Engagement Spaces
Engagement spaces provide designed interaction arenas in which actors, within explicit rules and boundary conditions, may achieve coordination, cooperation, and learning themselves. For instance, engagement spaces can be used to govern a natural resource as a commons or to organize a shared task such as shipping, or to collectively use a limited and relatively inflexible resource (such as infrastructure roads, charging, locks, docks, or facilities like hospitals ). A roundabout is popular example of an engagement space. It offers an alternative to traffic lights at intersections.
Why engagement: interaction is key.
Engagement spaces offer an attractive alternative to model-based hierarchical steering mechanisms for organizing collective action within complex systems.
Most existing engagement spaces have been created ad hoc, by accident, and based on intuition or specific trial and error. A more formal methodological approach accelerates the successful design and introduction of an engagement space for a specific use case. This website introduces the experts and practitioners developing the theory, taxonomy and (emerging) methodology of the design of engagement spaces that helps optimize resource availability and enable agency for the participants in these systems.
Examples of Engagement Spaces
Carriers exchanging their DC loading and unloading slot times among themselves
Inland vessels negotiating their order at a lock.
Street residents collectively regulating transportation movements in their street
Shared mobility users contributing to fleet rebalancing
A workforce collectively making and updating their own workforce planning