This method helps you build a community around a shared goal (like inclusive innovation) to learn, collaborate, and grow skills together.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who:
- have something that they do in common
- come together to share and develop their knowledge and skills
Communities of practice are often professional (for example a design community of practice), but don’t have to be.
When you are running an inclusive innovation project, you and the local people you are working with can form a community of practice around the subject you are working on.
Elements of a community of practice
3 elements of a community of practice
Anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger coined the term community of practice. They said that a community of practice has 3 elements that distinguishes it from just a group of friends or colleagues:
- Domain – a shared topic or area everyone is interested in
- Community – regular discussions, meetings and other activities
- Practice – working together to develop their own and each other’s skills
How to start a community of practice
- Choose and define your area of expertise (your domain), so that people can decide whether to join
- Set your goals. What do you want to achieve? How will you know if it’s going well?
- Get members to introduce themselves, so that everybody knows what skills and experiences others bring to the group
- Select community leaders or moderators – the people who will organise things and keep the community on track
- Choose how you will communicate and meet (for example which online platform you will use)
- Give newcomers and beginners useful resources, to help get them up to speed
- Track how things are going and iterate on how your community works
Further source reading
The steps above are a very short summary of an article from Thunkific by Colin Burton:
This method helps you keep people and environments that are often ignored in mind throughout the design process.
What are inclusive personas?
Inclusive personas are personas created:
- with characteristics that are often forgotten about
- to represent people who are often left out of the design process
- to represent the urban and natural environment that is often ignored in the process of innovation
Thinking about things like cultural background, socio-economic status and ability of your personas will:
- raise awareness of those groups
- remind you to consider their needs in your designs
Tips for creating inclusive personas
- Before you create your personas, do inclusive research with a diverse group of people, including marginalized communities. This will help your personas reflect their real characteristics, not assumed characteristics that might reflect unconscious biases
- Create use cases showing how personas will interact with your product, process, or service
- Collect focused data and remember that people often belong to more than one marginalised group and have specific experiences because of that overlap (intersectionality)
- Define different aspects of your personas, such as demographics, behaviours, motivations, and challenges
- Include details such as names, backgrounds, goals, and pain points. Make sure each persona represents a unique combination of characteristics and experiences
- Share your personas with your team and stakeholders using storytelling techniques to make them relatable
- Update your personas if you conduct new research – they should evolve as you learn more about your users
Below is a general example of a set of inclusive personas for different people that might be involved in an inclusive innovation project:
- The social butterflies
- The decision navigators
- The expert enablers
- The skilled explorers
- The involvement advocates
