Challenge Addressed: Most organizations recognize belonging as essential to retention, innovation, and engagement—but struggle to act on it in consistent, evidence-informed ways.

Three barriers often get in the way:

Fragmented Knowledge: Research on belonging, inclusion, and psychological safety is abundant but scattered across disciplines. Meanwhile, business practices often prioritize what’s easiest to measure—like productivity or profit—over what sustains people and culture.

Invisible Systems: Belonging is often described as a feeling, not a system. Without a shared language or structure, it’s difficult to design for intentionally or evaluate meaningfully.

Translation Gaps: There’s a persistent divide between academic research and real-world practice. Practitioners are left to interpret complex studies into usable tools—often losing depth, nuance, and sustainability in the process.

Belonging.Design bridges these divides by turning the science of belonging into a living, designable system—one that connects research to practice and demonstrates how cultures of connection create returns that go beyond quarterly metrics.

Initiative: Belonging.Design is a research and practice system that translates belonging science into actionable organizational design. It connects insights from organizational psychology, neurodiversity research, and inclusion studies with concrete practices that move organizations from intention to implementation.

The prototype includes:

• Research-Backed Concepts: Core frameworks like belonging uncertainty, psychological safety, and the double empathy problem—curated for practitioners building inclusive cultures.

• Practice Library: Evidence-based strategies organized by employee journey stage, population served, budget, and effort level. Each includes implementation steps, research basis, success metrics, and common pitfalls.

• Filterable Design: Explore by role, constraints, and organizational context to build custom belonging strategies that fit your culture and capacity.

Belonging.Design treats belonging as a design problem, not just a value statement—giving organizations the scaffolding to build cultures where people can do their best work without masking or wondering if they belong.

Objective: To consolidate the fragmented research and practice of belonging into an accessible, evidence-informed system that organizations and learning designers can apply to real-world contexts. This helps teams build cultures of connection that are intentional, inclusive, and sustainable.

Intended Use: Belonging.Design is built on the idea that everyone holds some power to shape belonging—no matter their title, department, or authority level.

The framework is designed to help people across roles—from learning designers and organizational development teams to managers, educators, and individual contributors—embed belonging into daily work and decision-making.

Whether an organization is just beginning this journey or refining mature practices, users can find actions that fit their sphere of influence—from inclusive meeting design to equitable policy development.

Each element—concept summaries, reflective prompts, and action practices—can be adapted to local context, helping individuals and teams build environments where inclusion and connection grow naturally from everyday choices.

Design Approach: Developed through a blend of systems thinking, human-centered design, and learning science, Belonging.Design connects theory with application. Its structure follows design principles of accessibility, emotional clarity, and cognitive flow—helping users see patterns and connections between ideas rather than consuming information in isolation.

The system is designed to evolve continuously as new research emerges and through contributions from practitioners and collaborators, modeling belonging as a living, adaptive process rather than a fixed state.

How it Works: This system brings together research, practice, and lived experience into a single connected framework. Users can explore and filter entries that include:

• Concise concept summaries that translate organizational psychology and inclusion research into usable insights.

• Linked studies and contributors that provide depth and credibility.

• Practical applications that show how belonging principles can shape leadership, onboarding, meetings, and communication.

• Smart filters and relationships that make it easy to explore by population, context, or stage of the employee journey.

By revealing how abstract ideas connect to daily actions, the framework helps practitioners design for connection with both evidence and empathy.

In its next phase, the system will evolve into a collaborative ecosystem—a shared space where organizational designers, researchers, and people with lived experience contribute examples, insights, and tools. Each addition strengthens collective understanding, helping workplaces turn belonging into something intentionally designed and continuously refined.

Why it Matters: Most belonging initiatives fail not because people don’t care, but because they lack a bridge between research and action. Belonging.Design fills that gap—giving practitioners a working system they can filter, adapt, and apply to their own context rather than starting from scratch or translating academic studies alone.

It makes belonging knowledge usable, not just aspirational—and models the collaborative, evolving approach that belonging work truly requires.

Take a closer look at how this system is built—from how research and lived experience are gathered and connected, to how insights are curated, validated, and shared for real-world use.