The purpose of this Master thesis in Experience Design is to understand how a cross-cultural digital community should be designed for volunteers in an NGO through a participatory design approach. The thesis therefor results in design considerations for how such a platform can be and not in a design for the platform. During my internship in GAME, a Danish based non-governmental organization, and the case partner for this study, I started working on a digital forum that could connect all the volunteers in GAME in one platform. Therefore, this thesis will explore how such a platform can be created. My internship lasted from August 2021 – January 2022 with me working closely with volunteers, and there for the ethnographic research approach in relation to Human-Computer-Interaction have been relevant for this thesis.
This thesis is a theoretical study that deals with topics like experiences and feelings, relatedness for volunteers and online communities, and design of interactive systems. My primary focus is the volunteers needs and wishes for the digital community, and to obtain some knowledge about that I have involved them in a workshop where I, through the participatory design approach, empowered them to design their future technology. By mutual learning between these volunteers and I, I have designed a concept design through prototyping, that represents the volunteers needs and wishes through my interpretation, and to visualize how the digital community technically can work. My suggestion is to create a digital community, that reminds of other digital communities that exist in this time, as that is what the volunteers wants, but also one where you can share thoughts and experiences about using sport for empowering kids and youth. If that would be realized, it will give the users in the digital community a good experience, since the ideas to my concept design is based on a creative process, where the volunteers have created and contributed with wishes to the technology. If my concept design would be realized it will also increase the volunteer’s well-being, their feeling of connectedness to each other, and strengthen their sense of community feeling, as my concept design makes it possible for them to know each other digitally and reflect with each other digitally.