Invisible Communities

What are invisible communities?

Have you ever wondered who will wear the second-hand clothes you threw in the collecting bin? Have you ever asked yourself who is mining the precious metals that go into your smartphone? Have you ever wondered how locals might feel about your tourist trip to Barcelona? Those are people who do not have a say in the design of our clothes, phones, or holiday booking platforms but are impacted by it, directly or indirectly. Sometimes, the effects are positive, but often, they are not.

These non-user or invisible communities often live in vulnerable places and are often already affected by the impact of climate change.

As a lot of design is rooted in a Western patriarchal modernist and brutalist way of thinking, we can also identify women, people of colour, members of the LGBTQ community and Indigenous communities around the world as another group of non-users. They are often invisible in user-centered design practices

Learn more about invisible communities

• Why are invisible communities a game changer?

  Including invisible communities in the design process and creating non-user personas facilitates the understanding and awareness of the positive and negative impacts of all directly or indirectly living in the impacted environment. This helps designers think about accountability, responsibility, environmental impact, social impact, equity, equality, and many other elements that can help position and frame insights to bring benefits to non-user communities.

• How do invisible communities affect how we might reframe the ways we design?

  Invisible communities can facilitate how we design through empathic action research & co-design processes, making non-users part of the design process from the start. With input from non-users, designers can gather insights to reframe impact further and find inclusive, holistic solutions & strategies

• How do you give invisible communitie a voice in your design work? How do you include non-users perspectives in your design work?

  You give invisible communities a voice in your work by first identifying who they are.

  Through participatory design research activities you include them in your design work and you design with them, to together create startegies that work for these communities.

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