Design Thinking for Diverse Democratic Technologies, Values, and Connected Procedures: A Normative and Empirical Approach

Design thinking offers valuable conceptual tools that can support normative and empirical theorising of constellations of tools and processes within democratic systems. This paper demonstrates how two key design-based frameworks – Saward’s Democratic Design framework (2021) and affordance theory – can be integrated to form an analytic approach that equips us to meet two pressing demands on the study of democratic innovations: 1) to develop novel theoretical methods that can handle the myriad of diverse designs that cannot be neatly aligned with a single model of democracy or a fixed set of democratic values, and 2) to attend to systemic embeddedness, even when focusing primarily on a particular element of a democratic process (e.g. case studies of 'micro-level' processes). I illustrate this approach through two action-research case studies of processes in Australia designed to support collective decision making on contentious climate-related issues using the prominent digital democracy platform, Polis. These case studies directly confronted the two demands highlighted above. In part, this was necessitated by the software’s structure. A Polis conversation combines deliberative and aggregative procedures in a way that defies neat delineation into a sequence; instead, opinion formation, expression and analysis are inextricably enmeshed, both temporally and in terms of interaction at the individual, opinion group and overall community levels. Additional complexity emerged from broadening the focus beyond the platform’s intrinsic features to include its contextual use in each case. This broader frame required attention to a myriad of interrelated elements (some designed for, others not) that occurred before, during and after each multi-week Polis conversation, across cyber, physical, social and institutional spaces. The concept of affordances has usefully been applied in analysis of the relationships between design features, processes and outcomes of democratic innovations, particularly those involving digital technology. While the focus is often on intrinsic features of digital platforms (e.g. design of interfaces and algorithms), affordance theory has increasingly been applied more broadly to encompass more social and institutional elements of process design. However, this scholarship tends to enmesh affordances with a particular conception of democratic values, limiting the applicability of such frameworks to the infinite variations in methods and aims of democratic innovations across diverse contexts and perspectives. To overcome this normative rigidity, I turn to the Democratic Design framework (Saward, 2021), which draws upon a different set of lessons from design thinking to provide a foundation for 'second-order' normative theorising. While Saward's focus is primarily at the systemic level, I illustrate how the Democratic Design approach can be fruitfully applied in systemically-oriented analysis of micro-level democratic innovation processes, through integration with the analytical granularity of affordance theory. In this way, this paper offers a novel theoretical method for small-scale democratic innovations, supporting attention both to the complex, interconnected micro-procedures they involve and to their embeddedness in wider political contexts.