Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
Summary
What if we applied our experience design and research skills to a new domain: designing communities? Historically, UX hasn’t paid attention to community as a solution space. And yet… at a business level: products, brands and creators build community to deepen their bonds with users and customers. At an organisation level: the best teams are modelled on communities. At a personal level: community brings meaning to our world, in our neighbourhoods and our personal interests. In this session, we’ll explore what's involved in creating and sustaining healthy communities. We’ll draw on the wealth of knowledge in fields as diverse as economics, network theory, social work and the design of cities, and on case studies of community efforts like Burning Man, Parkrun and Meetups. At the end, you'll have a good idea of how you might apply your skills to creating communities, whether in your organization, your brand, or your life outside of work. We'll introduce our toolkit, and show you how you could get involved in our project. Finally...let’s acknowledge that many people in UX are demoralised about their work right now. They’re in roles that underutilise their skills, they’re feeling undervalued, or are working on products they don’t love. Using your skills to build community might be just the change you need.
Key Insights
-
•
Your UX research and design skills can be effectively transposed to designing communities.
-
•
Community is best defined by the feeling of belonging it creates, rather than size or formality.
-
•
Community building often involves intentionally introducing friction to foster safety and reflection, contrary to typical UX goals.
-
•
Scaling communities differs from products; propagation and chapter models work better than mass scale.
-
•
Dunbar's number (~150) suggests communities are healthiest and most sustainable at smaller, manageable sizes.
-
•
Community design is akin to gardening — working with natural human social needs rather than mechanical design.
-
•
Ethical considerations in community design are heightened; misuse can cause serious emotional harm.
-
•
Metrics like repeat attendance and reciprocal acts of generosity matter more than vanity metrics like group size.
-
•
Succession planning and clear roles are crucial to sustain communities beyond the initial enthusiasm phase.
-
•
Many commercial community efforts risk becoming extractive; authentic community building requires non-extractive motives.
Notable Quotes
"If you can design an app, you can design a community."
"Community is a thing that fosters a sense of belonging and wanting to identify with it."
"We often introduce friction deliberately in community building to make it safe and meaningful."
"Scaling communities is about propagation, not just growing as big as possible."
"Dunbar's number explains why groups around 150 people work best as communities."
"Designing community is more like gardening than building a machine."
"The ethics in community design are critical — emotional damage can be severe if mishandled."
"Vanity metrics like membership numbers don’t tell you if the community is healthy."
"Early enthusiasm fades; succession planning is key to keeping communities alive."
"Extractive, commercially-driven communities aren’t really communities in the pure sense."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Multilingual embedding models can cluster similar meanings across languages in a shared latent space."
Ian JohnsonLatent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data
June 11, 2025
"Accessibility requires flexible designs, not limited or simplified ones."
Sam ProulxAccessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
September 8, 2022
"If you skip iterative testing, you risk building features nobody really wants."
Prayag Narula Hannah HudsonEmpowering Designers to do Good Research
March 11, 2022
"If you need to cross a dangerous river, you don’t paddle straight into it; you use the opposing force of the river to move forward."
John CutlerOxbows, Rivers, and Estuaries: How to navigate the currents of change (without burning out)
December 3, 2024
"Design and research people must report to leaders who understand their functions, or else they get assigned irrelevant tasks like social coordinator."
Anna Avrekh Amy Jiménez Márquez Morgan C. Ramsey Catarina TsangDiversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research
June 9, 2021
"AI doesn’t create much new; it accelerates the process and frees humans to focus on uniquely human work."
Noz UrbinaRapid AI-powered UX (RAUX): A framework for empowering human designers
May 1, 2025
"The way we build software now is fundamentally different; it's just easier to write code using platforms and microservices."
Greg PetroffEverything is About to Change: Software as Material
June 8, 2016
"Language matters so does money. The way it connects with the business is how you get those resources."
Andy Polaine Lavrans LøvlieWhat is the role of service design in product-led organizations?
December 3, 2024
"DesignOps KPIs don’t exist universally; they emerge from your organization’s context and what you can influence."
Patrizia BertiniDesignOps + KPIs = Measure your Impact!
January 8, 2024
