On this page I have tried to identify the main high-level design criteria we need to implement as we build the Hitchhiker Platform.
Page type: agentic specification Abstraction: toplevel Status: work-in-progress Perspective: personal
These design criteria sit above, or meta to, any architectural design principles that students or other partners may bring. They are necessary to ensure we can coordinate the build with funders and developer partners.
# Design Criteria - We need to start with a social, federated writing platform that writers, designers, and community members can use and evaluate to inform iterative development. The fundamental design concepts are unfamiliar to most designers and writers, so we need a practical embodiment of the ideas, not just theory. - We start with interdisciplinary writers and require a common format for the documents produced. This format must be easy to work with for content producers, designers, and programmers (including agentic coding workflows). - We need a flexible ecosystem of projects and technical components that supports quick, agile student and community projects. - These fundamental design constraints must reflect the sustainable governance (legal) structures of the project, the technical architecture of the project, and the social design of the project. This integration is essential and needs to be tight and explicit. - An agile, iterative, evolutionary approach must be supported across all elements. The integration of legal, technical, and social design must support, and not hinder, this evolutionary and emergent design principle.
So this was a document that I started at Astral Ship a couple of years ago. I have some notes, and audio in other media to explore on the topic, but essentially this was the beginning of my journey to integrate the way we write in wiki completely into the application - that is both the process of making a software application and of what the application looks like and how it behaves. Code and Text, both as equal partners in the writing process.
**Design Narratives** turn collaborative storytelling into a practical design loop—very close to agile user stories, but written in scenes and beats. Where agile might say “As a ..., I want ... so that ...,” we say:
We seek to open up a new type of design space, one that aims to address a core question through the practice of making. This question is:
Design Thinking is a human-centered method of problem solving that emphasizes empathy, creativity, and iterative prototyping.
# Use Future Design thinking.
**Design Reflections** are the built-in feedback moments—our retrospectives. After a guide runs in the world (a meeting, a review, a decision), we capture what actually happened as small edits to the story: which beats landed, which roles showed up, which spells helped or hindered.