What Design can Learn from Community Development
In May of 2026, I went back to school for a Master’s in Community Development. I’ve been lucky enough to work on community-based projects for the last decade or so as a designer, in spaces such as disability justice, healthcare, and the cooperative economy. While I felt well-equipped in research and design methods, I’ve also realized that there was so much more to learn about working with communities in responsible, ethical, and reciprocal ways—skills that are rarely emphasized in traditional design education.
This blog post is my initial attempt at summarizing what lessons I’ve learned as a design practitioner from the field of community development after my first semester in the program. I hope that this can spark discussion with other community-oriented designers and help us build our practices and toolboxes together.
But before I get into it, let’s define the two fields.
What is community development?
Community development is the practice of supporting communities to build relationships, agency, and capacity to identify their own problems, define it according to their needs, and take active steps to address it (Bhattacharyya, 2004). The key elements include:
Self help: Support people in building their agency, including having them define the problems for themselves rather than problem solving for them.
Felt needs: Addressing people’s needs as they see them, rather than how outsiders see them.
Participation: Having people take part in the process of sensemaking, producing solutions, and taking an active role in solving the problem they’ve defined.
Micro and macro: Not just looking at the symptoms of an issue, but the root causes behind it. Develop solutions not just at an individual level, but a systems level.
What community development projects can look like can be really broad – for example: Creating programs to address food insecurity in a local community; engaging seniors in low-income communities to activate neighbourhood spaces; or creating opportunities for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities to access sports and recreation in a safe and affirming way.
What is design?
My favourite definition of design is from Victor Papanek, who says that “design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order”. I specifically like how this definition opens up the act of designing to anyone, rather than just professionalized designers. Anne-Marie Willis of the Design Philosophy Papers has a similar take: “Design is fundamental to being human – we design, that is to say, we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure out actions and makings... we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us”.
To that end, the act of designing can be applied to anything from discrete visual materials and digital interfaces to larger services, policies, and operations of organizations.
There are some specific sub-areas within design that are already heavily inspired by community practices:
Design justice
Design Justice emphasizes the full inclusion of, accountability to, and ownership of the design process and outputs by people with lived experience of the issue being addressed (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Design justice can also be seen as a form of community organizing, asking the same questions about who gets to speak for a community, who’s perspectives are not heard, and what strategies of problem solving and resistance already exist. Read the Design Justice principles here.
Co-design
Often interchangeable with participatory design, co-design facilitates the sharing of power in the design process – planning, discovering, designing, delivering, and evaluating with people with lived experience. It includes using inclusive facilitation, creative methods, prioritizing relationships, and centering care and accountability (McKercher, n.d.).
Similarities
As I compare the fields of community development and the more community-oriented fields within design, there are some obvious similarities.
Participation
Both fields emphasize the importance of participation of people with lived or living experiences, and have various ways to involve them meaningfully. Some version of the Spectrum of Participation by the International Association of Public Participation is typically used during projects to consider how different stakeholders and rights holders are engaged, and how much decision-making power they have - with the goal of maximizing their participation.
In community development, this can look like the practice of participatory democracy, which is a set of ideas, practices, and governance systems working towards the active and direct involvement of citizens within decision-making processes (Fillet, 2024; Levac & Wiebe, 2020). In design, this can look like co-design processes, where people with lived experiences are involved and actively contributing to every step of the process. The field of inclusive design has extensive experience in developing accessible ways of engaging a diversity of people in creative processes.
Arts-based research methods
Both fields use a variety of arts-based methods (drawing, collaging, building, podcasting, photographing, etc) to facilitate understanding, connection, and knowledge-generation. In both fields, arts-based methods disrupt routine ways of thinking and knowing and introduces playfulness and fun, which can evoke meaningful dialogue (Ashworth, 2020).
In design, these methods help people not only articulate their explicit needs, but get deeper to their tacit and latent needs - the needs that are deeply held and difficult to articulate in words (Sanders & Stappers, 2012). In community development, arts-based methods can be used to engage in civic dialogue, enable respectful and mutual listening, and remove power dynamics from the medium of expression.
Differences
Community ownership and sustainability
While fields like design justice and co-design emphasize the importance of community members owning the project and outcomes, community development goes further by building in specific guidance to make sure the communities aren’t dependent on external people like the designer or community worker and start considering the sustainability of solutions from the beginning. It also highlights the importance of community members developing power literacy, as one of the key goals of community development is to reshape power relations.
Micro/macro thinking and systems theory
While the design field has been slowly incorporating systems theory for a while now, there are still ways to practice design without leveraging systems thinking. In contrast, the field of community development considers it a key practice to effectively addressing community challenges. For example, the Six Conditions of Systems Change encourages practitioners to think about how policies, practices, resource flows, relationships, power dynamics, and mental models can work together to make systems-level change (Finegood, n.d.). It also emphasizes that community interventions are always required both at the grassroots and local level, and at a systems and policy level (Bhattacharyya, 2004).
Building coalitions
Community development is acutely aware how difficult large-scale change can be, and is much more intentional at coordinating partnerships and building coalitions to achieve a shared goal. For example, more stakeholder and rights holder mapping tools and engagement methods are used – community workers understand that the feasibility of an idea lies in garnering the support of their network. Collective impact is another framework that is used to implement and coordinate systems change, aligning different efforts towards a shared mission and ensuring activities done by different organizations are mutually reinforcing (Borns, 2023).
Emphasizing strengths and assets
Design research, and research in general, can easily fall into the trap of perpetuating damage-based narratives that ask participants to speak of their pain and deprivation, under the assumption that this will somehow create access to material or political gains (Tuck, 2009). Solely focusing on community pains can risk perpetuating ongoing colonization by research. In community development, asset-based community development (ABCD) is a great framework to support people to identify resources within their community - it allows people to “become producers rather than problems” (Homan, 2009).
Conclusion
Design and community development no doubt have many overlaps in its principles, ethos, and how it’s practiced. However, there are still many tools and practices that community development can bring to design practice, especially as it relates to creating community ownership throughout and after the project, creating systems-based strategies rather than focusing on a single solution, bringing people together to work towards a collective goal, and focusing on strengths and assets rather than pains and detriments.
I realize that design also brings ample gifts to community development as well, and I hope to unpack that a bit more in the future.
If you’re also a designer who works with communities, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Are there additional skills from community work that design could learn from? What are some of the ways you’ve practiced these skills on specific projects?
References
Ashworth, J. (2020). Art-ful Methods of Democratic Participation: Listening, Engagement, and Connection. In Levac, L.R.E. & Wiebe, S. M. (Eds), Creating Spaces of Engagement (pp. 208–225). University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487519889-011 Bhattacharyya, J. (2004). Theorizing community development. Journal of the Community Development Society, 34(2), 5–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/15575330409490110 Borns, P. (2023). Breakthrough Community Change: A guide to creating common agendas that change everything. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Center for Community Health and Development. (n.d.). Community Toolbox: Section 8. Identifying Community Assets and Resources. https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/identify-community-assets/main Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press. Fillet, Sören. (2024). What is participatory democracy? Go Vocal. https://www.govocal.com/blog/what-is-participatory-democracy Finegood, D. (n.d.). Six Conditions for Systems Change. Complex Systems Frameworks Collection. https://www.complexsystemsframeworks.ca/framework/six-conditions-for-systems-change/ Homan, M. (2009, August 26.) Introduction to Community Asset Mapping [PowerPoint Slides]. International Association of Public Participation. (2024). IAP Spectrum of Public Participation. Public Participation Pillars. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.iap2.org/resource/resmgr/communications/11x17_p2_pillars_brochure_20.pdf Levac, L.R.E. & Wiebe, S. M. (2020). Introduction: Why Create Spaces of Engagement? Connecting Theory, Policy, and Practice. In Levac, L.R.E. & Wiebe, S. M. (Eds), Creating Spaces of Engagement: Policy Justice and the Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy (pp. 1-22). University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487519889-002 McKercher, K.A. (n.d.). What’s co-design? Beyond Sticky Notes. https://www.beyondstickynotes.com/what-is-codesign Papanek, V. (2019). Design for the Real World. Thames & Hudson. Sanders, E., Stappers, P. J. (2012). Convivial Design Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. BIS Publishers. Tuck, E. (2009). “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3):409–28. Willis, A-M. (2006). Ontological designing. Design Philosophy Papers. 4(2), 69-92. https://doi.org/10.2752/144871306X13966268131514