About the DSD Playbook

The Decentralised Service Design (DSD) Playbook is an evolving resource for designers, developers, and innovators seeking to explore decentralised opportunities.

Decentralised technologies present innovative solutions that can, for example, enhance security and increase inclusion, resulting in opportunities and efficiencies not possible with centralised systems. However, decentralising data or services can be a big step change. New considerations and risks arise as relationships and power dynamics shift. It can be difficult to know if decentrlised tools are right for your context, and what the results might be when implemented. Our mission is to bridge the gap between traditional service design methodologies and the unique challenges of decentralised systems.

The methods in this Playbook will help give you insights on what new opportunities, dynamics and risks might emerge from a decentralised approach.

What is Decentralised Service Design?

Decentralised Service Design is a co-creation approach to identifying and developing services that operate on decentralised technologies. Unlike traditional service design, DSD focusses on supporting:

• Trustless interactions - Services that function without centralised authorities
• Distributed governance - Decision-making spread across stakeholders
• Smart contracts - Automated, immutable business logic
• Transparency - Public, verifiable operations and transactions
• User sovereignty - Individual control over data and assets
• Tokenomics - Economic models based on cryptocurrencies and tokens

Designing decentralised services presents new challenges for service design. It means connecting a greater range of individuals, organisations and technological agents in service ecosystems, in new ways. Mapping these expanded ecosystems and understanding the potential consequences is complex.

Co-creation is essential for equitable and sustainable results. Despite the promise, decentralisation and the technologies that support it, remain difficult to understand, have a poor reputation, can be deeply politicised, and are often developed and applied in ways that remain opaque and irresponsibly governed. While an industry focus to drive decentralised service design is essential, it is vital to recognise and work with a wide range of potential stakeholders who may be integral, in contributing resources and data, and sustaining the ecosystem.

What Does This Playbook Offer?

The workshop methods offered in this playbook are designed to be collaborative, inclusive and encourage diverse perspectives across participants. This explores the perspectives of both the service provider, “what new services can be offered?”, and consumer, “what new services are desirable?”. The methods are guided by simple, tangible materials and activities that require no technical or expert knowledge to use and encourage the articulation and sharing of ideas.

Discover and Define

These methods focus on discovery and are intended to stimulate new thinking on existing challenges and open up novel ideas for entirely new services. To illustrate how these activities map to the innovation process, we use the Design Council’s double diamond to show how they fit into the first stages of innovation: Discover and Define.

Though the focus of this playbook is specifically on exploring the new potential of decentralised technologies, the activities or outcomes are not tied to the use of a particular technology, protocol or system.

The Workshops

In this first iteration of the playbook, we offer the DSD fundamentals, as a starting point for understanding what it means to decentralise a service. Activities lead you through mapping your project ecosystem, identifying opportunities for decentralisation and then exploring the benefits for a wide range of ecosystem stakeholders.

We offer a further four workshop methods which enable a deeper dive into the features of specific decentralised technologies such as Blockchain, NFTs, and smart contracts, and the services they might support. These workshops are experiential, using tangible materials and playful activities that lead to a more accesible and grounded understanding of the dynamics of decentralised services.

Who This Playbook Is For?

This playbook is for anyone interested in exploring the opportunities of decentralised services. In particular, we present these activities for those who have interest and experience in using workshop methodologies to develop new products or services such as:

• Facilitators and researchers
• Service and system designers
• Product teams, managers or innovation consultants

Currently this playbook assumes a basic knowledge of facilitation processes, and the requirements of preparing and organising these events. We encourage those who are already skilled to consider how to adapt and integrate these methods within their current workflows.

In addition, we want to encourage those working directly with technology that may not have this experience to explore the materials and use them as part of a broader journey to understanding the user perspective.

Whether you're seeking to: solve sector challenges, develop new services, gain buy-in for your new concept, or explore decentralised services with wider communities, these activities will provide insight and inspiration for developing the design of engagement activities.

How Do I Use This Playbook?

We recommend starting your DSD journey with the fundamentals workshop. You can either work through the whole workshop, or you can pick and choose from the eight activity stages to fit your constraints and requirements.

Explore the other workshops and consider which might fit your needs. This playbook has been designed to be modular, so you can select sections or elements from the methods to create your own workshop process. Think creatively about how the activities could be playfully adapted for your sector and stakeholder group. While we include case studies showing how we have used these in specific contexts, at the core of the activities are concepts that can be adapted to many situations.

Open and Accessible

The DSD Playbook is free to use and share. We believe that democratising access to design tools will lead to better, more inclusive decentralised services. All templates, worksheets, and guides are available for download without registration, and you can adapt them however you wish. We do ask that you credit the DSD Playbook when using or adapting our materials, as per the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, indicated at the foot of this page.

Join the Community

We're building a global community of practitioners who are passionate about designing better decentralised services. Share your experiences, ask questions, and contribute to the evolution of DSD methodologies.