Peter Sörries
Interaction Design & Research
Individual values can serve as guiding principles. Considering this, the »be part« toolkit offers a structured method for design practitioners and beyond to identify, explore, and analyze values within co-creative design processes. It facilitates a comprehensive approach through a specially developed four-stage participatory workshop and a systematic two-stage analysis process to examine values in-depth.
In Cooperation with
Studio von Fuchs
The Be Part toolkit was developed in four stages, each building on the previous one to support critical reflection throughout its development.
To support design processes at any stage, the toolkit includes materials such as instructional guides for both workshop facilitation and subsequent analysis of the workshop insights.
The first part of the toolkit supports the facilitation of participatory workshops.
During the workshop, participants begin by exploring their values in the context of the topic, identifying key beliefs and priorities. Next, they contextualize these values by placing them on a value map and grouping them according to relevant stakeholders or stakeholder groups. Finally, participants translate these clustered values into idealized scenarios, envisioning how they can be realized in practice to generate actionable outcomes for each stakeholder group.
The second part of the toolkit supports the analysis of insights gathered from the workshop and helps make them actionable in design practice.
The analysis of values is conducted in three steps. First, the values are sorted and organized into categories based on commonalities. Next, the team links the values to the scenarios using color-coded tokens to understand their practical implications from the participants’ perspective. Finally, the values are evaluated and documented in terms of their relevance and feasibility as design requirements.
The toolkit has already been applied in various contexts by different practitioners to enrich their design processes through a co-creative and value-sensitive lens.