Human Connection as the Design Goal

Abstract

Collaboration platforms are increasingly used to address complex societal challenges, enabling actors from different organisations and communities to work together across geographic and institutional boundaries. For these platforms to sustain participation and build trust between contributors who do not know one another, reputation and recognition mechanisms are essential. A reputation system makes past behavior visible so that trust between strangers becomes possible, while recognition mechanisms acknowledge contributions to motivate continued participation. When a platform hosts multiple distinct communities with differing norms and value priorities, designing these mechanisms becomes significantly more complex. This multi-community design challenge, and the absence of design principles that address it, is the knowledge gap this research fills.
The research question is: What design principles are needed to support value-aligned reputation and recognition mechanisms in multi-community collaborative platforms?
This thesis was conducted in collaboration with Alkemio, an EU-built platform for multi-stakeholder collaboration, using Value Sensitive Design as the research approach. The conceptual investigation drew on a structured literature review, the empirical investigation consisted of nine semi-structured interviews with three stakeholder groups and a focus group, and the technical investigation translated the findings into design requirements through value hierarchy specification.
The conceptual investigation established that reputation and recognition are deeply intertwined in practice, and that a purely ethical VSD value inventory is insufficient for motivational systems. Supplementing VSD with Self-Determination Theory produced a preliminary value inventory of thirteen values. The empirical investigation confirmed ten of those values, added respect as an empirically grounded addition, and removed benevolence, integrity, and reciprocity, producing a final inventory of eleven values: accountability, authenticity, autonomy, competence, fairness, inclusivity, privacy, relatedness, respect, transparency, and trust. Three consistent findings emerged across all stakeholder groups: personal connection and relational trust consistently outweighed formal reputation signals, automated recognition and quantitative metrics were broadly experienced as hollow and demotivating, and privacy and autonomy were the dominant values with contributors drawing a clear line between a platform that supports collaboration and one that controls it.
The technical investigation translated all eleven values into 28 consolidated design requirements through value hierarchy specification. Value conflict analysis revealed that all conflicts clustered around the privacy requirement that no profile fields are mandatory and display is always contributor-controlled.
Five design principles emerged from combining these results. The first is that the platform makes the collaboration network visible, enabling trust through trusted third parties. The second is peer recognition over platform automation, prescribing that recognition must come from people rather than platforms. The third is visibility as the default with privacy as the choice. The fourth is that the platform enables but the human chooses, keeping mechanisms non-prescriptive and non-competitive. The fifth is that respect matters but design possibilities are limited.
These principles point to one overarching conclusion: human connection is the design goal, and simultaneously the element that platform design is most limited in achieving. A platform can create the conditions that make human connection more likely, but it cannot produce it. For public interest platforms, this establishes not only what design principles are needed but also where design reaches its limit