Powazek, Derek. M. Design for Community. Indianapolis: New Riders, 2002.


Powazek’s book Design for Community is a look inside community-building from a more mainstream perspective. The book discusses the tools needed for a community to form. Powazek raises such questions as “How do you present a discussion system that encourages friendly conversation? How does color influence the tone of conversation? Should there be fewer barriers to entry in a site with community features, or more? How can the community police itself?” (xxiv). Questions like these serve as a jumping off place for Powazek, who also argues an often-overlooked (or understated point): “The medium this communication takes place in is virtual, but the connections themselves are real, intimate, and indeed revolutionary” (xxi). Powazek often takes a rhetorical approach, asking readers to consider audience and purpose before all else. He also instructs community designers not to call their sites community: instead, Powazek argues, if the appropriate tools are provided, the users themselves will be the ones to provide such a moniker.

Powazek also considers visual rhetoric and visual design in his book, discussing matters such a readability, simplicity, color choice, shapes, patterns, photos, and illustrations. He also discusses how one can choose to power a community, a subject most appropriate for general, more mainstream community designers, not necessarily instructors. Interestingly, Powazek devotes an entire chapter of his book to policing and policies, a topic that has interesting implications for managing one’s online classroom and also raises questions, again, about the authority and role of the instructor in an online classroom. Powazek’s discussion of the intimacy of the visual and barriers to entry also raise interesting points in light of a discussion of the online classroom community: barriers to entry, as discussed in DePaw and Lettner-Rust’s “Mediating Power” article, may not be readily apparent to an instructor and may be the product of an administration, a course designer, or the design interface itself. Like most articles and books specifically discussing online community in the online classroom, Powazek discusses the significance of e-mail and immediacy as well. Powazek also takes up such interesting topics (particularly in light of postmodern pedagogy) as gaming, role-playing, and identity shifting in the online community.

As a consultant and someone who has worked on building community on the Web basically since its inception, Powazek’s discussion of the techniques needed to build a successful online community is quite useful. It is important to note that this book is directed at more of a mainstream audience who will likely be engaged in designing communities for a specific group of non-students. The reason I feel strongly this text is useful to my project is because, like many instructors and English teachers, I still consider myself somewhat of a digital immigrant. This book does not discuss the technical side of building community, nor does it discuss how to build sites or chat rooms or anything of the like. Instead, the book focuses on strengthening the intuition of the person attempting to foster the online community, offering, from a design perspective, specific information regarding the tools users need to participate in community-building. In this way, the book manages to subvert the traditional power dynamic associated with a community designer (in my case, and online instructor) and a community member (again, in my case, a student), suggesting that communities are, in fact, built by the members themselves when they are given the proper tools. I think this is an interesting opportunity for research, specifically in postmodern and electronic pedagogies.

Additionally, online instructors frequently have very little (or no) training in design. I think this is a shame, as their choices and the way they organize information in an online class can shape the learning experience and reify ideology. It is useful to take a look outside the information regarding the design of the online classroom from a purely academic approach and consider the basics of design from a more mainstream approach which has stood the test of time. After all, it was the success of online communities at large on the Internet that prompted the belief that we could build online classrooms that offered the same type of learning experience offered in the traditional classroom. Powazek also includes interviews with Howard Rheingold and other big names in the study of online community. The book is smart, streamlined, appealing, and readable, a useful text for someone wanting to understand more about the ideas that undergird community design, whether for the virtual classroom or the general online community.