This issue explores how individuals and organizations sustain engagement amid ongoing changes and a crisis of meaning—characterized by decreasing community cohesion, an overload of conflicting information, and feelings of loneliness – personal, cultural and commercial levels.
Engagement occurs today across multiple spaces. Communities, audiences, customers, and participants continually shift between physical and digital environments. Groups and organizations aim to create seamless experiences across this continuous spectrum of interaction. Physical and digital aspects are distinct parts of an interaction, yet they both serve to build and sustain the same relationship.
These efforts foster a sense of recognition that everyone seeks — feeling acknowledged, included, or part of an ongoing relationship. Both physical service and algorithmic follow-up play similar roles by signaling familiarity and making sure you do not feel like a stranger.
However, smooth interaction depends on the right mix of activities that foster attentiveness, helping people feel genuinely engaged rather than passively occupied.
In fact, the term ‘engagement’ now generally signifies two distinct concepts. One refers to a meaningful, reciprocal relationship that transforms both parties, influences outcomes beyond metrics, persists after initial contact, and continues even without active involvement from the person/s who initiated it. The other describes a more extractive system that ingrains habits, prolongs engagement, and turns attention into profit, often leaving participants essentially unchanged. In the first scenario, individuals feel genuinely understood, whereas in the second, they may feel exploited.
Regarding this dualism, our focus is on understanding how engagement is fostered.
We highlight a crucial difference in the ‘space’ where engagement occurs. Personal involvement with a community or friends’ circle is fundamentally distinct from engagement with a business or commercial entity. The notion that commercial interactions can be entirely free of extractive motives is difficult to sustain in the current landscape. Therefore, the primary concern isn’t whether measurement or revenue collection is present — since this support economic activity — but whether participants are seen as more than merely sources of revenue or data.
To add further complexity, the term ‘engagement’ now encompasses three overlapping meanings. First, as a metric — such as engagement rate, user engagement, or other engagement KPIs — it quantifies engagement based on participants’ observable behaviors. This is the most extractive interpretation. Second, as activity, it describes actions taken by an organizer in which the participant is part of the audience rather than a co-creator. Examples include artist talks, members’ previews, customer activations, panel discussions, themed evenings, or public lectures. Third, as a relationship — in the substantive sense — it signifies an ongoing connection between two parties who exert mutual influence on each other.
The distinction of the latter case hinges on agency. Understood within people-facing organizations as the participant’s ability to influence the relationship they are part of, and the operator’s acknowledgment of this as valid, substantive engagement revolves around this form of agency. The participant’s presence shapes the relationship, and this impact is recognized. Extractive engagement, however, disconnects this influence, positioning the participant within a rigidly designed experience without real involvement.
Over time, authentic engagement develops what communities seek — ‘belonging’ — the feeling of mattering to and being valued by the group. Conversely, extractive engagement often uses community terminology without nurturing its genuine meaning.
Within this framework, some factors that boost engagement are unique to physical presence. Multisensory experiences, nonverbal cues, shared energy, spontaneous interactions, proximity, and real-time, in-person connection have impacts that no other form can replicate.
At the same time, certain aspects of digital form remain irreplaceable — extensive reach, real-time global immediacy, precise personalization, scalability, relational memory, and the ability to participate in multiple communities simultaneously.
Recent trends show a revival of physical third places and group wellness activities as solutions to isolation and digital fatigue. Meanwhile, digital ecosystems continue to grow, creating relationships beyond individual interactions.
The main question is how organizations sustain ongoing relationships across both realms, and what lessons they can learn about what maintains stability and what causes relationships to break down.
Maintaining relationships in a complex environment is simpler at local level, where smaller engagement manifests as a community that expresses a specific interest, in a specific place and time. The ‘founder’ of the community is often part of the same milieu as the participants. As such, the community is a result of the proximity and evolves as its members change.
At size, global engagement in its operational form is closer to what we might call a colony — a node at a distance from an originating center, carrying the center’s design, programming logic, and operating standards into a new location. It reliably produces a certain quality of engagement at each node because the center has designed what the local node executes. However, it risks to be standardized and to produce a kind of engagement that is not genuinely of the place, because the local node remains an extension of the originating logic with limited agency.
Between these two forms lies a third model, the ecosystem network — multiple actors linked by shared methods, values, or connecting layers, with each node largely rooted in its own location. Examples of these networks include Chinese platforms such as Pinduoduo, or, in this edition, a platform as Fuorisalone. These networks combine the scale of a colony with the situatedness of community, held together by shared connectivity rather than top-down control.
What the network form aims to provide is concrete support of a kind that the current environment and a widely felt crisis of meaning makes both necessary and effective. Global operators that initially started as colonies are evolving into networks that integrate the diverse interests of all participants. The operator who assembles visibility, peer connection, and operational infrastructure – help – for participants whose capacity is thinned is rebuilding what the broader structural changes have hollowed out. Participants in such networks are not just consumers or providers of a service; they are people and operators whose capacity has been enhanced by their participation in the network.
This ‘collective’ landscape shows the possibility of coexistence of the global and the local, the small and the scaled. Each addresses different needs and desires for scale.
Moreover, the design of these models reflect and refine what is an already existing change in individual behavior.
Individuals are already exploring a wider range of relations, products and activities offering different engaging opportunities. In daily life, somebody can simultaneously: avoid completely engagement, be a community member at a local civic center, join a platform as participant of a city festival, and register as a customer of a global brand. In the same way, modes of engagement coexist, each designed for a particular relationship, tribe, or offering.
Recognizing this evolution and understanding people aspirations and needs behind it is the challenge for everyone interested in engagement.
In preparing this issue, we have been listening to a wide range of industries — hospitality, retail, fitness and wellness, cultural entities and museums, gaming, volunteer groups and civic organizations. Depending on the organizer or operator, engagement may mean an authentic online-offline flow, a curated digital space designed to prevent overwhelm, or a third place that motivates people to return to physical presence.
The pages that follow propose a conversation about engagement methods and formats that raise further questions about their lifespan, the criticism and resistance as well as the operational challenges they face across different phases of their evolution.
The issue contributions are records of individuals and operators across many sectors who have built practices that sustain these conditions in the present moment. Their models are very different from one another. They share, however, a commitment to continuously update and rethink engagement when its conditions can no longer be assumed.
The conversation on the theme is organized around four engagement logics that we believe reflect our experience. Engagement as restraint the refusal to optimize, in favor of preserving an emotional or relational state, and the deliberate withholding that creates intensity. Engagement as co-creation — engagement built between people through repeated action over time, with the organizer’s role being to design the conditions for the community to engage itself. Engagement as ecosystem — engagement at the city, institutional, and cultural scales, where the operator builds the connecting layer and the participants do the engaging. And finally, engagement at scale — the engagement systems that connect millions of people across many countries through the replication of locally-grounded experiences.
Between the first and the second cluster sits the theoretical hinge — two contributions, scholarly and reflective, that articulate what makes engagement substantive and what reduces it to extraction.
These discussions indicate that effective engagement thrives when factors such as recognition, reciprocity, consistency over time and location, and trust are acknowledged. None of these elements are limited to a particular sector or scale, and each can be assessed honestly. However, what remains important is the value proposition and the meaning of the engagement, which cannot be purely transactional. There must be a genuine interest in what the individual, group, or brand is offering.
appraisal. at present. is a twice-yearly, monothematic publication about people-facing sectors. an editorial initiative of praxis. , produced independently from client work.