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Nature-Inspired Design for Self-Organized Social Systems: A Tool for Collaborative Communities

Part of: Collaborative Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Sumin Lee  and
Joon Sang Baek
Sumin Lee
Affiliation:
Ulsan National University of Science and Technology;
Joon Sang Baek*
Affiliation:
Yonsei University
*
Contact: Baek, Joon Sang, Yonsei University, Department of Human Environment and Design Korea, Republic of (South Korea), joonsbaek@gmail.com

Abstract

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This research was motivated by the need to design for self-organized and sustained collaborative communities. A collaborative community is defined as a group of people who are bound by a sense of community and fulfil their unmet needs through collaboration (Baek, Meroni, & Manzini, 2015). A community with limited resources and premature organisational structure and therefore experience an unbalanced workload is fragile. If the community fails to distribute workloads fairly within and the commitment of the sacrificing members is exhausted, it is likely to fall apart. Inspired by the self- organization phenomena in nature, we designed a tool that these communities can use to conceive strategies that contribute to autonomy and collaboration. For validation, we applied the tool to an industrial design student club. The results demonstrate that despite the differences between social and ecological systems, there is a potential to learn from nature to design for self-organized collaborative communities with the condition that one has sufficient knowledge about both the references and the design target. We also discuss the problem-solving and learning effects of the tool.

Keywords

Self-organizationBio-inspired design / biomimeticsDesign methodologyParticipatory designOrganizational processes
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 189 - 198
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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