How Do You Design a Community? Start with the Why or the Who

Episode 011 • 46 min

We’re all able to connect through our phones and social media, but humans crave coming together, and yet participation in the classic religious and civic communities has declined over the decades.

COVID-19 has certainly complicated our ability to gather in person. Community is so important to us at the Design Museum, and like anything, you can be intentional about designing creating, maintaining, and growing community. It’s more than simply bringing people together and watching the magic happen, even though that’s definitely part of it! In this episode we talk to two community experts. Sara Sigel is a product and community builder who advises and invests in profit-from purpose companies — she’s an Advisor and Investor at Rev Boston. And Sascha Mombartz is a multidisciplinary design director, and the Founder of The Office for Visual Affairs. Sascha and his 2 other community-loving friends created the Community Canvas, which is a framework that will help you build a community. Plus we have our weekly dose of good design.

Weekly Dose of Good Design

• Sam: National Anthem with Madisen Hallberg and Emmanuel Henreid
• Liz: How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy webinar by Creative Reaction Lab
• Sara: Black Lives Matter street painting

Links

• Article: Lessons learned from Quarantine 
• Community: The Great Disconnect (TGD)
• Community: GrabCAD
• Community: Rev Boston
• Talk: Five Ingredients of an Enduring Community by Ana Noemi
• Resource: The Community Canvas
• Book: The Speed of Trust
• Community: Sandbox
• Community: Burning Man
• Article: Community Built Futures
• Community: ChangemakerXchange
• Resource: Community Canvas Minimum Viable Community
• Resource: Community Built Futures
• GoFundMe: Black Opera at PDX Protests