Introduction

The aim of these user-centred-design (UCD) oriented examples is to improve a community designer's practices in defining community needs. Whereas the Strauss' theory of social worlds presents a very high-level conceptualizations, and Social Design Strategies a mid-level one, these UCD examples handle a few cases on a rather practical level.

The first four examples - presented as before and after improving a UCD practice with the model - of a community designer’s practices are thought to be the most relevant ones, though not of course capturing all possible areas of applying the model. However, those examples are kept on a rather general level precisely for the sake of their applicability. This approach depicts also the ideology behind the whole model. It is not a ready-made abstraction of a computer-supported community for a community designer – simply to build his or her own community with case-sensitive parameters. Instead, the model is an organised point-of-view storage to help (rather well-resourced) community managers and community designers in concept design or maintenance work with the community in question.

Furthermore, the model accepts the fact that in many cases the community is not simply restricted to wait behind a “community” button on the web site. Instead, the community’s (metaphorically) “spatial” borders may lie vaguely in the middle of other communities, as does its temporal borders. In other words, in understanding communities in a member-centred way it is essential to realize that, first, very seldom a community exists alone. Instead, its members are members of other communities that may be partially overlapping with the one in the scope. Second, the temporal starting point of a community is a question of interpretation, and thus formulated afterwards in many cases. Anyway, it is quite safe to say that the roots (yes, we are changing the metaphor here for a reason) of a community lies somewhere outside of the explicitly realised community. They may be in its previous forms, or simply in a “latent” state, i.e., in the desire of people’s minds who are longing, say, to meet again after 20 years' diaspora, or to play a non-violent online fantasy game, etc.

The last two examples are more like description methods than community need studies compared to the first four examples. The first description method, that of defining user groups, utilizes David Unruh's (1983) idea of levels of involvement in social worlds, where the members participate voluntarily. The last method example, describing membership paths, notes also that individual paths are usually not linear or even stepping towards higher levels, and that the starting point of a path may hardly be recognized or in a rather "latent" state.