Cooperation

This project was undertaken as part of a course in Design Led Research at the M.F.A Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons school of design. The work on this project was done as an experimentation of various design research techniques such as: system mapping, provotypes, system modelling etc.

We were interested in co-ops and the non-transactional business relationships that are embedded within them. Why do people not choose to work together more often since co-ops tend to perform well and are economically resilient? Strategically there were a lot of ways to go about doing this but we chose to focus on a specific design led research tool, a provotype, to get at the root of the issue. This was a decision that became intentional because of the richness of information we got after each session. We applied other DLR methods along with the provotype to produce more insights but ultimately, the provotype itself continued to add more information to the research we were trying to achieve. By changing contexts and participants, being mindful about how we observed, and iterating on the tool, we were able to uncover a trove of information and continue to add nuances towards the research itself. This proved to be more valuable to us than haphazardly applying various other methods for our situation.