@About
(Re)Designing the Social Architectures of Human Connection
New Social Forms brings together artists, technologists, researchers, and civic actors to explore, prototype, and scale the social architectures that strengthen connection and collective agency in a time of rapid technological and cultural change.
‡Principles
Why?
We live amid the collapse of civic, spiritual, and digital spaces that once held us together. Yet everywhere, new experiments in belonging are emerging.
New Social Forms exists to surface, connect, and advance these experiments.
Drawing on current research, age-old lived practice, and creative experimentation, we’re helping map and promote a new field devoted to defining the social architectures that promote meaningful human connections. We engage principles and questions such as:
Taking inspiration from immersive theatre, DisCourse was an unconventional dinner series hosted in an MIT basement dressed-up as an archive of the future. Conversations as Worlds
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Immersive environments can create temporary worlds with their own social physics, liberating us from the invisible norms that keep us performing, guarded, or small. How do we design these temporary alternative realities?
AI Seances are collaborative experiences which encourages collective reflection with an AI model. AI as Collective Mirror
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We turn to AI with our biggest questions—about meaning, purpose, connection—but we ask alone. What if AI could used as a site for collective understanding and meaning-making?
In Light Rituals, people gathered around an altar to share and listen to community stories Ritualized Reciprocity
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How do you create social experiences which shift from consuming content to reciprocated vulnerability?
~Format
A living map of emerging social forms
New Social Forms brings people together to explore how humans create meaning and connection. We do this through three core activities:
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Salons
We convene intimate, cross-disciplinary groups to actively experiment with new gathering formats and rituals. These in-person and virtual salons aren't just discussions about social forms—they're experiences of them, where participants prototype new approaches, document what works, and collectively build a living archive of knowledge.
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Research
We're building a living database of social forms gathered through collective experimentation. Drawing on both traditional academic research and practice-based approaches, we articulate patterns, develop shared language, and document what works as a way to create an open repository of definitions, principles, use cases, and tested approaches that anyone can learn from and build on.
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Prototyping
We support practitioners experimenting with new social forms through small grants and collaborative development. These funded experiments, including rituals, tools, gathering formats, and hybrid spaces, serve as live case studies that the community learns from. Grantees share their findings with the salon, contributing practical insights to our growing database of social forms.
*Salons
Future Session Topics
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Join us in Exploring and Piloting New Social Forms
Are you hosting gatherings, researching connection, or designing new social tools? Do you want to participate in our salons, research or prototyping work? We’d love to hear from you.
Join us in Exploring and Piloting New Social Forms
Are you hosting gatherings, researching connection, or designing new social tools? Do you want to participate in our salons, research or prototyping work? We’d love to hear from you.