Designing Communities

Erik Dahl is researcher and design consultant, he is a board member at our beloved Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

He is also a board member at the Columbus Center for Architecture and Design, organizer for MidwestUX Conference and blogger at www.uxaxioms.com.

Here’s some of our notes about Erik’s talk at Interaction South America 2014.

Let’s leave our everyday reality. Let’s take a step back, and reflect. Think of a time in your life when you were happiest.

I’m from Pittsburgh and at a point, I was out of job, my wife was pregnant, life was messy enough so I decided to move to Columbus. When I got there I vowed to make a change. I promised myself I was gonna help create a community. That was my moment right there.

When I got to Columbus Kendra was running the local IxD group, we worked together and then I started the Midwest UX Conference.

Communities are the social infrastructure supporting and enabling human action.

Before becoming a designer, I was an anthropologist, so when I think about community I think about culture as well. We create the culture we live in and that also impacts who we are and what we do.

There’s several definitions for culture. Let’s see some of them:

Culture is:

• Behavior — what people do
• Knowledge — what people know
• Artifacts — thinks people make and use

- James Spradley

Culture is simply what gives meaning to actions, which it does by providing a sense of coherence or patterning and predictability. It provides the lens through which one interprets events, scenes, and actions.

- Robert Gordon

The concept of culture.. man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

- Clifford Geertz

Culture is a system of shared meanings that is based on a signifying order, a complex system of different types of signs that cohere in predictable ways into patterns of representation which individuals and groups can utilize to make or exchange messages.

- Marcel Danesi

As we can see, culture is interpretive, and generative…
Culture is not taxonomic.

Our communities are sites of cultural production.

Culture influences cognition… both what we think and what we do.

As stewards of our communities, what does this mean for us?

How do we craft good communities? What is a good community?

Why do you…

• join or not?
• stay or leave?
• lead or not?

6 themes about communities

There’s 6 themes about communities, let’s go through each one of them.

1. Get active

This captures the idea of moving from a posture of being passive to one of being active.

We tend to sit back and allow the heroic innovations of others to justify our own creative passivity.

- Michael Dilla

We need to create our own path and make the work we want to live in.

To do that we need to have a future vision. So what’s your future vision?
Visualize your future identities. For instance, I wanted to become a runner, so I got running shoes. When I get out of bed in the morning, that’s the first thing I look. Likewise, you need to appropriate that identity you are envisioning.

Visualize the community you want and take an active role in building it.

2. Be a facilitator

Communities need facilitators, not just leaders. Be a facilitator, a space maker, a path clearer, a friction reducer and an enabler.

Sell your expertise and you have a limited repertoire, sell your ignorance, and you have an unlimited repertoire.

- RSW on Charles Eames

In other words, you don’t have to be an expert. Just be an experimenter, a facilitator for other’s success.

3. Drive beyond events to community

Find your tribe and keep it going.

Trust is key on this. To develop it, you need to share your life with people, when communities are distributed, how do you do that?

If I don’t understand who you are as a person, I probably might not trust you that much, so creating those opportunities to share with each other is crucial.

It’s really about getting people to know each other.

4. Focus on relationships and networks

The power is on the network, not the node. Communities are more than the sum of their institutions and infrastructures — they’re the sum of their relationships.

We need to create spaces for other people to connect and grow, foster openness, participation, connection, and opportunities for others.

We need to put other people first, be humble, and be curious.

5. Allow and support emergence

Meet people where they are. Figure out where they are and just go there.

For example our experience was that we wanted to up-level our community, so we got some young startups, independent designers and just got them together on an open office format so they could collaborate with each other.

6. Take the time to do it

This community stuff takes time. There’s no quick fix. And soft work is hard.

There’s times in which people are really engaged , and there’s times when life gets on the way. Local leader burnout happens all the time in IxDA, so we need to find a way to keep it going.

Ami Jo Kim’s models on cooperative gaming describe this pretty well. Players at different stages, have different needs across time.

Likewise, we need to detect the needs of each player stage in our community and aim to get them what they are interested in.

What you give is what you get, so give more than you take.