Call for participation: Design for Civic Protocol Economies

Why this, why now?

Across the globe, communities are reimagining how to organize economies that serve collective well-being rather than profit alone. At the same time, new digital tools—blockchains, smart contracts, protocol-based infrastructures—are transforming how we coordinate, govern, and exchange value. But how do we ensure these tools support civic life, rather than replicate extractive systems in new forms?

This design charrette invites you to explore that question through hands-on experimentation, case-based design work, and design fiction.

What we’ll do

In this three-day gathering, we’ll bring together designers, technologists, researchers, and civic practitioners to prototype futures for what we call the Civic Protocol Economy—the intersection of community-driven economies and programmable, protocol-based infrastructures.

Together, we’ll investigate:

• How can digital media—like tokens, local currencies, or governance protocols—support collective care, commons-based organizing, or neighborhood-scale collaboration?
• What kinds of rights, roles, and value flows emerge when we design from civic principles?
• How might we prototype such civic futures?

We’ll work hands-on with real-world cases, using design fiction and rapid prototyping to build provotypes—provocative prototypes that bring speculative civic protocols to life and test their practical viability.

Who we’re looking for

We welcome applicants from diverse fields—designers, developers, policy-makers, researchers, students, artists, activists—working at the intersection of:

• Civic economy & community-led initiatives
• HCI and Digital Design
• Platform & protocol technologies
• Commons-based organizing
• Doughnut, solidarity, or regenerative economic models
• Speculative or critical design

Whether you’re building local infrastructure, imagining post-capitalist alternatives, or experimenting with protocol-based governance—we’d love for you to join us. There will also be room in the program for participants to share their own projects and discuss themes and questions with the group.

Organizer & Goals

This workshop is organized by Civic Interaction Design, an interdisciplinary research group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Together with students, designers, technology developers, policymakers, (local) governments, academic researchers, and citizens, we explore how design & technology can contribute to civic life: the numerous and varied interactions through which people in a society come together to strive towards collective well-being.

In 2024, the Civic Interaction Design lectorate, in collaboration with the Centre of Expertise Economic Transformation (CET), organized a research residency titled “What happens when the Civic Economy meets the Protocol Economy?” In this initiative we explored how these two significant economic and technological developments might complement and strengthen each other. Building on a report concluding this project, we would like to further explore this theme in this design charrette. Our goal is to explore real-world cases, identify opportunities and knowledge gaps for future research and design work, and build a network of people interested in these themes.

Thematic background: Mediation for civic economies

Civic economies aim to prioritize collective well-being, not shareholder value. Protocol economies introduce programmable governance mechanisms, often grounded in decentralized technologies. Could these two logics reinforce one another?

During a 2024 research residency, the Civic Interaction Design group explored this question. From that work, we developed a conceptual model that distinguishes three types of media for civic economies:

• Currencies to store and exchange value
• Tokens to govern rights, roles and privileges
• Current-sees to express states and signals within a system

These media allow us to encode and mediate civic values—relationality, reciprocity, shared responsibility—within economic and technological infrastructures.

In this workshop, we’ll explore how these can be operationalized through design: as mechanisms, interfaces, rituals, or systems that support civic life.

The full report from the research residency can be found here.

Outline of the program

Day 1: learning as foundation

Keynote speakers and case owners share their insights and perspectives.

Keynotes are by Indy Johar of (Dark Matter Labs) and Venkatesh Rao (Summer of Protocols).

Cases from TU Delft/LIFE Arena, Dark Matter Labs, MeentCoop/Becknprotocol, and more to be announced.

Indy Johar is an architect by training and a maker by practice, he is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation. He, amongst other organisations – co-founded Impact Hub Birmingham and Open Systems Lab, was a member of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission and a good growth advisor to the Mayor of London. He is an explorative practitioner in the means of system change & the dark matter design of civic infrastructure finance, outcomes, and governance. Indy is a Director of 00 and Dark Matter Laboratories.

Venkatesh Rao is a writer and consultant based in Seattle. His current writing can be found on the the Contraptions newsletter. Since 2023, he has been the program director of the Summer of Protocols program. Between 2007-24, he used to write a popular blog called Ribbonfarm (now archived) Several curated collections of his online writing are available as Kindle ebooks.

In a separate session, workshop participants are invited to present their own projects, and discuss their underlying themes and questions with the group.

Day 2: design to unpack

The second day is dedicated to applying protocol mechanics with civic principles to explore specific elements per case (subject to change):

• How to scale up a hyper-local energy cooperative as a collective entity in a complex energy balancing system?
• How to achieve a community-stimulating mechanism within governance-oriented social software?
• How to leverage data in a protocol-based service design?
• How to design an economic layer on a strong collaborative neighbourhood fabric?

We will have two tutors with backgrounds in social design and protocol design who support the design activity with inspiration and critical, creative directions.

We end the day by pitching the outcomes to stakeholders from the actual case owners.

Day 3: reflection and making plans

The third day is dedicated to capturing the learnings and questions that will drive new knowledge. We take time to reflect on the learnings in a structured way, and explore how these could be addressed in follow up design or research projects.

Practical details

• Dates: Monday–Wednesday, September 15–17, 2025
• Location: Amsterdam (exact venue TBA)
• Cost: Free, thanks to our partner CoECI. Lunch & refreshments provided. Monday dinner included; Tuesday dinner informal.
• Commitment: Full participation across all three days is expected.
• Participants: 15–20 selected applicants

How to apply

Please fill out [this form] and include a short motivation (½ A4). Let us know:

• Your name and affiliation
• Why you’d like to join
• Your background in topics like civics, design, economy, or protocol tech
• A project you might want to present
• Any relevant cases, readings, or initiatives you think we should know about

Deadline 1: July 6 (AoE) — Notification: July 13

Deadline 2: August 24 — Notification: August 30 (if spots remain)

You can email Iskander Smit your application here.