My writing of this blog would be more experiential and annecdotal than being a research or citied one as I believe over the years being part of several communities and forums have given me a well rounded sense of the way we have been doing things and improvised with experience. Having said that this blog might not have any references or citations rather have a lot of inferences from my experience and memories 😁.

The importance of being a part of a community for personal and professional growth as a designer cannot be overstated. Design and innovation communities that I have known, built and been a part of have been a pivotal part my success and learning as a designer. They have always served the purpose of providing a supportive, creative and collaborative environment for me to share my ideas, skills, knowledge and experiences of my craft. Not just that it has also proven to to be a great way to network, learn and grow in the field and find exposure for my work and myself.

As a designer the need to be constantly in touch with the latest trends, to gain exposure and build my professional network has been my goal and over the years these communities and forums have been a great way for me to be enabling that. Being part of some design communities and building a local community in my city of innovators and design thinkers always enabled me stay up to date on the latest trends, techniques, and technologies. Our conversations within these communities have sparked novel ideas, have been food for thought and has been a great platform for learn from others and share experiences.

My experience of building a local innovation community in my city

Since 2019 me together with a few colleagues and professionals that we have know have been building a small community of innovators and design thinkers from and around our city. Corporate Innovation Forum started with 4 - 5 of us initiating the idea and currently has become a thriving community of over 120 professionals with innovators coming from large organizations like Amdocs, Accenture, Volvo, Eaton, Philips and more and some coming from government-led innovation initiatives and incubation agencies. Our primary goal as a community is to share ideas, conduct meetups provide each other with feedback and help one another find opportunities to grow in their professional careers. Our community primarily communicates over a WhatsApp Group and we also have a community LinkedIn Page. During covid when we could meetup in person so we have had several talks and sessions conducted over Zoom, this was the time when we could also bring in international speakers and experienced professionals in innovation from Europe, Israel and the US.

Here are a few screengrabs of our community on LinkedIn and WhatsApp.

My Experience of participating in a large design community conference in India

Before the pandemic struck I had a chance of attending a major design conference in India, the name of this event was Design4India which was hosted by NASSCOM which is the confederation of the Indian IT Industry. It was a huge conference with over 1000 participants from all over India and a few hundred International participants. This conference had a lot of speakers and panel members. They shared various learnings, and challenges of their design practice and lectured on a few design practices and methods they apply in their practice and within their team. The knowledge and experience of listening to these people was pretty insightful. It was great to get to know a few industry leaders and I had an opportunity to network with a few. There were a couple of employers too participating in the conference and showcasing their culture and design practices within their organizations. The possibility of making connections and learning experiences and journeys of fellow practitioners was indeed insightful and inspiring. At this conference I had an opportunity to talk to and network with a few good people from the industry some of which I speak to and connect with over LinkedIn to date. Some of these were design leaders from large companies like Air Asia, Accenture, Tekion amongst few others.

The goodies from this conference

Conclusion

Overall, being part of a design communities is essential for designers to learn, succeed and thrive in the field. Joining a community, we as designers can gain much wider access to a large pool of resources and learn from other professionals. Joining a community can also lead to opportunities for designers, such as working on projects with other members or getting hired for projects.

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