Finding Place in a Design Space: Challenges for Supporting Community Design Efforts at Scale

Many organizations have adopted design processes that integrate community voices to discover the real problems that communities face. Online discussion forums offer a familiar and flexible technology that can help facilitate discussion around problems and potential solutions. However, we lack understanding about what information community members share, how that information is structured, and how social interactions affect design processes at scale. This paper presents a mixed-methods analysis of Canvas, a learning management system, which enables users to contribute to the design of the platform by sharing and deliberating on problems and solutions in a discussion forum. We collected and analyzed 1412 ideas and 18,335 associated comments shared on the Canvas discussion forum. We found that only 56.8% of posted ideas articulated a clear problem and 40.4% included a comprehensive set of information (problem, solution, and contextual details) sufficient to make design decisions. At least 11.6% of the ideas were duplicates, many of which were posted by members to garner attention for their ideas. The distributed nature of design information, the presence of duplicate ideas, and gaming behaviors made it difficult for the community to get oriented to the discussion. Finally, we reflect on how Canvas community members contribute information to a co-constructed design space and how future systems could more effectively coordinate community design efforts.