I have included all posts from the Nature In LinkedIn community below for ease of assessment, as all content isn’t viewable unless you are a member when groups are featured on LinkedIn. The private nature of the group is also beneficial in protecting our discussion of intellectual property. This post breaks down all of the current content featured on the Nature In Community; however my tutor is a member of the community and so has full access to view all of the content it features.
If you are interested in joining the community and viewing the content how it was intened, please use the link below:
Nature In Community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14013386/
The community is hosted on LinkedIn as it is a natural platform to access professionals, featuring high quality content and it offers the opportunity to critique the work of others sparking intellectual debate. To discover further why LinkedIn is utilised to host the community please see my earlier post here.
The main outcome of my project is the Nature In Community, accompanied by the efforts of the Nature In Instagram and Youtube pages and Natural events I have hosted. The content of the Nature In Community is shown in this blog post along with engagement and feedback from stakeholders which is then reflected upon at the end of the blog post. Content and engagement on the Nature In Instagram and Youtube pages will be featured on my blog in upcoming posts and outcomes ofmy natural events have previously been documented on my blog.
Nature In Community:
After building the Nature In Community on LinkedIn I have devoted time to growing the members in the community with professionals leading in their fields. I currently have 32 members and counting in the group and members consist of interior designers, biophilic consultants, podcasters, professors, and many others. Recruitment to the group began through reaching out to all of the contents I have made during the course of my project, introducing the mission of the community and asking if they would like to join, including a link to the community. Through this method, I have had many positive responses and subsequently members joining the group. However, I am still awaiting responses from numerous people. I have only had a couple of responses that were negative with these being around not using LinkedIn and wanting to reduce screen-time. But, I am aware that in some cases no response is the same as a negative response, as many who wish not to join will simply not reply.
I have reached out to new connections predominately through LinkedIn. I search groups around natural design, different professions and individual profiles to find people that may be interested in and beneficial to the community. Again, I reach out to them via a connect request and subsequently message informing them of the community’s goals and a link to join if they are interested. This method has led to just less than half of the group members now and had resulted in a real variety of people being included in the community from various countries, backgrounds and professions.
I have also been developing valuable and practical content to begin informing around the value of natural design and how to integrate it into various internal city spaces.
LinkedIn NatureIn Community
I also received a mention from Sue Thomas, with whom I spoke a few months ago on the topic of technobiophilia and how to utilise technology as a tool to integrate nature into spaces. I was very pleased to see Sue share my work with her network and begin to form academic validation around the community I am developing.
Since Sue shared the group I gained around 5 requests to join the Nature In community. The post and comments on the post also helped to connect me to others that may be interested in the community and collaborating on future discussions and projects.
Resultant of Sue’s sharing of my work I have received further shares of the community to people’s networks (see below).
Reflections/ Evaluation
The content posted in the group reflects and showcases the work of all my previous interventions, stakeholder meetings and insightful conversations/ knowledge I have gained throughout this project. The community content will expand beyond this, but as a starting point to add content and kick-start conversations I wanted to include the community in the work I have undertaken and pose it in a way engaging and inspiring to them. Posting this content also allows me to gain added feedback and viewpoints on the ideas I have been addressing through my work and to collaborate to grow them even further.
I have had some interesting and insightful discussions taking place in the group. Specifically, the post I put out around technobiophilia and the use of technology to connect people with nature really triggered conversation. I believe this was due to the slightly controversial nature of the topic as many believe or presume that technology and nature need to be kept separate for people to become more in-tune with the natural world.
However, the work of Sue Thomas unpacks how technology can be beneficial as a tool to bring the benefits of nature to those who wouldn’t otherwise experience them. In the post, I linked my discussion with Sue that unpacks this line of thinking and provides examples. I also found this when conducting my work, as my immersive event utilising projections of natural visuals and soundscapes engaged people through the unusual way to present nature and feel connected to nature. However, the physical interactions with plants in my herb event provided the instinctive connections to nature through touch, smell, and sight of real plants.
Going forward I will try to post more thought-provoking and controversial or divisive content to spark more interesting discussion and community engagement.
Many people have posted introductions on the group as I have asked members to do so, both in a post I added to the community and also when messaging people asking if they wish to join the group I then ask if they would like to post a short intro so we can all get to know each other. The introductions have been very beneficial in getting participation in the group rolling, but now I need to focus on how to utilise the information provided in the introductions to spark further conversation. Possibly I may ask questions pertaining to certain members’ field of work and tag them in the posts to trigger their responses and hopefully, then others in the community will also add their opinions on the question in the comments section.
Additionally, moving forward I am going to look to add more people to the community that doesn’t have a background in natural design, as there are currently slightly more natural designs experts than professionals that are simply nature curious. It is important to include professionals from various backgrounds to ensure points of discussion and ideas formulated in the group are representative and inclusive of the wider world. Many professionals in none natural design-related fields are currently unaware of the value including nature in their city spaces can provide, which is something I am to change through the work of this community.