Collective Intelligence Design Playbook


The Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta have designed a playbook to help you design and deliver a collective intelligence project. They've released a beta version of the toolkit for people to explore, make use of and feedback on.

What collective intelligence is

Collective intelligence is created when people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise a wider range of information, ideas and insights to address a social challenge.

Although people have been working together since the dawn of time, collective intelligence has evolved quickly since the start of the digital age.

This playbook introduces you to activities you can use to orchestrate diverse groups of people, data and technology to achieve your goals.

We call this collective intelligence design.

Download the playbook

The playbook contains all of the content you need to design a collective intelligence project. It provides an introduction to collective intelligence and illustrative case studies. It will help you identify when and how to use collective intelligence design, and explain the stages in the collective intelligence design process. It includes a collective intelligence design canvas, plus prompt cards and other activities to help you structure and stretch your thinking.

It is designed to be used by teams or groups working through the activities and exercises together.

You can download an A4 landscape version for free.

Other downloadable formats

We’ve made key parts of the playbook available in larger formats for you to use as a group or in a workshop setting when you’re ready to start designing your collective intelligence project.

Hack this playbook!

This is only Version 1.0 of the Collective Intelligence Design Playbook. We’d love your feedback, comments and suggestions for how we make Version 2.0 better! To contribute, follow the link to the Google Docs version.

Alternatively, please send suggestions for additional activities, or your versions of hacked activities and completed canvases to collective.intelligence@nesta.org.uk with CI Playbook: Version 2.0 as the Subject Line.

Let's work together