Admin: Included full information on each of the components, plus licensing info

2026-04-23T14:32:18Z

Included full information on each of the components, plus licensing info

Show changes

Admin: Added direct links to components in Figma board

2025-12-02T12:38:38Z

Added direct links to components in Figma board

Show changes

Admin: Page created and initial content population

2025-12-02T12:25:59Z

Page created and initial content population

New page

== A Toolkit for Co-Creation in Virtual Worlds ==
This page provides an overview and links to the co-creation tools developed by Politecnico di Milano in the context of the OPENVERSE project.
[[File:Double Diamond 2.png|alt=Image representing the Double Diamond design process model|thumb|'''Double Diamond design process model'''Work by Politecnico di Milano, adapted from Design Council's original work]]
A core component of planning is the selection and contextual adaptation of co-creation tools. The OPENVERSE Toolkit includes a wide variety of such tools—a curated set of 48 co-creation tools mapped across the four phases of the [[wikipedia:Double_Diamond_(design_process_model)|Double Diamond]]—that support everything from early exploration to final decision-making.

The goal is to empower a diverse range of stakeholders—designers, developers, educators, VWs consumers, and citizens—to run meaningful co-creation processes in immersive environments, using a shared methodology grounded in field experimentation and design research.

The complete [https://www.figma.com/board/zXsNUSOj1H0wzurjMedMAP/OpenVerse_Toolkit?node-id=0-1&p=f&t=djpkfnwCxadiCigO-0 Co-creation Toolkit] is available on the Figma platform.

=== Components of the Toolkit ===
All the components are available for exploration and reuse on the Figma board, along with the full description of each of the components. This page provides a high-level overview of the components for quick reference.

==== [https://www.figma.com/board/zXsNUSOj1H0wzurjMedMAP/OpenVerse_Toolkit?node-id=3-1396&t=jRTjE5JDjxvV23M4-4 Cultural Probes] ====
Cultural Probes are stimuli-based design research tools that invite participants to document personal experiences, contexts, and thoughts through artifacts such as postcards, diaries, or in-world interactive objects. In immersive VW environments, designers distribute digital probes (VR postcards, 3D tokens, prompts) into user spaces.

==== Ecosystem Map ====
Ecosystem Map portrays every entity, flow, and relationship that defines a service’s surrounding ecosystem in immersive three-dimensional space. Avatars or 3D tokens represent users, partners, suppliers, technologies, and environmental factors, while animated streams trace value exchanges, information channels, and resource movements.

==== Envisioning the Future ====
Envisioning the Future is a collaborative scenario-building tool that invites teams to imagine plausible worlds three to six years ahead within virtual environments. Participants embody avatars in detailed VR or 3D spaces, exploring future success states—streamlined operations, empowered customers, sustainable ecosystems.

==== Fishbowl ====
Fishbowl is an interactive dialogue technique that amplifies expert knowledge and broadens group understanding through a concentric-circle setup in virtual worlds.

==== Iceberg Diagram ====
An Iceberg Diagram visualizes beneath-the-surface forces that shape service behaviors by layering observable events, systemic structures, mental models, and underlying paradigms in a vertical 3D canvas. Participants position avatars or tokens at different strata—the tip of the iceberg representing customer actions, the submerged mass depicting processes, regulations, cultural beliefs, and deeper worldviews.

==== Jigsaw ====
Jigsaw is a cooperative learning strategy adapted for virtual worlds that divides a complex service challenge into interlocking “puzzle pieces.” Small expert teams explore an assigned component—such as user research, technology integration, or policy constraints—and develop deep insights. Avatars reconvene in a shared 3D space to assemble findings, linking visual tokens, diagrams, and narratives to complete the holistic picture.

==== Knowledge Café ====
Knowledge Café or Round Table Sessions is an avatar-led dialogue method that builds collective intelligence in virtual worlds. Participants gather at themed café tables, sharing experiences and posting digital notes on shared canvases. After a timed session, avatars rotate to new tables, carrying forward insights and weaving ideas into a knowledge web.

==== Knowledge Fair ====
Knowledge Fair is a virtual event for sharing insights from diverse experts through immersive booths, dynamic displays, and interactive presentations. In a 3D or VR expo hall, participants navigate avatar-driven pavilions themed around specific domains—data privacy, user research, policy design—and engage with multimedia panels showcasing research findings, prototypes, and case studies.

==== Open Space ====
Open Space is a participant-driven agenda creation method that harnesses the self-organizing capacity of virtual-world attendees. In a shared 3D plaza or VR amphitheater, avatars propose topics by posting spatial markers, then gather around interest hubs to co-create content and agendas. Participants dynamically form breakout circles, author session titles, and schedule discussions in real time, shaping learning objectives and collaborative outcomes.

==== Problem Framing ====
Problem Framing is a visual synthesis method that defines and structures ambiguous or complex challenges. Teams collaborate in a 3D canvas to externalize problem elements—constraints, assumptions, stakeholders, and unknowns—as digital nodes or clusters. Participants drag and group digital sticky notes, icons, and shapes to represent pain points, policy constraints, technical uncertainties, and user needs.

==== Service Safari ====
Service Safari immerses designers in first-person explorations of a service using avatar-led autoethnography within virtual worlds. Participants navigate key touchpoints—booking, service delivery, support—experiencing each interaction exactly as a customer would. As they move through the environment, they capture contextual insights via spatial annotations, voice memos, and reflective prompts triggered at meaningful moments.

==== Social Network Analysis ====
Social Network Analysis visualizes the web of relationships and knowledge flows among individuals, teams, and organizations within a service ecosystem. In a virtual world, nodes—avatars representing people or groups—are positioned in 3D space, with linkages animating communication channels, collaboration ties, and information exchanges.

==== Sociometrics ====
Sociometrics uses embodied spatial modelling in virtual worlds to map social dynamics, influence patterns, and group interactions. Participants assume avatar roles and position themselves within 3D spaces to represent relationships—cooperation, authority, trust—connecting with lines or proximity triggers that reveal network density and communication pathways.

==== Stakeholder Map ====
Stakeholder Map visually arranges all actors in a service ecosystem by plotting individuals, groups, and organizations on axes of influence and interest within a shared virtual canvas. Designers place avatar tokens or 3D icons to represent each stakeholder, then draw animated links to illustrate relationships, dependencies, and communication channels.

==== Stakeholder Value Map ====
A Stakeholder Value Map distills the core motivations and needs of each stakeholder within a service ecosystem by plotting practical, social, and higher personal values on a shared virtual canvas. Participants assume avatar roles representing users, partners, regulators, or employees and annotate a 3D map with value attributes—basic necessities, relational priorities, and dignity-driven aspirations.

==== Ecosystem Loops ====
Ecosystem Loops is an immersive mapping tool that visualizes complex service ecosystems across multiple scales—users, stakeholders, partner networks, objects, and environments—within virtual worlds. Participants arrange and connect 3D tokens or avatars to represent entities and draw animated flows that trace value exchanges, information transfers, and dependencies.

==== Co-creating Journey Maps ====
Co-creating Journey Maps harnesses the collective expertise of invited participants to collaboratively construct detailed customer journeys within immersive virtual environments. Participants embody avatars representing diverse user roles and pool first-hand insights, documenting touchpoints, pain points, emotional states, and backstage processes along a shared 3D timeline. As contributors add and cluster digital sticky notes, icons, and sketches, the group iterates on journey phases, pauses to explore branching scenarios, and surfaces opportunities for innovation.

==== Co-creating Personas ====
Co-creating Personas is a collaborative method that leverages the collective expertise of invited participants to develop rich, context-driven user archetypes and associated journey maps or service blueprints in virtual worlds. Workshop attendees assume avatar roles representing target segments and co-design persona profiles by contributing real-world insights, behaviors, motivations, and pain points.

==== Co-Creative Workshops ====
Co-creative Workshops leverage the expertise of invited stakeholders to jointly develop rich personas and service artifacts within virtual worlds. Participants adopt avatar identities aligned with target segments and contribute real-world observations, motivations, behaviors, and pain points through interactive exercises.

==== Emotional Journey Map ====
Emotional Journey maps shifts in user perception and emotional valence across a service experience in a virtual world. Designers plot rising and falling emotional states along a spatial timeline using 3D curves or color-coded overlays. During scenario enactments, avatars display real-time emotional cues—gestures, facial animations, environmental feedback—which observers annotate to pinpoint stress peaks, delight moments, or ambivalence.

==== Impact Journey ====
Impact Journey is a foresight tool that models and evaluates effects of a service experience across environmental, social, and economic dimensions in an interactive virtual world. Participants enact key touchpoints as avatars—customers, service personnel, suppliers—while indicators trace resource consumption, waste streams, community benefits, and carbon footprints along the timeline.

==== Mapping Journeys ====
Mapping Journeys visualizes the service ecosystem around physical and digital products by creating spatial, interactive maps in VR or 3D platforms. Participants drag and connect avatars, 3D tokens, or digital artifacts to represent users, touchpoints, channels, and product interactions across layered environments. As teams assemble and reposition elements, they surface dependencies, information flows, and ecosystem boundaries, running “what-if” experiments by introducing new nodes or rerouting connections.

==== System Map ====
System Map is an immersive spatial tool for visualizing all actors and components involved in service delivery within virtual worlds. Designers create a shared 3D canvas where avatars or tokens represent users, frontline staff, support systems, digital platforms, and environmental elements.

==== System Scenario ====
System Scenario is a dynamic simulation tool that models how a service ecosystem adapts and evolves under specific conditions. In a virtual 3D or VR environment, participants configure scenario parameters—seasonal demand spikes, regulatory shifts, tech failures—and watch animated system components (avatars, processes, data flows) respond in real time.

==== Transition Journey ====
Transition Journey is a dynamic tool that maps and analyzes how user behavior and roles evolve over time within a service ecosystem. In virtual worlds, participants embody avatars that transition through sequential personas—novice to expert, customer to advocate—navigating branching scenarios that illustrate changing motivations, skills, and expectations.

==== AI Functionalities Cards ====
AI Functionalities Cards are a spatial ideation tool designed to spark innovation by showcasing modular AI capabilities—natural language processing, computer vision, recommendation engines, anomaly detection, and more—as tangible cards in virtual environments. Participants navigate VR or 3D workspaces where avatars draw from a digital deck of functionality cards, combining and placing them along service journeys or ecosystem maps.

==== Concept Walkthrough ====
Concept Walkthrough is a guided, immersive, step-by-step 3D or VR tour that presents a service concept through sequential stages, enabling stakeholders to experience proposed features and flows in context. Creators animate avatars or interactive hotspots to demonstrate each touchpoint—from discovery to service completion—while participants observe, comment, and suggest ongoing improvements in real time.

==== Ecosystem Map ====
The Ecosystem Map is an immersive, synthetic visualization that captures all stakeholders and value exchanges within a service ecosystem. Participants arrange avatars or 3D tokens to represent individuals, organizations, technological components, and environmental elements in a looping network, then animate flows to trace information, resource, or interaction exchanges.

==== Future Backcasting ====
Future Backcasting is a foresight tool that reverses time to identify pathways from desired future outcomes back to present-day actions within virtual worlds. Participants embody avatars representing future stakeholders to enact scenarios in 3D or VR environments, dramatizing how emerging trends and innovations influence service evolution.

==== System UX Map Human Agent Journey ====
Human Agent Journey visualizes the step-by-step path a person takes to achieve a goal, illustrating agent, scenario, expectations, phases, actions, and insights in an immersive virtual environment. Participants embody an avatar representing the human agent and progress through journey stages—awareness, exploration, decision, fulfillment, and reflection—within a shared 3D or VR space.

==== Future-State Journey ====
Future-State Journey uses narrative structures to guide co-creative exploration of envisioned service experiences. Participants apply the classic dramatic arc—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution—to a future-state customer journey mapped three to five years ahead. In virtual 3D or VR environments, collaborators embody avatars to spatialize journey stages, enact critical moments, and iterate plot-driven touchpoints.

==== Innovative Brainstorming ====
Innovative Brainstorming is an inclusive, fast-paced ideation technique that stimulates spontaneous thought by leveraging spatialized virtual tools and avatar-led interaction. In a VW workshop, participants converge on a shared digital whiteboard or 3D canvas, where facilitators introduce provocations, constraints, or stimulus cards.

==== Integrated Journey ====
Integrated Journey extends traditional journey mapping into a comprehensive service blueprint within virtual worlds, visualizing customer touchpoints alongside backstage processes, technology systems, and stakeholder roles. In an immersive 3D environment, designers arrange avatars, swimlanes, and interactive nodes on a shared timeline to show how front-stage interactions trigger behind-the-scenes support functions and data flows.

==== Journey Ideation with Dramatic Arcs ====
Journey Ideation with Dramatic Arcs is a co-creation method that applies narrative structures to service design in virtual worlds. Teams leverage classic dramatic arcs to outline user journeys, mapping emotional peaks and transitions across touchpoints.

==== System UX Map Artificial Agent Journey ====
System UX Map Agent Journey visualizes AI/ML system interactions and human collaboration within virtual worlds. Participants guide avatars representing data pipelines, models, and human operators across a spatial timeline that highlights when core AI elements—data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, inference—are generated and required.

==== User Scenario ====
User Scenarios bring envisioned service experiences to life through compelling narratives that follow a user’s journey in context. In a virtual 3D or VR environment, avatars embody personas and enact stories that illustrate goals, motivations, and pain points at each stage of interaction—discovery, decision, execution, and reflection.

'''Rough Prototyping'''

Rough Prototyping is a rapid, low-fidelity method for mocking up service ideas using simple virtual assets available on demand in VR or 3D platforms. Teams embody avatars that assemble, rearrange, and annotate digital placeholders—such as basic shapes, sketch overlays, or interactive widgets—to explore concepts in real time.

==== Experience Prototypes ====
Experience Prototypes are interactive simulations of key service touchpoints within virtual worlds. They let teams rapidly prototype and test specific moments in a journey—such as checkout kiosks, support chatbots, or onboarding flows—by building high-fidelity mock-ups in VR or 3D spaces.

==== Role Playing ====
Role Playing brings a hypothetical service to life through avatar enactment in virtual worlds. Users assume persona roles—customers, frontline staff, or partners—and act out journey scenarios in immersive VR or 3D environments. As avatars, participants navigate scripted or spontaneous interactions, responding to prompts, making decisions, and adapting to system feedback.

==== Desktop System Mapping ====
Desktop System Mapping, known as Business Origami, is a tactile method for visualizing complex value networks by arranging simple paper cutouts—or, in virtual worlds, draggable avatars and 3D tokens—on a shared collaborative workspace. Participants represent key people, locations, channels, and touchpoints with standardized symbols, connecting elements to reveal relationships, dependencies, and information flows.

'''Desktop Walkthrough'''

Desktop Walkthrough is a low-fidelity prototyping tool that brings teams together around a shared simulation of a service journey in a virtual world. Participants embody avatars to step through each critical touchpoint—sign-up, payment, support—while observers annotate pain points, decision triggers, and contextual cues.

==== Emotional Journey Feedback ====
Emotional Journey Feedback extends the System UX Map by overlaying users’ emotional states across every phase of their experience in virtual worlds. A continuous “emotion line” traces peaks and valleys—signaling stress points, moments of delight, and transitional shifts—plotted along a spatialized service timeline.

==== Investigative Rehearsal ====
Investigative Rehearsal is a theatrical tool that uses iterative roleplay to uncover and refine service behaviors within virtual worlds. Participants embody avatars to act out scenarios—customer interactions, back-end workflows, decision points—while observers note emergent patterns and friction points.

==== Rehearsing Digital Services ====
Rehearsing Digital Services is a variant of Investigative Rehearsal that prototypes digital interfaces through embodied, actor-led simulations in virtual worlds. Participants—represented as avatars—take on customer, agent, or system roles and act out conversational and transactional flows: chatbot dialogs, voice assistants, form interactions, and error recoveries.

==== Service Blueprint ====
Service Blueprint is a comprehensive mapping technique that visualizes every stage of service delivery—front-stage interactions, backstage processes, support systems, and physical or digital touchpoints—in a unified blueprint. In virtual environments, designers arrange swim-lane structures on a 3D canvas, deploying avatars to simulate customer and staff roles and animating process flows in real time.

==== Service Prototype ====
Service Prototype simulates real user interactions with service touchpoints in virtual environments. Designers create interactive mock-ups—digital kiosks, chatbots, mobile interfaces—and deploy them in VR or 3D worlds.

==== Subtext ====
Subtext is a theatrical method that can reveal deeper motivations and needs by focusing on unspoken thoughts in a rehearsal session.

Co-creation Toolkit - Revision history

Admin: Included full information on each of the components, plus licensing info

Admin: Added direct links to components in Figma board

Admin: Page created and initial content population