupted the system by empowering the consumers

and bypassing the record labels and music distribution companies. The effects of Napster have directly

influenced the emergence of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Napster’s demise

began as evidence surfaced that it was significantly disrupting hegemony, and that spurred a series of

lawsuits from which the company was unable to fully recover after the plaintiffs were able to successfully

frame Napster’s efforts as Internet piracy. The company has since then restructured into a regulated

corporate entity with a main goal of maximizing shareholder value.

Regulative environments many times are the sources of constraint on the autonomy of individuals in the

non-market networked economy. Patents and copyrights are examples of laws that may be counter-intuitive

to freedom and choice, and may actually affect the quality of products being delivered to the market.

Contrary to general perception, companies are less inclined to want to control copyrights and patents

than they are about finding other important advantages that they may secure for their organizations - like

first mover advantage, or strong marketing, or vendor relationships. Many times, intellectual property

issues are usually secondary concerns except in industries with unique circumstances (Benkler, 41).

Property (rules that govern the resources one has when one comes in relation to another person) also

provides constraints to autonomy.

Property has historically been thought to enhance an individual’s freedom. The current intellectual

property, copyright and patent laws, while they are in place to provide material security and help protect

the needs of the owner for later (future) use, raise concerns about monopolization and divulgation.

Properties are meant to be the background structures and rules that govern the allocation of resources

within societies. These rules apply asymmetrical constraints to behavior and choice. In contrast, the

constraints experienced in a commons many times aren’t in fact market driven. Nonetheless, commons

do have constraints as well; social, physical or regulatory ones.


One determining factor of a commons property is that an individual actor doesn’t have the direct authority

to impose their will on another. In other terms, the broader the commons, the more improved the

individual autonomy is. The reverse is true for market based property rights control mechanisms. The

controls placed in environments to affect communication may affect autonomy by stemming information

flow. With fewer options, individual choices are controlled by the amount of knowledge they are exposed

to. Their decisions based on this knowledge can thereby be seen as autonomous. According to Benkler,

the freedom to choose a networked information provider as autonomous as well (especially when there

are several quantitatively adequate options available to the individual i.e. those options represent a set

of meaningfully different decision paths). Questions still remain about how autonomy is defined in this

context, and when an individual or group can be seen to be truly autonomous in making a decision.

Constraints with the flow of knowledge in effect restrict autonomy and individuals cannot be said to

be truly autonomous if knowledge is restricted. When for example, there is an attempt by government

to limit Freedom of the Press, through inadequate/lack of information or by controlling the flow of that

information, the members of the press cannot be said to be truly and intrinsically autonomous even if

there might be a certain level of autonomy in the ability to decide what forms of news to share with

the public. Other examples are laws that allow an individual to assert control over another, or those that

systematically limit the options available to individuals participating in the economy by either reducing

the numbers or variety.

The 1990s deregulation and privatization in the U.S. push led to the strengthening of the laws that guided

intellectual property use. Ostrom indicates in her text that this idea isn’t new. Many policy analysts

have for long believed that the only way to “solve the tragedy of the commons problem” is to create a

system of “private property rights,” and that private ownership is the solution for many common-pool

problems (Ostrom, 12). Policies like these have however led to oligopolistic market structures controlling

industries such as telecommunications – with only few players (cable providers as well as telephone

companies) providing access to the respective services. The effort to continue to privatize and control

networked information production, changed it from a government-supported initiative to an increasingly

private undertaking. Nowadays, the onset of WIFI is making it possible to change the structure of

telecommunications into to allow individual users to enter in at a lower cost. These opportunities allow

individual owners to access the information commons at cheaper rate.


5.4 Cultural Commons, Babelization and Balkanization

The four types of commons (in two categories) are: Open Commons (such as oceans, air, highway

system), Limited Access Commons (such as pasture agreements for farmers), Regulated Commons and

Unregulated Commons. There are many examples of limited access, regulated commons both on the

Internet and offline. The effects commoning on the Internet were initially criticized via the Babel Objection

which argued that like with the Tower of Babel, individuals will act in a more dispersive manner than in a

collaborative or congealing fashion, and that this phenomenon will lead to more confusion and less civic

discourse. This confusion is one in which “everyone speaks and no one is heard” with money reemerging

as the distinguishing factor between who gets to be heard and whose words get pushed into oblivion.

Benkler (pg. 10) refutes this argument by pointing to new evidence on what he calls the liberating effects

of “non-market peer produced alternative forms of filtration.” Open-sourced efforts are being combined

with collaborative efforts through private, public, and non-profit partnerships and recommonsing strategies

to design at innovative solutions to systemic problems and not just to serve individual selfish interests.

The degrees of freedom within a society determine how freedom is used. It also determines what

views are considered important (and which ones are to be ignored or dismissed) in a collective action.

The communication that surrounds the dissemination of such information is helpful in creating common

parameters for mutually constitutive understandings of the possible and most desirable collective paths

forward for individuals constituting the group. Organizations and societies that ingrain non-market

production in their framework are bound to improve the levels of freedom across such organizations

because the networked information economy allows people the autonomy and power to be able to make

individualized decisions that is not easily influenced by media. It also allows for ease of participation in

public discourse, instead of a dependence on information from talking heads.

A second criticism of the move towards an on-line commons is that the Internet is not in fact as equitable

as is assumed by many, but it gives an overwhelming advantage to only few participants since a huge

majority of Internet users actually prefer a small percentage of sites. The core argument of this claim

is that Internet mimics the current mass media structure. Other criticisms included the importance and

centrality of mass media to the press, the ability of authoritarian regimes to muzzle autonomous speech

by filtering and monitoring information that passes through, and the disparity of access of the Internet

to certain citizens (which has skewed information production to benefit the social and financial elites.


Others like Benkler believe that the Internet is making citizens more civic-minded and the readily available

information is bound to increase participation within communities. In an effort to further clarify his

positions, he reflect on Noam’s prediction that given the new environment where everybody is speaking

but also wants to be heard, the main determinant of being heard is money and how it is distributed in a

new market economy. He also referenced Nicholas Negroponte’s statements that people will increasingly

have individually framed experiences to their interactions online. In essence, instead of having one large

fractured discourse, there would be many small individually customized “self-referential” discussion

groups, and these will form the larger whole. Benkler believes that observation of the networked public

sphere indicates that online networks aren’t too centralized or too complicated and chaotic but it just

right, or at the very least more effective that mass media controlled versions.

Peter Levine suggests however that convenience or ready access to the Internet does not always equate

to participation. In referring to the balkanization of the Internet, he believes that while people may be

exposed to a wealth of information, but if people want to find relevant materials that fit their values and

interests, they will naturally “balkanize,” and create a cocoon of like minded contributors (Levine, 126-

128). Ezio Manzini references John Baeck’s studies on social networks and social ties, and he concluded

that in high-tech networks built “on the possibility of digital networks” are more successful when the

social ties are looser than in low-tech collaborative organizations since it is the weaker ties that make the

network more open to other perspectives and communicative (Manzini 101).

6 ARTICULATING A RESEARCH AGENDA

There are five research areas for the exploration of the problem of recommonsing specifically relating

to design’s impact on a commons: initializing, constructing, maintaining/governing, contributing to and

exiting a commons. This review analyzed the costs and the opportunities relating to these categories by

exploring issues such as theoretical and practical situation spaces, hegemony, agency, design scenarios,

collaborative contribution, affordances and negotiation. This review also explores the role of boundaries in

thinning out the degrees of freedom, anonymity and autonomy in the non-market networked information

economy versus rules of scarcity and exclusivity in geographical locations.

In the concluding pages of his book, The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler acknowledges some early

arguments that an increase in online connectivity translates into weaker social connections and poorer

offline social circles, family communication and networks. He references Robert Kraut’s studies The


Internet Paradox as well as the Stanford Institute for Quantitative Study of Society’s Preliminary Report

on Internet and Society, which claimed that the amount of time spent on the Internet was directly

proportional to the time spent with real people. He challenges both studies by referencing Amitai’s

Etzioni’s criticism of the studies with the finding that those that spent more time on the Internet, spent

less time on shopping and watching television (360). Benkler claims that the advent of the “networked

society” (Castells) does not destroy one’s sense of community but instead reflects the changing human

needs (with a mixture of strong and weak ties) over time. Further exploration of the initial studies indicated

that the negative effects of continued Internet usage dissipated over time, and the Internet allowed for

weak ties to be strengthened into stronger ones.

According to Ezio Manzini in Design, When Everybody Designs, the strength and weakness of these

social ties is a meaningful causation for collaboration levels. In 1973, Granovetter suggested a theory

of the strength and weakness of social ties, and claimed “the strength of a social tie can be measured

by observing the considerable amount of time, affective intensity and the intimacy (mutual confiding)

as well as the supportive services characteristic of that tie. Strong ties take a long time to build while

weak ties (which make for more collaborative and open social systems that make organizations more

reachable) may be approached more rapidly (Manzini, 101).

My primary objective has been to summarize my inquiries into recommonsing, or design enabled

communities, and while I believe there are more ideas to explore in this space, I summarize some of the

core themes explored.

On the meaning of the commons

I explored collaboration and self-regulation as important tenets for the formation of a commons. I was

also able to distinguish the similarities with and differences between the two vantage points from which

I will be conducting my research: physical commons (relating to physical property regimes) and digital

commons (relating to different parts of the online commons-based information network).

On reflective practice

Donald Schön’s work distinguishes between felt knowing, reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action. He

also situates the theoretical space of designing within social complexity in what he called the swampy

lowland of problem solving. Not only do these forms of problem solving require individual action, they

also require the mastery of a combination of skills in other disciplines like sociology and anthropology.


On collaborative contribution, cost and agency

Design beyond design allows for the exploration beyond product appearance and interactions to socio-

technical systems and relationships. This form of design is not project oriented but engages socio-material

assemblies. Manuel Castells believes that community reemerges locally when online commons-based

networks are radically decentralized. Elinor Ostrom shares the costs of constructing and contributing

to a commons. These costs may be economic, transactional or even social. When design principles

that govern commons are adhered to, it sustains the commons. Also, as the community increases its

autonomy, the costs of managing participation greatly reduce.

On Cosmopolitan Localism

According to Ezio Manzini, place building is a “new idea of wellbeing” (Manzini 202). He believes that

social networks should be loose around the edges so good ideas can permeate on a global scale. He

sees cosmopolitan localism as a metaculture that is formed by a multiplicity of cultures that have been

held local and but also open to share ideas. These communities are not self-serving but are nodes of a

successful network. These communities are diverse and flourishing.

Therefore, instead of situating altruism at the center of the discourse on recommonsing (or redesigning

commons) I would like to explore the design angle by exploring the agency of the designer/design

researcher, the participant as well as that of the socio-technical platform on which the assembly stands.

In conclusion, the way culture is produced affects ideas of autonomy and levels of collaboration. In

contrast to the 20th century, the networked information economy can shape culture in ways that were not

possible several years ago. It changes the way we gather and the networks we use to build community

and commons, discover new cultures and new ways of communicating with each other that makes the

process of culturalization more participative. The network information economy also allows newly formed

cultures to emerge around shared goals that advance the needs of the community.


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