Long term care at home | Sheydarashidi

The problem was not what it seemed

When the university community garden was shut down, the official explanation pointed to student behavior. Interviewing multiple stakeholders revealed a different story. Each party had a conflicting account of what happened and why, and beneath those conflicting narratives was a shared reality: university policies required a single department to be accountable for the garden, making shared stewardship impossible from the start.
The more I investigated, the clearer it became that the conflict was not between people. It was built into the university's own policies and regulations.

Interviews
Observation
Iceberg mapping
Auto-ethnography

Discovery methods:

Organizational policies made collaboration impossible

The university's accountability policies required a single department to take full responsibility for the garden. This reinforced competitive and territorial mindsets across departments, where ownership and recognition became more important than shared stewardship of the space.

This finding made the design direction clear. If the existing policies were reinforcing the wrong mindsets, then everything we designed needed to deliberately reinforce the opposite. Reciprocity mindset became the conscious foundation of every design decision, not just as a value, but as a practical counterbalance to the competitive dynamics the policies had created.

The question shifted from who is responsible for this space to how can we design interactions, tools, and agreements based on reciprocity that make shared responsibility feel natural and possible. That became the design brief for everything that followed.

Designing for reciprocity

Every tool and model in this project was designed with one intention: to make reciprocal behavior the path of least resistance. Rather than relying on goodwill alone, the designs created conditions where collaboration was structurally supported.

Stakeholder Reciprocation Tool

Traditional stakeholder mapping tools prioritize stakeholders based on their power and influence, which mirrors the same hierarchical logic that caused the conflict in the first place. I designed the Stakeholder Reciprocation Tool as a direct alternative, mapping stakeholders based on their needs and potential contributions instead. This shift in logic made opportunities for mutual value exchange visible across the system, giving the community a practical way to organize around reciprocity rather than hierarchy.

Group Agreement and Governance Model

With no existing university policy supporting shared responsibility, the community needed its own governance model to fill that gap. I designed a group agreement that established shared responsibility and shared harvest as the foundation of how the garden operated, replacing the need for a single authority with a collectively owned set of principles. Rather than rules and penalties, the agreement was built on mutual respect and reciprocity, creating a horizontal structure where members contributed based on their capacity and expertise rather than assigned roles.

Decision-Making Toolkit

A governance model built on shared responsibility only works if people have a clear and accessible way to act on it. I designed a decision-making toolkit that structured how the community surfaced needs, prioritized actions, and coordinated contributions over time. It created a repeatable process that allowed any member to initiate change, distribute tasks, and share outcomes without needing a central authority to manage it.

Designing "With", Not "For"

The tools and governance model were tested through co-creation workshops and two growing seasons with students, faculty, and staff. During the first season, the group agreement and reciprocity-based model worked well among the founding members, who quickly developed strong bonds and a shared sense of ownership. However, as the community grew and new members joined, a clear gap emerged. Openness and mutual respect were not enough on their own. New members felt intimidated by the closeness of the founding group and were unsure how to participate without feeling like they were intruding.

This finding directly informed the next iteration of the design. The Decision-Making Toolkit was further developed in response, creating a clearer coordination system that balanced the autonomy of the original model with enough structure to make participation accessible for new members. Co-creation workshops were introduced to bring people together in person, break down the barriers between founding and new members, and collectively refine the governance model based on everyone's input.

What the testing revealed was that reciprocity as a value was easy for people to embrace, but reciprocity as a practice required intentional scaffolding to sustain, especially as the community scaled.

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