Workshop
Attaching Strings
Materialising the invisible entanglements of power, trust, and automated governance in decentralised systems
Workshop Creators:
Design Informatics: Bettina Nissen • Chris Speed • Ella Tallyn • John Vines | University of York: Deborah Maxwell | Scotland Beyond Net Zero: Kate Symons
Workshop Overview
Attaching Strings is a tactile, participatory workshop tool used to map the messy and complex relationships within decentralised systems. Moving beyond traditional flat stakeholder maps, it uses physical materials—such as wool, wire, and magnetic pins—to represent the entangled connections between people, organisations, code, and things. The central purpose of this process is not to create realistic, technical maps, but to structure and support critical debate within the teams or organisations on issues of ownership, power, governance, and politics. By materialising relationships and invisible infrastructures, the workshop provides a tangible way to interrogate the social and ethical implications of shifting trust from institutions to distributed networks and automated code. It can act as a braking mechanism, ensuring that the human and relational impacts of a technology are considered in advance of more complex blueprints and technical implementation.
More About This Workshop
Attaching Strings is a material mapping workshop methodology designed to help participants think through materials when designing for distributed systems. It's one of the most inclusive and hands-on DSD workshop methods, and great for projects with diverse stakeholders, especially those with non-technical backgrounds.
The workshop was first developed and run at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2017 conference in Edinburgh. Originally titled "New Value Transactions," it emerged from a need to investigate how Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and decentralised systems re-imagine value exchange and challenge traditional concepts of power. This early iteration explored diverse domains such as decentralised housing markets, school meal supply chains, and artist cooperatives. This session highlighted critical tensions, such as the friction between immutable code and the dynamic nature of human behaviour.
Within the DSD Playbook, Attaching Strings serves as a vital bridge between high-level conceptualising and granular technical logic. While other workshops like BlockExchange and IFTTW? focus on the mechanics of the ledger and the automation of rules, Attaching Strings focuses on the relational impact of those technologies. It adds a critical layer of socio-technical exploration, mapping the entire ecosystem of human and non-human actors, and supporting consideration and discussion of the relationships therein. By materialising the quality of these connections, it ensures that when we automate a relationship through code, we have first considered the informal trust, historical power dynamics, and potential "strings" of liability that define real-world interaction. This ensures that the systems we design are not just technically functional, but socially and ethically sustainable.
The Power of Materiality in Co-Creation
A core strength of Attaching Strings is how it facilitates co-creation. The use of physical materials—the "materiality" of the workshop—acts as a universal language that enables a diverse range of stakeholders to engage fully with the conversation. By moving the discussion out of abstract digital concepts and into a shared physical diorama, the method allows participants to literally see and feel the system.
This is essential for inclusive design; it allows non-technical participants to express their perspectives and include their unique insights on equal footing with developers or policy-makers. When a participant chooses a specific thread or moves a pin, they are negotiating the socio-technical impacts and the power balance of the network in real-time.
How it is Run
The workshop uses a structured co-construction process to move from abstract ideas to a physical "diorama":
Define & Identify: Groups identify a DAO application area and select physical objects or icons to represent actors, including humans, organizations, and non-human agents like sensors or nature.
Characterize & Map: Participants create a "material key" (e.g., wire for rigid contracts, wool for social trust) and weave connections. This collective mapping encourages participants to discuss and visualize the quality of relationships.
Interrogate & Synthesize: Facilitators guide the group to critique the map through the lenses of Ownership, Agency, and Tensions. Finally, groups present their maps to the wider workshop to synthesize insights on power and value flow.
Who Should Participate?
This workshop is a powerful leveler for diverse stakeholder groups, especially where technical knowledge varies. It is particularly valuable for:
Service Designers moving toward "system-centric" thinking.
Community Groups & Non-Profits exploring cooperative ownership.
Technical Teams seeking to understand the social impact of their architecture.
Cross-Sector Partners navigating complex supply chains or data-sharing.
Logistics & Scalability
Group Size: Ideal for small teams (4–6 per map); one facilitator can manage up to 30 people.
Time: 2–4 hours to allow for meaningful construction and debate.
Materials: Magnetic whiteboards, pins/icons, and a diverse "tackle box" of strings (wool, wire, elastic, etc.).
How to Use with Other DSD Workshops
Attaching Strings acts as the socio-technical anchor for the Playbook:
Pre-DSD Fundamentals: Use it to identify actors and explore relationship dynamics before defining them in DSD Fundamentals.
IFTTW? Extension: Use it to visualise how a newly defined smart contract disrupts or alters the wider stakeholder landscape.
Persistent Artifact: Keep the physical diorama in a shared project space as an evolving representation of the system's tensions and relationships.
Getting Started
To begin exploring the Attaching Strings workshop tool, you can download the Facilitator's Handbook and our customisable Slide Deck Template. Similar to the IFTTW? method, Attaching Strings is a modular tool which can be integrated as an addition to enrich other workshop sessions or developed into a standalone, deep-dive workshop. The handbook outlines various ways to adapt the mapping process, allowing you to design a bespoke activity tailored to your specific goals. All physical materials required for the workshop—such as strings, wires, and tokens—should be easily sourceable. We encourage you to be creative and curate a range of materials that best suits the context of your participant group and the specific "socio-technical" relationships you intend to explore.
You can also adapt this workshop for online delivery using Miro by downloading the PDF resources above and adding them to a Miro board. For more information, see the Running the Workshops Online section under Workshop Techniques on the Workshops page.
Workshop Outcomes
What to Expect
By participating in an Attaching Strings session, organisations and project teams will gain a deeper, more resilient understanding of their proposed decentralised systems. The outcomes move beyond a simple map to include strategic alignment and risk identification.
A Materialized "Diorama" of the Ecosystem
The primary physical output is a persistent, 3D stakeholder map. Unlike digital diagrams that are easily archived and forgotten, this physical artifact can serve as a living reference point that stakeholders will remember.
Persistent Reflection: Teams can return to the map as the project evolves to ask, "How does this new feature change the tension in this specific string?"
Identification of "Entanglements" and Tensions
Participants will leave with a clear articulation of where "strings are attached" to their technology. This includes:
Power Asymmetries: A clear view of who (or what) holds the most influence. For instance, realising that an autonomous smart contract will require a string leading back to a human developer who holds the override key.
Liability Mapping: Identifying which actor is responsible when a decentralised process fails or produces an undesirable outcome.
Social vs. Technical Trust: Distinguishing between relationships governed by rigid code (wire) and those relying on social reputation or informal agreement (wool).
Inclusive Alignment
Because the workshop levels the playing field between technical and non-technical staff, a major outcome is shared mental models.
Demystification: Non-technical stakeholders (legal, marketing, community leads) gain an understanding of how DLT affects their specific domains.
Common Vocabulary: The team develops a shared language to describe agency, ownership, and governance, reducing friction in later development stages.
Critical "Slow-Down" and Risk Mitigation
One of the most valuable outcomes is the deliberate pause it creates in the design cycle.
Interrogating Agency: Teams will have explicitly debated what a non-human actor (like an AI agent or a sensor) is allowed to do autonomously, preventing "black box" logic from being implemented without oversight.
Stress-Testing Assumptions: By physically moving actors and strings, teams can play through different scenarios—such as a stakeholder leaving the network—to see how the rest of the ecosystem reacts.
A Foundation for Governance Design
The debates triggered by the workshop can provide raw material for a project's Governance Framework.
The insights gained regarding ownership and decision-making can directly inform the rules that will eventually be coded into smart contracts or written into legal Terms of Service.
It stimulates thinking around the logic of relationships that can acts as a starting point for the more granular work found in the If This, Then What? workshop.
Share Your Experience
Have you used Attaching Strings with your team? We'd love to hear how it went and what you learned.
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