Skip to content

Designing Digital Worlds Communities, Protocols, AI, and Power - Andrés Monroy Hernández

Lecture Andrés Monroy Hernández, Soan Dukes

Andrés Monroy Hernández and Soan Dukes from Princeton introduce a framework for understanding digital worlds through the lens of online communities, protocols, and power dynamics. They argue that protocols—understood as both technical systems and social norms—shape how people interact in online spaces like Scratch and Wikipedia, and that examining these design choices can illuminate challenges in community governance and digital world-building.

Related resources

Lecture

Applied Protocol Thinking - Timber Stinson-Schroff

Timber Stinson-Schroff presents Applied Protocol Thinking as a capstone course for Protocol School 2025, offering practical frameworks and literacies for participants to apply protocol analysis in their everyday lives. Drawing on nearly three years of research including his study of occupational health and safety protocols in coal mining, Stinson-Schroff shares methodologies for recognizing and analyzing how organizations use protocols to create value, manage uncertainty, and advance their missions.

literacies-and-lenses meso-level-analysis organizational-protocol-use

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Lecture

Musicalization not Music - Ben Zucker

Ben Zucker presents music as a protocol—a system of abstract structure and notation that can be analyzed, practiced, and transferred across disciplines—arguing that musicalization (the procedural practice of bringing aesthetic protocols together) offers non-technological frameworks for understanding formal systems and refining creative practice across fields.

aesthetic-protocols formal-modeling-through-music music-as-protocol

Ben Zucker

Lecture

Protocol Art II - Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer

Primavera De Filippi and Felix Beer explore protocol art through case studies and audience analysis, examining how protocols—systems of rules created by designers but executed and modified by communities—function as artistic practice. The discussion uses role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons as a concrete example of protocol art, analyzing how rule systems evolve across different social contexts and how they balance constraint with creative freedom.

community-adaptation constraint-and-flexibility protocol-art

Primavera De Filippi, Felix Beer