We are a group of
four Culture Design Studios
Each one applies culture design to a different group of people with its own unique approach.
Culture Clubs builds communities.
Culture Systems designs how teams work.
The Culture Method works with a community of culture designers to shape the field.
The Map Room publishes what we find along the way.
Where it began
Rishi's first company was in music tech. The plan was to get enough artists collaborating that a culture would form around the work, and the culture would carry the product. Two WhatsApp groups, both maxed out. A year of meet-ups, conferences and live shows behind them. On launch day, almost nobody showed up.
They had collected their ideal customers into a group and called it a community. It took about a year of digging to admit the bigger problem, which is that he'd never been building culture at all. He'd been using the word the way most people use it, which is to say loosely.
Aashna had the opposite problem. She was inside a 25,000-member professional network for women, designing touchpoints and sitting with members for hours, and the relationships were real. What she didn't have was a repeatable way to do any of it. Everything ran on effort. In a company where the product was community, the people building it were the ones who felt most alone
We started comparing notes and found we were working on the same questions. What is culture actually made of, and can you build it on purpose. The early answers came out of testing on two groups who trusted us to experiment, an alumni network and a coaching community.
Since then we've been applying what we worked out wherever people have to come together. Classrooms, teams, communities, remote work. The more we experimented & studied, the sharper our method became.
When we find ways in which culture design can reliably be used to solve professional problems, we turn it into a culture design studio and share our skills and learnings with the world.
Today we have culture design studios for community building and work culture and as we continue discovering the role culture plays in different domains, we look forward to revealing the different ways in which intentionally designing culture can help us.
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We build communities with organisations, through the three stages every community moves through: foundations, growth and systems, then scale.
We work out what your people actually want, then design the culture that keeps them coming back and gets them building it with you. -
Most work cultures die on a wall. Living one takes an environment built to support it, which is rare. We define the culture a founder actually wants, design how the team works together, then build it into Notion so the culture is applied to the team’s day to day.
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Our community for people who want to learn the methods and come with us to the frontier of culture design. In-depth training for people who intend to build cultures themselves.
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Where we publish what the work teaches us. Case studies, field notes, research, and the occasional argument with how the industry talks about community.
Our Four Studios
Meet the Founders
Aashna Rane
Founder
Aashna got here through classrooms. She went into education believing that community and relationships had significant influence on the way we learn, then found the same truth: nothing works until the people are aligned, and this requires intentional design.
Rishi Bradoo
Founder
Rishi got here through music. He spent years trying to build culture through marketing, art and products before discovering that culture didn’t need to be sensed, it could be seen. He now designs it for others.