Digital Platform Design

Digital platforms offer innovative ways to organize business and social processes. The rise of digital platforms is transforming entire industries (such as marketplaces for data sharing, Airbnb in the hospitality industry, and Uber in the personal transport industry). This leads to new and potentially disruptive business models. But these platforms also influence social processes, such as the way we interact with businesses and peers.

In this module, we explore the design variables of digital platforms from a designer's perspective: if you were to develop a new digital platform, which aspects/elements would you need to decide upon for this type of highly dynamic sociotechnical complex systems throughout their life cycle?

A tentative list of aspects that we explore are: the technical architecture of the platform; (distributed) platform control and governance; data platforms; the ecosystem and business models; generativity and openness of platforms; data spaces(what they are, what exists today, and why data sharing matters); joining data spaces (connectors, taxonomies/ontologies, interoperability standards, and onboarding challenges); motivations and the role of regulatory bodies; tools for data sovereignty and usage control; access control and data-sharing policies (e.g., ABAC) with context-aware decision-making; and open issues in data spaces. The bottom line is: how to develop an integrated platform design that takes these aspects into account?”