Collaborative services
Design of enabling sharing solutions
François Jégou, August 2009

This paper was published in the Design Made09 catalogue, Corea.

“Drills are used in average 4 hours in all their life but if I lend mine to my neighbours I am sure it will come back broken one day…”; “I have plenty of stuff that I don’t use in my basement but it’s too complicated to find who may need them…”; “People don’t pay attention when they use good collectively. They don’t clean them after use and they don’t maintain them properly just because they don’t feel responsible for it…”

Who has never heard theses sentences whatever culture or social background s/he is coming from? They represent the mainstream way of considering sharing practices. Although when looking around at informal behaviours between neighbours, lots of sharing can be observed. The researches we conduct since nearly ten years now observing with design eyes, cases of social innovations worldwide brought us to analyse many examples of good practices from co-housing, car-sharing and pooling, community gardens… focusing collective use of goods to local exchange trading systems, solidarity purchase groups, community supported agriculture or stockwell… for mutual help and supports. The rich catalogue of examples we progressively constitute offers very interesting alternative models of organisation of daily living in a new and more sustainable way. We can witness these promising solutions worldwide and in many places they constitute an emerging trends shifting lifestyles.
In order to upscale and further diffuse in larger circles of population, the spontaneous social innovations should be adapted from the local specific niche in which they flourish to encompass various contexts of use and address selectively different profiles of possible adopters. Discrete and informal sharing practices observed may be supported and designers have a role to play in streamlining these solutions to make them available and attractive to larger share of the population. At the crossroads of design of services and design for sustainability opens a new a fruitful field to develop collaborative services. Whereas most of professional services are thought to be delivered to a passive user and fulfil completely his requirements, collaborative services are meant to be participative solutions designed to enable users to take part in their fulfilment and partially co-produce the benefits they will get.
Collaborative services is also the title of a recent book where we brought together some of these thesis together with guidelines and examples of how grace roots social innovations promising in terms of sustainability can be reinforced to facilitate their up-scaling and diffusion. We will reproduce here some of these principles particularly important for the promotion of sharing practices.

To facilitate user access and open up collaborative practices inspired form social innovation to a wider range of potential adopters with differing socio-demographic profiles, suppose to determine the main difficulties in the acceptance of sharing practices (i.e. time dedicated; cognitive constraints; organisational burden…) to define possible ways to facilitate use and increase functionality. Practically it involves a series of combined design operations such as: fluidifyng use by introducing new kinds of service organization and/or new supporting technology; diversifying access so that a single solution can meet the requirements of different categories of user; enhancing communication support to make services more visible to potential adopters; facilitating the replication and diffusion of service across different contexts of use and diverse local implementations.

Support collective use
Sharing and collective use are a part of many of our informal daily practices. This common use of resources requires great attention to manage places and products collectively, to organise time sharing, to ensure maintenance of products where there are multiple users, to provide conciliation in case of conflict between people sharing the same device.
Sharing services must then be designed to support collective use of shared places and goods. Products should be thought for multiple users and compensate for the burden of self-managed collective resources.

For instance, the Neighbourhood Library (above) is based on collective neighbourhood access to the books people have on their living-room shelves, but the solution benefits from the organisation and management system of a professional library. Participants are registered members and they choose which of their books to place on the database. An online catalogue is available, and books are tracked through a computerised booking system, with return dates and fines for late returns. The sharing of books becomes, then, an easy and fruitful operation.

Reduce anticipation
More than being time-consuming in their implementation and management in daily life, sharing requires forethought from users. To take part in a car-sharing system requires advance booking. To get second hand books requires taking part in an exchange network and waiting for an available copy. To buy organic products directly at the local farm, through fair trade circuits as in a purchase group means planning and ordering purchases.
In a mainstream culture of immediate consumption of personalized products and instantaneous services, the necessity to plan in advance and anticipate needs is a heavy constraint for the users. Sharing solutions must therefore reduce needs for forethought from the users. Allow more instant use of the service through the use of quick information exchange supports, simple and automated procedures.

For instance, the loan of domestic tools is a natural thing to do, but at a neighbourhood scale it means users, checking that tools are given back in good order, bargain for maintenance or substitution in case of problems and so on. This heavy management required by loaning may upset the generosity of most. Product Time Sharing (see above) is a personal leasing service proposed when one buys new goods such as tools or specific domestic appliances that are not used all the time: simply by applying for the service the new owner becomes the leaser of the products. He or she gains access to a professional infrastructure for leasing goods locally, including: a means to track a fleet of products; a reservation and booking system; the management of financial rewards, etc.

These two examples of design strategies presented here give an idea of the improvement in terms of functionality that a strategic design approach can bring to social innovations.
But increasing the functionality, providing access for a larger audience, facilitating participation, reducing time and organisational constraints, providing professional support to streamline the usage processes may lead to the generation of more commercially oriented services: Car-sharing evolved in the last thirty years from an informal agreement between friends living in the same street to the large service companies we can see nowadays. Cars are still shared and probably in a more convenient and easy way. But the risk is to divorce the solutions from their substantial humanistic and relational content, which is the essence of the perceived quality of sharing and very often essential to make the solution work.

Build trust-based relationship
In most of the observed cases of sharing, the construction of mutual trust is based on the relationship between individuals. It is mainly because participants meet physically and collaborate, know each other directly or through a third party that such initiatives are viable. Leaving kids to someone that will walk them to school, pre-financing the production of a local farmer, hosting a student in a spare room of one’s own apartment or receiving a vegetable box without the possibility to check the quality and freshness of the products, etc, in all these situations, the relationship precedes and motivates the trust. Professional services on a large scale are based on the opposite: trust relay on the institution and its longevity; relationships with the service staff are codified and anonymous.
The relational quality of the developed solutions is generally based on a mix of the two approaches. Sharing services should be designed on trust-based relationship combining interpersonal understanding and reliability of the service organisation. It should enable the construction between the participants of a lasting face-to-face relationship, regular physical meetings, dialogue and personalised interactions for a robust and flexible collaborative service.

Enhance the semi-public status
Contrary to the organisation of mainstream society, showing a strong limit between public and private, sharing implies an in-between status. An orchard in a public park, a series of single houses sharing a garden, a purchase group organised by the inhabitants of the same street, etc – these are all examples of semi-public (or semi-private) places, frequented by regular users but open to others, collectively managed but generating a feeling of intimacy. The very in-between status of these places tends to induce a similar in-between attitude among the people who use or organise those resources. They are neither together nor isolated; they are voluntarily in a relationship.
Develop sharing suppose to enhance semi-public status for resources and places, to foster open ownership, proximity and even interpenetration of public and private to gently raise awareness on collective care among users.

We don’t have here the space to further develop more of these design patterns to support the development of sharing solutions. More research has also to be done. DESIS as Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability has been structured into a network of design schools and universities worldwide that among its goals will follow this track of research.