Reckoning with Reality: Reflections on a Place-Based Social Innovation Lab

Abstract

This is a reflection upon a social innovation lab process used to establish and build an ongoing culture of sustainability (COS) within a new multi-tenant commercial office building. It seeks to answer two key questions: (1) what are the design tensions that emerge when constructing co-design processes meant to encourage social innovation in a complex system while working from inside that complex system; (2) in building commons governance structures in a complex system, what are realistic expectations for the voluntary participation when multiple organizations with different core mandates are involved? This paper’s primary results come from reflecting upon the COS development coming from the social innovation lab process and adaptations process needed for it to work within a place-based context. The COS intervention itself is still in process and was disrupted by COVID-19, so these findings are still preliminary. Participatory co-design research often involves a great deal of complexity and tacit knowledge, so the key finding here is the surfacing of four core sources of tension that arise when developing a co-design process for the management of a commons: the allocation of costs for co-ordinating collective action, balancing a homogeneous platform for action with heterogeneous participants, physical building infrastructure and social co-design approaches, and between-tenant organization leadership and co-design approaches. This paper’s key contribution is in clarifying core challenges that participatory process designers face when developing and implementing co-design processes.

1. Introduction

In the fall of 2018, a new net-positive energy commercial multi-tenant office building opened in Canada, the result of an ambitious collaboration between an environmental nonprofit organization, local government, local post-secondary educational institutions, a property developer, and the local office of an international accounting firm. Previous research had shown green buildings frequently underperform in their sustainability potential due, in part, to the way the buildings are used by their tenants [1,2,3]. For this new building a strategy was launched which sought to address this underperformance through collective rather than individual behavioral change. This culminated in an applied research project focused on developing a transformational culture of sustainability (COS) characterized by “shared values, symbols, rituals and practices grounded in sustainability principles leading to individual and societal choices that promote environmental protection, social justice and wellbeing, and a supportive economy” [4].

As a basis for collective action, core principles for the theory of change underpinning the construction of a COS were established. These principles were process-oriented to enable learning, rather than set rules to be followed to the letter. The COS principles are to be systems-oriented, long-term developmental, strategic, comprehensive, and participatory [5]. Voluntary participation was seen as critical. Having more people engaged with the collective COS is an in-flow into this cultural system, increasing its durability and compactness; reduced engagement is an out-flow with the opposite effect [4]. A COS core group was formed to encourage engagement, comprised of researchers from three universities and a COS staff manager co-employed by an environmental nonprofit tenant and academic research institute.

Part of the work of this COS core team was a series of co-design workshops adapted from the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience’s (WISIR’s) Social Innovation Lab model [6]. The social innovation lab approach fits in a broad range of lab approaches that have greater or lesser degrees of variation between them [7]. The COS approach taken here has some similarities to living lab work that was recently highlighted in a special issue of Sustainability [8], in particular, questions raised about the blurring of boundaries between lab research and practice [9], and using lab processes for applied transdisciplinary research and collaboration [10]. While the WISIR process was designed somewhat differently from the Living Lab approach more common in Europe than the North American context, the lessons that can be taken from the building-based adaptation of a social innovation lab approach here are generalizable as critical design and sustainability issues.

This paper reflects upon the application of the social innovation lab approach in a hyper localized place-based intervention. COVID-19’s spread in March 2020 shut down the building less than a year after the completion of the final workshop in the initial social innovation lab process, limiting the degree to which the COS strategy could evolve in the building. Yet, even with that context, the experience of this participatory action research reveals insights into the use of co-design processes to govern a commons. As such, this this reflective piece focuses not on the outcomes of the social innovation lab process itself, but rather four key design tensions that arise when creating and delivering co-design processes for commons governance: the allocation of co-ordinating costs for collective action, the balance between a shared strategy for action and heterogeneous approach participation, how physical infrastructure interacts with social processes for co-design, and the tension between top-down organizational leadership decisions and bottom-up co-designed efforts.

2. Research Question

This paper addresses an inter-related pair of questions: (1) what are the design tensions that emerge when constructing co-design processes meant to encourage social innovation in a complex system while working from inside that complex system; and, (2) in building commons governance structures in a complex system, what are realistic expectations for the voluntary participation when multiple organizations with different core mandates are involved?

To answer these questions the key unit of analysis for this research is the social innovation lab co-design process itself. However, because this process was applied in a place-based COS development strategy this must also be outlined to provide the appropriate context for reflection upon the co-design process. This is, in turn, important for understanding both the generalizability of the findings in this paper and clarifying its limitations. For further information on the COS development process itself, see Dreyer et al. [4].

3. Place and Culture

Using the physical infrastructure of an environmentally high-performance building as the setting for such self-reinforcing interactions is conceptually a natural fit. The idea of sustainable building is itself a contested concept. However, it is argued that, since the built environment shapes how people interact with each other, it is important to improve their performance [11], though, in practice, these largely focus on low-carbon performance rather than a broader conception of sustainability [12] and focus primarily on engineering elements in a building’s infrastructure [13]. However, even on this narrow metric, high-performance buildings often fail to meet their targets, leading to what has been called a “performance gap” [1,14]. Including social justice and economic development into a broader conception of performance could build synergistic potential, though it could also generate conflicting goals [15]. For example, the building might prevent tenants from adjusting temperature, causing physical discomfort [16].

While co-location provides a shared touchpoint, the tenants come from different organizations as well as different private sector industries, the nonprofit sector, and academia, further adding to the complexity of the space and the need for co-creation of solutions by a variety of actors to increase the chances of success [17]. Curated processes enable collective engagement with complex issues and, increasingly, lab processes have been central to these approaches to create space for dialogue [18,19]. These processes go by many names, including social innovation labs [6], change labs [20], social labs [21], and systemic innovation labs [7], among others. Each has its own distinct features and theoretical grounding, however, they do all share themes of convening, experimentation, and design [22] and draw upon participatory design, design thinking, and systems thinking to create space for sensemaking and dialogue [23]. WISIR’s social innovation lab model [6] draws on complexity theory to explore adjacent possible spaces [24].

Innovation labs work at the intersection of complexity and design. Active experimentation and prototyping are tools used in innovation labs to explore this adjacent possible space. While these experiments would not be expected to solve any of these particular complex problems, they help advance understanding of the complex system and its subsystems overall. Prototyping and experimentation become a part of the design as an iterative process of knowing that can be used in participatory design to advance mutual learning [25]. As noted before, the prototypes themselves become boundary objects that can be used to form connections between participants’ and their knowledge [26], which can, in turn, support both the bringing together of existing ideas into novel new prototypes through “bricolage” as well as the diffusion of learning through these created networks [27]. Taken together, the experimentation and the co-design processes that help to process what comes from them enable collaborative learning through praxis. This is particularly important for sustainability research because both the goals and methods of achieving them are contested, making learning through action a necessity.

This ties into the role of cultural change and learning. Part of this is the role of building capacity for collaborative learning that extends beyond individuals to working beyond the boundaries of organizations [28]. Yet reaching the point where there can be this type of collaborative learning requires substantive cultural change, as people in multi-tenant buildings are used to working relatively independently of those working in other organizations. Addressing organizational culture is critical to shaping peoples’ actions in ways that support sustainability [29,30,31,32,33], and successful cultural change usually occurs when it builds upon an organization’s existing culture [34]. By centering the role of culture and creating space for participants in a building to leverage their own organizations’ cultures, the researchers sought to achieve the objective of creating—at a minimum—a partially shared culture. In practice, navigating both shared and contested complex factors were revealed. In the following sections, these factors will be surfaced and explained.

4. Governing a Commons

The goal of the research here is to create COS within the building characterized by shared values, symbols, rituals, and practices grounded in sustainability principles, which, in turn, lead to greater sustainability according to the broader ecological, social justice, and economic development conceptualization [35,36]. Such a culture involves continuously evolving capacities at multiple scales [37], capable of fluidly responding to change [38]. In this, there is recognition that the broad vision of sustainability emerges through dialogue [39,40], with an abstract goal in mind [41], that becomes increasingly tangible through experimentation [42,43]. Because of this, moving towards sustainability requires the ongoing voluntary contribution of participants in its construction [44,45].

Given that the COS requires voluntary participation for a shared benefit, considering culture as a “common-pool resource”, referred to here as a commons, is useful. Libraries and irrigation systems are common examples of commons [46]. Common-pool resources are goods that people cannot be excluded from accessing the benefits of and that those accessing the benefits of can diminish through their usage of the good. Tenants that are part of a positive COS and the halo effect it creates may reap benefits, such as improved workforce recruitment outcomes. However, as traditional commercial tenants, there is no requirement to actively create and maintain a positive COS. One view of voluntary commons suggests that they are destined for either leading to an underperforming sustainability culture or a COS that can only be maintained within a facility serving a single organization that seeks to make sustainability a priority, or through a strictly contractual relationship, such as the building management taking responsibility for all sustainability issues and charging a rental premium to do so [47,48]. A rival view is that a commons can be sustainably self-managed with an effective institutional design [49].

Working together across interorganizational, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary boundaries is the key challenge to constructing a COS and the key source of insights that will benefit it. Boundary objects are artifacts that enable people holding different perspectives to communicate with each other [26]. A protected natural area is a good example of a physical space as a boundary object. A natural area can operate as a research site for physical scientists, green space for urban planners, and a source of leisure activities. In doing so, the natural area itself can serve as a touchpoint that each of these stakeholder groups can use to connect with each other. Scientists can ground their public education efforts by curating material for local citizens using the natural area’s trails for leisure activities, which the local citizens can, in turn, use in their communications with public officials to advocate for the protection and expansion of natural areas. Within this project, the boundary objects can be as big and tangible as the whole building itself or as small and abstract as lunchtime conversations about food [50]. Prototypes generated through the co-design workshops are being used as boundary objects in both their construction and implementation. These are built upon and work alongside the co-designed system maps being used as translation tools [51]. Reducing the barriers to working together was expected to make it easier for tenants to contribute to and sustain a positive COS, while the improved quality of the co-designed solutions was expected to make a positive COS seem more attractive to tenants than a standard cultural alternative.

The goal of the place-based interventions is to create a COS within the building that works across organizations. Such a COS would be self-reinforcing over time. The goal of the social innovation lab is to create a strong commons governance framework through experimentation and co-design by building tenants (see Figure 1). A strong commons governance framework would be one that aligns to the design principles outlined by Ostrom (1990) [49], namely:

• Clear group boundaries;
• Rules regarding governance of commons are adapted to local conditions;
• Those affected by the roles can participate in their modification;
• Rule-making rights of organizations and communities within the building are respected by outside authorities;
• Systems for monitoring member behaviors are created and enforced by members;
• Graduated sanctions for rule violations;
• Low-cost means for resolving conflict;
• Nested systems of governance.

It was not anticipated that all of these design principles would be fully articulated by the end of the intervention, but that the basis for their further development would be established. In this, the social connections and conversations across organizational boundaries were seen as key preconditions for the development of an effectively governed commons. Additionally, the cultural interventions which are the focus of this research were part of a broader strategy that included engineering to design the building for environmental sustainability and the ongoing involvement of the senior leadership of the building management, tenants, and researchers, both of which preceded the use of co-design processes and the tenancy of the participants within the building (see Figure 2).

5. Materials and Methods

This paper is itself part of a “reflection upon practice” element of the overall COS strategy and is an output from a series of reflective activities undertaken by the COS core team. In addition to sharing lessons learned, it is part of the process for moving forward into the next phase of this participatory action research project, a method with a long history of use in work on complex systems [51,52,53]. The core data feeding into this reflection came from products produced during co-design workshops themselves (see Appendix A: Workshop Delivery and Prototyping for more details on the timeline; see Appendix B: Culture of Sustainability Lab Prototypes for an outline of the developed prototypes). Additional COS and engineering sustainability strategies that the social innovation lab co-design process supported are explored in Dreyer et al. [4]. In addition, the core organizing team engaged in a systematic reflection process during mid-August 2019 using the COS strategy manual as the basis for the reflection. This involved three investigators focused on the COS aspect of the intervention, including the author, incoming COS manager, and the project manager who co-ordinated the leadership team that created the sustainable building. This reflective session was part of a program fidelity process to identify gaps in delivery and part of the new COS manager’s onboarding process. However, it also served as a constructivist process for checking the validity of the author’s findings in this paper.

For the design of the COS social innovation lab process itself, the researchers were among the participants in the co-design processes, with the exception of the author of this paper who was co-facilitating the sessions with the COS manager. All researchers were also hotdesk tenants in the building, as one of the building’s tenants was a large academic institution that had a classroom in the building that was used for the workshop convenings. Other tenants include a fast-growing local tech company and the branch office of an international firm, and a number of smaller companies largely housed within a sustainability-focused business accelerator in the building, an additional local academic institution, and a local environmental nonprofit organization. All of the commercial anchor tenants in the building had employees who primarily worked during standard daytime office hours. The academic and hotdesking business accelerator tenants also primarily operated during standard daytime office hours but with more variation, as many of these tenants also spent substantial time working from other locations, including home offices.

Critical systems tools were used in the co-design process, including the grounding of the analysis in personal and collective narratives [51,54,55,56]. The core co-design methodology being used is the WISIR Social Innovation Lab model [6], adapted to the context of a single site within the building. Initially, this involves research into the system in advance of co-design workshops and preliminary modeling, which could include computer models, though these were not used in this case. Then the process shifts towards a series of one- or two-day-long co-design workshops in three phases:

• Seeing the system (retitled System Mapping)—early February 2019;
• Designing (retitled System Design)—mid-February 2019;
• Prototyping (retitled Experimentation 1)—late February 2019.

In addition, two additional co-design workshops were added to the process as a planned follow-up to the Experimentation 1 phase:

4.

Evaluation—early May 2019;

5.

Experimentation 2—mid-May 2019.

At all stages, each co-design workshop was expected to have 15–25 participants that would represent all of the tenant organizations in the building, with multiple representatives coming from larger tenants. Ultimately, 22 people attended the first workshop, 19 the second workshop, 17 the third workshop, 18 the fourth workshop, and 15 the fifth and final workshop. While there was some churn in the attendees, the group was relatively stable throughout, with 9 attending only one workshop, 11 two workshops, 5 three workshops, and 8 four workshops (due to a data collection issue, the exact list of attendees for the fifth workshop has to be discarded. At least one person from each of the major tenant organizations attended all five workshops, but exact numbers are unavailable). In addition to the co-design workshops, the COS core team convened a planned day-long design workshop eight months in advance of the System Mapping workshop. After the core team convening, the first COS manager was hired and started work alongside the move-in of the first tenants, though, in June 2019, the original COS manager resigned and was replaced in August 2019. Most of the core COS team was housed within the building from September 2018 until the March 2020 building closure due to COVID-19.

6. Findings

The findings of this study focus on the praxis of using co-design processes in a shared space. Given the consequences of building closures for almost two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is premature to evaluate the efficacy of these processes in supporting the emergence of a COS in the building. The first research question asked what design tensions emerge when constructing co-design processes meant to encourage social innovation in a complex system while working from inside that complex system. Inherently, this question establishes an action research framing for its response, and the role of reflection in addressing it is critical, but it also meant that the challenges involved in implementing the planned research itself serves as a source of learning. In practice, the implementation of participatory co-design processes using the social innovation lab approach was too thin to be fully considered a social innovation lab process as outlined in the original Social Innovation Lab Guide [6]. However, the challenges that arose in attempting a social innovation lab process were critical in surfacing design tensions.

The social innovation lab processes are inherently rooted in complexity theory and praxis. From the perspective of a practitioner, the use of lab processes within the hyper-localized context of building sustainability within a building has raised a number of creative design tensions. The manifestation of these tensions would vary depending on the particular context. Still, four broad sources of tension are likely to arise: allocating the costs of co-ordinating collective action, balancing a homogeneous platform for action with heterogeneous participants, building infrastructure and co-design approaches, and leadership-driven and co-design approaches (see

Table 1. Tensions in building-based lab design.

Locus of Tension	Tension	Manifestation
Allocating the costs of co-ordinating collective action	Use of shared spaces to communicate messages without undermining alternative channels	A shared café or restaurant that could be used to informally communicate messages or have chance encounters with other workshop participants were expected but had not materialized before COVID-19
		Because shared spaces did not function as anticipated, alternative ad hoc communications had to be developed that took a considerable amount of time
	Have communications platforms that are useful for the needs of individual tenant organizations while also allowing conversation between tenant organizations	At the micro level, there were challenges in actually scheduling meetings and events between different organizations was a time-intensive task
		Alternative systems were put in place that enabled easier scheduling; they were largely ad hoc and person-by-person based, which had the consequence of making it difficult to maintain co-ordination systems when there was employee turnover
	Deference to centralized leadership of implementing distributed strategies can be more efficient in the short-term	Engagement of employees in intensive bottom-up co-creation is expected to make the COS more dynamic, distributed, and transformational
		Having the research team and COS manager effectively providing services for “free” to tenants may be part of what is driving the de facto top-down approach, as tenants feel the core team has the resources to do much of the heavy lifting while they were feeling the day-to-day time pressures of their core work
	Low barriers to entry into co-design processes increases participation but this may be at the cost of participant commitment	By design, COS activities were structured as having low barriers to entry, but this, in turn, meant that participants had to invest relatively little in those COS activities and prototypes, leading to little sense of ownership amongst those who did participate
Balancing a homogeneous platform for action with heterogeneous participants	Designing more opportunities to enable the heterogenous possible contributions of members can increase future support for a COS, while also greatly increasing the complexity of the design process	For the most part, tenants were engaged as if their tenancy was their sole contribution, rather than as people and organizations with unique capabilities they could bring to the development of novel COS practices; for example, one tenant is a large accounting firm—what role can accounting play in encouraging a COS?
		Each organization has its own cultural norms, and the challenges of working within a multi-tenant building rather than a single-tenant building became clearer in trying to work across those different cultural systems
	Resourcing of strategies within individual organizations versus resourcing collective action	Leadership within tenant organizations is often supportive of COS programming throughout the building, but freeing staff time or financial resources to support it is often prioritized lower than internal efforts
Building infrastructure and co-design approaches	Tenant spaces being fully finished at the time the building opened, while also allowing all tenants to enter simultaneously	Leaving office space empty longer than anticipated is a large cost for both the property manager and tenants who have expectations about space usage
		Some tenants occupied their space much earlier than others and were able to establish their own norms
		Tenants who moved in early often had to expend energy managing challenges with their own space and, therefore, had difficulty contributing time towards collective efforts
		There was not a single time when all tenants moved into the building, which lost opportunities to build enthusiasm through co-ordinated COS activities; tenant-centered events, even low-key ones, such as lunch-and-learns, would have been greeted with quite a bit of enthusiasm despite the challenges of staggered move-in dates
	Maintaining the professional presentation of shared spaces alongside the messiness of cross-organizational communication	Low-cost means of communicating that leverage the space, such as posters and bulletin boards, also appear to be amateurish and unprofessional in most commercial office spaces
		Maintaining a professional appearance in shared spaces is particularly important for a building intended on being used to showcase the combination of commerce and sustainability
Leadership-driven and co-design approaches	Individual peoples’ knowledge and motivation provide commitment to action but also leave a COS vulnerable to turnover	Reliance on key champions within different tenant organizations is critical to preventing all of the organizing work to fall on the COS staff, which would, in turn, limit the amount of COS-supporting activity that could be undertaken
		Turnover amongst individuals and this impact is taken a step further when tenant organizations enter or depart the space
		Overcoming this challenge will be critical, as a key point of using a COS approach is that the established culture transcends specific individuals, including the acculturation of new employees into the existing culture
	The broad mandate of the COS staff relative to other tenants created a lot of flexibility for them to act at the expense of cultivating a broader COS leadership base	The overall offloading of responsibility for developing and energizing the COS to the COS staff led to a centralization of ownership in the COS leadership team
		Because there was no broader inter-organizational green team, this sense of ownership remained contained to the researchers and the COS manager, a sense that was further compounded by a lack of building-wide onboarding events

: Tensions in building-based lab design).

7. Discussion

The locus of two of these tensions is primarily at the interaction between decisions made in the co-design process, how they are received by participants, and the activities undertaken by participants in response. Allocating the costs of co-ordinating collective action relates to issues tied to enabling and encouraging participants to volunteer time and other resources towards the co-development, co-creation, and co-sustaining of COS activities. At its core is the problem of sustaining a commons that benefits the entire community but does not compel contribution, and the degree to which contribution can or should be compelled is always in question. Alongside this is another locus of tension, balancing a homogenous platform for action with heterogeneous participants. The COS itself is a contested concept, as both the meaning of sustainability and the bounding of culture(s) within a building with multiple organizations are both sources of heterogeneous perspectives. The degree to which the COS is a single collective action versus a set of related but different—even at times competing—interests is constantly a source of tension. Additionally, the degree to which the co-design model seeks uniformity of action versus enabling independence reflects this tension.

The locus of the remaining two tensions connects with how the co-design methodology fits with the other core tensions within the building. The first of these is the tension between the building infrastructure and co-design approaches. While the building is a sustainability intervention itself, it is also an enabling constraint for lateral activity between and bottom-up engagement from individual tenants. As importantly, the expectations that tenants and the COS team placed on the building before moving into the building, early experiences with the move-in process, and since being established tenants within the building have shaped how co-design has been approached and implemented. The second of these tensions is between the leadership-driven and co-design approaches. Leaders within tenant organizations enable action in the development of a COS, but they also place constraints on their workers as to how much time they can allocate to collective building-wide COS actions. Leadership also helps determine the balance between their organization’s internal sustainability strategies and the collective approach being taken between tenant organizations in the building.

The second research question asked what realistic expectations are for voluntary participation when multiple organizations with different core mandates are involved. While the initial Social Innovation Lab Guide suggests some flexibility in the time and resourcing required for the implementation of a lab process [6], its suggestion of a total programing time of 29–44 h over three workshops is substantially longer than the total of 7.5 h over five workshops that were all held over lunch and, therefore, also had to allocate time for eating. Taken together, that is a different order of magnitude between the plan and the actual delivery and, at that level, it would be unrealistic to suggest that there was true fidelity to the WISIR Social Innovation Lab process, though whether or not close fidelity was actually possible is explored more in the contribution to praxis section.

8. Contribution to Praxis

For participatory process designers, there are a number of critical lessons to be drawn here. As important as the design of processes while participants are “in the room”, physically or virtually, is, context-setting around the design is often more important. Getting the right people together, with the right amount of time, and proper resourcing is necessary for them to be able to participate in co-design. Often, participatory processes are tokenistic and, in those cases, the importance of context-setting is secondary—when real participation is not the actual goal, then designing for the perception of participation is all that is needed. However, when real power-sharing is necessary to achieve the end goal, then the context-setting is critical.

The core learning for praxis to draw out here is that enabling people with different interests and capacities to contribute to a commons is a design challenge. The implicit model of a commons is often that everyone using it draws a similarly valued resource from it, for example, fish from a river or a common vat of wine for a village feast. Alongside this, everyone contributing to the commons contributes in a similar manner, such as refraining from excessive fishing or bringing a bottle of wine to the feast. However, in this case, the common contributions are different. The property manager can offer common physical space and the leaders of each organization can offer financial contributions and staff time. Even in this, the nature of staff time differs. Tenants in the building are academics, engineers, professional service providers, and entrepreneurs, while also being yoga instructors, cooks, and trivia players. The heterogenous nature of the potential contributions greatly increases the complexity of the commons being governed.

The heterogenous nature of the contributions also matches with the heterogenous opportunities for collaboration these contributions present. Bringing together people in the building for co-creative activities is a means of exploring the adjacent possibilities that these different attributes of each participant bring to the table. However, it is not clear before people are convened and start working together what those adjacent possibilities may be. Because of this, early on in the cocreation process, the specific asks made of the participants may be unclear—it is not known exactly how much money might be needed to support the commons, what type of space is most critical, or what skills will be most useful. Yet, until there has been some co-design and implementation, it is impossible to ascertain in a complex system what the highest value contributions relative to cost could be.

For process designers then, it is critical that there are initially substantive commitments by leadership in participating organizations to make some resources available early on that are rather general in nature. Arthur argues that the path to identifying opportunities in complex systems in which the actors are, at best, boundedly rational is through inductive experimentation, which is, in turn, how adjacent possibilities are identified and expanded [24]. What this means for designing the context is that, early in the engagement, all of the heterogeneous contributions—notably physical space and peoples’ time—should be viewed as highly fungible. A general meeting room might be of value early on until the group identifies a bulletin board and a prayer room as being the most important spaces to have, and an outgoing and well-connected person within an organization might be more important early on than a programmer and an accountant. As the co-design process moves forward, the needs of the group will become more specific and the personal networks that evolve within the community will lower the cost of matching the right resource to the right opportunity. However, building those networks will necessitate early contributions in which the benefits to each organizations’ leadership may not be clear.

This is difficult in spaces that work between organizations. When participants were engaged with the COS co-design process, it was often seen by their leaders as time on top of, rather than a substitute for, their work time. Even if it occurred during formal “work hours”, participants were expected to offset this time with leisure rather than company work. While such voluntary contributions to corporate culture are often expected within a company, such contributions are often recognized formally or informally by being seen as a “team player” or having “leadership potential”. Such recognition would be unlikely in the COS case because networks with which participants’ contributions were most visible were often external to their employer’s organization. While this does not actively block participation, it does disincentivize it.

As applied tools, design labs must necessarily consider the contexts into which they are used. Design labs are built from the organizations, infrastructure, and histories of the people and organizations of which they are comprised. This is particularly acute when the subject of the lab is not an opportunity space outside their current operations, but is instead part of their daily lived experience. This, in turn, means that a larger share of potential strategies or prototypes could change established resource or authority flows. Without ample trust built between participants, this likely constrains the size of the adjacent possible space that participants can explore in their co-design efforts.

There are costs associated with governance and, given the multi-participant nature of a commons, there are a number of places where contributions could come from. The clearest source is financial contributions from one or more participants in a commons to a centralized body to manage the commons. However, beyond financial contributions, there are also heterogenous human and infrastructural contributions that can be made as well, though these are not easily substitutable, which increases the cost involved in managing them efficiently. It may be that this added cost is so high that, under many conditions, financial contributions may be the only ones that can be used cost-effectively. More importantly, such a model can change the nature of the commons being provided. In this case, it would mean substituting a bottom-up “culture of sustainability” for an additional top-down “paid service of sustainability” approach.

These contributions to praxis being noted, it is worth noting the limitations of the approach in this study. Reflective practice is valuable but, since it was being used primarily to support the ongoing participatory action research being undertaken in the building, the findings are all developed on constructivist foundations developed primarily to enable action within this particular context. Thus, though the context found here may be analogous to those encountered in other place-based complex systems, they will not be identical and the analysis here will have picked up peculiarities embedded in this context. That said, with these caveats identified, the key design tensions are likely to be expressed in a broader range of circumstances, as co-design processes often have many contextual similarities to what was seen here.

9. Conclusions

The end goal of this process was the creation of a self-sustaining COS within this shared space facility. This work is still in progress, though it faced a major interruption due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the first co-design workshop held in February 2019 and the building being closed to all tenants due to mandated safety protocols in March 2020 just over one year later, it would be premature to describe the culture of the building at that point or the online organizational cultures that developed over the two years since the building has been partially or fully shut down as a success or a failure. Indeed, as tenants started returning to the building in late 2021 and 2022, the experiences of working remotely for almost two years have certainly created far more dramatic cultural changes than anything envisioned in the COS strategy or the supporting co-design processes.

That said, the early part of this COS strategy revealed the crux of the challenge of co-design to support a commons is that there are constant pressures, for the processes can slip away from distributed leadership and co-implementation towards allowing a secretariat or executive to become the assumed implementor of co-designed outputs. In this case, these would have defaulted to the core COS staff. Without substantial commitments of peoples’ time outside the core COS team or shared space, co-implementation became extremely difficult. This made the experimentation to build the networks that would be relied on for larger-scale integration difficult and suggests that there may be a minimum threshold requirement for participation in a co-design strategy, though exactly what level that is remains unclear.

These design tensions cannot be resolved, but it is a matter for further exploration to identify the conditions under which the balance of each of these tensions should fall under a given context. The context matters greatly because, while good design processes encourage voluntary contributions to a commons, there will always be strong opposing pressures to those contributions. Expecting that a commons can be supported from the bottom up when individual participants are facing strong incentives to not participate or to work only through the programing within their own organizations may be too great an ask in a primarily commercial context. Indeed, the disproportionate role of the nonprofit and academic tenants in implementing prototypes would fit with this framing. Yet, alongside this, the workshops were quite well-attended, as were the prototype events that they produced. This suggests an appetite for cross-organizational engagement in sustainability issues, despite operational challenges. Design can mitigate those challenges but they cannot eliminate them.