Grounds
A marketing and event app for community organizations built around member participation.
Visit groundsusa.com ↗
01Background
In a social era dominated by digital connection, physical community is collapsing.
Americans spend nearly 150 more hours alone per year than they did two decades ago, and only sixteen percent report feeling very attached to their local community.
Communities are responding by creating more local third spaces for gatherings and events.
New gathering places are emerging: indie bookstores are up seventy percent since 2020, and local coffee shops have more than doubled.
These local third spaces — libraries, bookstores, cafés, community centers — are the front lines keeping physical community alive.
This project started as a capstone for my Master's in Learning Design and Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I went into this capstone interested in learning about the needs of these budding spaces, and investigating whether the concepts behind successful digital community platforms (Reddit, Discord) could help build local, physical community.
02User Research
To start my research, I spent extensive time at across Boston and Cambridge — volunteering and interviewing staff and community members.
Through these interviews, I discovered two core reasons for the disconnect between residents and their local community:
03What Does Grounds Do?
An engagement hub for organizations
When an organization joins Grounds, they create their own Ground Space — a digital community engagement hub where they can:
- Post eventsShare what's happening with members
- Poll membersGather input on decisions
- Host forumsOngoing community conversation
- VolunteeringOrganize and sign up helpers
- TicketingManage RSVPs and entry
Think traditional outreach tools meeting digital community tech:
Each community space gets a digital home page — an interactive bulletin board.
Spaces host conversations relevant to their community.
Conversations and other interactions help bring members' voices to the forefront.
A window into local community
Grounds is also a hub for residents to find the local community life in their neighborhood — seeing inside nearby spaces and discovering the events most relevant to them. From their feed, a resident can:
- Discover nearby spacesBrowse local organizations around you, sorted by distance
- Browse local eventsFind what's happening across every space nearby
- Join communitiesBecome part of the spaces they care about
- Tune notificationsChoose what they hear about and how often
Forming an all-in-one platform for hosting local community life.
Browse public events happening across all the spaces nearby.
…as well as join new communities.
Members control what they hear about and how often.
04Design System
Grounds uses a custom design system meant to mirror the aesthetic of a community bulletin board, and communicate a similar feeling of approachability and friendliness. I designed this system using a 3-tier structure that builds up from design tokens, to the reusable components made from them, to the finished cards.