CCA’s closure (which follows a series of closures of other independent arts organizations in recent years) threatens the future of the arts in the Bay Area. As a 120-year old institution, CCA has been a home for fostering young talent, the same people that go on to become teachers, mentors, artists, entrepreneurs, and creative industry leaders. Without a physical institution to support this pipeline and foster these relationships, that community is at risk of disappearing.

However, even before the closure, the community was facing fragmentation. Interviewing faculty and students we heard again and again how separated people felt and how difficult they found it to build connections with people in other departments.

With Ripple, we were designing for artists, designers, and creatives—CCA students, faculty, staff, and alumni—many of whom dislike traditional networking events and sites (such as LinkedIn). Instead, they are primarily interested in community building and sharing work and events (such as  gallery openings) with their community. 

I co-created Ripple and co-founded Third Space with Lydia Chau—collaborating on brainstorming, marketing and outreach, and execution of the events. For CCAConnect, Lydia, Johanna Huarachi, and I shared responsibility for researching and concept development, then Lydia and I collaborated on the design of the platform.

We interviewed students, faculty, and alumni about how they experience community at CCA and researched how peer institutions had handled maintaining community after closure.

Our interviews confirmed that people outside our program were also experiencing the disconnection and yearning for more cross-discipline interaction.

From our research into peer institutions, we found that an institution's promise to steward an archive (as Northeastern University had done for Mills College, and as Vanderbilt has promised CCA) doesn't automatically produce something alumni feel emotionally connected to. Instead, we found a grassroots effort, focused on connecting people (as we saw at San Francisco Art Institute) was more successful at bringing people together.

Setting goals:
From this research, we synthesized a working list of goals for anything we designed:

Those eight goals became the guiding principles for every decision for both Third Space and CCAConnect from that point on. This also lead us to pursue a two-part solution, because no single format could address all of our objectives.

Students and faculty alike told us their strongest relationships came from working side by side in a classroom or studio, but that doesn't create the cross-disciplinary mixing we were targeting, since people mostly stay inside their own program.

With Third Space, we intentionally chose to focus on in-person events exclusively, and we experimented with different gathering styles and sizes to see what resonated. In designing the gatherings, we used Priya Parker’s book, The Art of Gathering, as a guide. 

Over six months, we hosted six events, including:

Outcome:
Across our Third Space events, we’ve had over 100 participants and gotten to witness new friendships form, resources and contacts shared, and conversations started about what this time meant to people and what comes next. 

From people that attended, we heard:

Why a digital home, separate from CCA:
Vanderbilt has agreed to steward CCA's physical and digital archives, but as Mills College's experience showed us, an institution honoring a legacy doesn't necessarily equate to a sense of community and belonging for alumni. 

Additionally, in the wake of the closure announcement, many of the students and faculty we interviewed had negative feelings about the current CCA administration and were not interested in engaging with an administration-led platform. Furthermore, the current platform CCA offers for students already feels clunky and sterile—something students seldom use voluntarily—and we were doubtful the institution would do better after closing. 

Therefore, we designed CCAConnect as an independent platform, ensuring the community's digital home wasn’t dependent on an institution and was grounded in community connection. 

The community-focused core:
CCAConnect is built around a few core functions: a shared calendar of community events and a directory for discovering faculty and alumni and their work, plus a community Discord for ongoing conversation. We wanted the people in the community to be the focus and giving people ways to keep meeting each other and engaging to be central. 

The archive experience—growing community identity through shared history:
Today, the CCA archive experience is very research-oriented. Despite being primarily an art archive, it is not image-oriented and doesn’t invite exploration—hardly any of the students or faculty we spoke to had ever looked at the archive or knew it existed. However, when we dug into the archive, we found inspiring work, delightful historical photos, and a profound sense of connection to the generations who came before us, something that made us feel even more responsible for keeping this community alive. 

We wanted to spread what we found with others and also believed that more engagement with our shared history could help establish a foundation for the shared sense of community identity that had been eroded over the years. We designed an immersive, interactive archive experience on top of the library's CCA/C collection (which contains nearly a thousand items spanning the early 1900s to today), engaging with the archive could be an enjoyable experience that more people would want to spend time with.

Alongside it, we built a living archive page where community members can contribute their own memories from their time at CCA, to capture the human side of the institution’s history.

An aesthetic that appeals to CCA’s community:
From our research, we heard that the typical “corporate” platform felt alienating and unappealing to many artists. As a result, we chose a Bauhaus-inspired visual style with bright colors and fun animated touches. 

When we showed these designs to members of the community, we heard: