@About
(Re)Designing the Social Architectures of Human Connection
New Social Forms brings together practitioners, researchers, designers, artists, and technologists to design, prototype, and scale the social architectures that strengthen connection, communication, and collective agency in a time of rapid technological and cultural change.
Social forms show up everywhere: in neighborhoods, civic institutions, classrooms, places of worship, workplaces. Year One begins with the one most people inhabit every day: Teams
New Social Forms is an initiative of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication at the MIT Media Lab, made possible by Google Xi.
MIT Center for Constructive Communication‡Teams
Why Teams?
Why Now?
AI is changing what teams need from each other.
As technical execution becomes increasingly commoditized, the relationships, conversations, and collective sensemaking that hold teams together become more central to the work itself.
At the same time, remote and hybrid work have disrupted the spatial and social forms teams once relied on, often without replacing them with intentional alternatives. The defaults most organizations rely on were designed for a different moment.
The question that sits at the center of this initiative is: how might we deliberately prototype new ways for teams to gather, communicate, and make decisions together?
Drawing on CCC’s research on listening, dialogue, and sensemaking, we design tools and social forms that can be tested in real settings, with real teams.
~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 four workstreams, all focused on teams in year one:
- 1
Gatherings
We convene practitioners, artists, technologists, designers, and researchers to exchange insights, test prototypes, and identify generative research directions, through salons, field trips, research retreats, workshops, and offsites.
- 2
Community Knowledge Hub
A living, AI-assisted, human-reviewed hub connecting practitioner interviews, small group conversation outputs, and public storytelling under one architecture. This is how nSFi knowledge becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
- 3
Field Pilots & Prototyping
We partner with teams open to experimentation, co-learning, and co-creation to introduce new social forms and CCC prototypes drawn from our research, and study interventions in real-world settings.
- 4
Research
We pursue research directions that lay the foundation for a multi-year program. Year One research focuses on prototypes that support teams to work together, a taxonomy of team forms, workplace diagnostics, and evaluation frameworks that travel across organizational contexts.