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Between Institutioning and Commoning: Grassroots Co-creation in Web3 Communities

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Cross-Cultural Design (HCII 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14022))

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Abstract

A growing body of research is focusing on how to co-design with grassroots communities. Particularly within the vision of design for social innovation, the role of designers is shifting from traditional design leads to supporters of collaborative design. The potential ethic of co-creation with grassroots communities is to support more bottom-up innovation, thereby stimulating the potential for distributed social innovation. Grassroots innovation is often inseparable from collaboration with institutions, and recent design research has begun to focus on the role of designers as intermediaries between grassroots communities and institutions to help co-creation activities achieve a balance of commoning and institutioning. With the development of blockchain technology, a new type of organizational design, DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), on which web3 practice is based, provides some new insights and opportunities for a more broadly participatory grassroots co-creation. In this paper, we use a theoretical framework and thematic analysis based on six DAO samples to explain and analyze the ambiguity and complexity of web3 communities in both commoning and institutioning dimensions, inspiring new types of grassroots co-creation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tongji University, No. 1239, Siping Road, Shanghai, China

    Man Zhang & Danwen Ji

  2. Tsinghua University, Hai Dian District, Beijing, China

    Jing Wang

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  1. Man Zhang
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  2. Jing Wang
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Correspondence to Man Zhang .

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  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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Zhang, M., Wang, J., Ji, D. (2023). Between Institutioning and Commoning: Grassroots Co-creation in Web3 Communities. In: Rau, PL.P. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14022. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35936-1_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35936-1_23

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