A Vessel, Not a Mold

How we run Index’s peer-led programming model

(Illustrations by Juliette Lépineau)

Dries and Kay built the programming page of our new site so that it pulls all our events directly from Luma. Upcoming events are featured at the top of the page, and below, Jake and Jake designed a comically long list where all our past programs appear in reverse-chronological order.

There are programs on this list that I barely remember, subjects I know almost nothing about, and ideas I never would have thought to bring into Index myself. That is, more or less, the point.

Unlike a lot of cultural spaces, these programs weren’t conceived of and curated by an Index programming team. In fact, we don’t have a programming team. We have a studio & programming manager and three studio assistants, whose jobs are to ensure the same high standards of community across the experiences of our members — who join us regularly during the workday — and the public, who might swing by to catch an event every so often.

We designed Index’s peer-led programming model as a representation of our community. Rather than hiring people to take a guess at the programs our community might be interested in, we let the public come to us.

“I’ve been researching the ways in which human language is changing as a result of communication with LLMs.”

“I curated five short films and am bringing the directors together for a screening.”

“I have a 5-week syllabus for a course that posits fermentation as a model for a more equitable economic system.”

An anti-denominational community

We’ve always been very careful to stress that, even though we also run a design studio and a technology studio, Index is not intended to be a space specifically “for” any one career type or discipline.

During coworking hours, a lot of our members work in ways that consider how gestures of typography, image, and message work in concert to create meaning, but we are not a space for designers. Many of our members write code to build platforms, experiences, and bodies of research, but we are not a space for developers. More and more, people are joining us as they take steps toward launching their own businesses, and though we don’t bill ourselves as a space for entrepreneurs, I like to think that, on the precipice of taking risks and bringing new things into the world, founders are particularly attuned to the energy of creativity and acceptance that our community radiates.

I see Index as a fundamentally anti-denominational space. It’s not just that we choose not to see the divisions of craft and career that might differentiate our labor. It’s that too much focus on these distinctions can become a distraction from our mutual purpose: to make good work, live fulfilling lives, and — if we don’t all have the hubris to think we’re making the world a better place — at least to do as little harm as possible.

Expertise matters deeply to us, as long as it circulates. The power of making things is so much stronger when a product designer can read a P&L sheet, or an architect can navigate the complexities of a codebase, or a growth marketer is well-versed in critical theory. A community becomes more capable when its members are not only good at what they do, but curious about what everyone else is doing.

And so the purpose of our peer-led programming model is to foment that exchange — of knowledge, of craft, of ideas, of access, of funds — and, in doing so, to make a more inter-reliant community. Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn.

Many hands make long work

What makes this model culturally generative is also what makes it organizationally resilient. Programming isn’t itself a major revenue driver for Index. In the near term, events are a way to get more people through our doors than coworking alone. Someone might attend a screening, sign up for a class, or come hear a conversation, and eventually find their way into our coworking space as a paying member.

But in the long term, the peer-led model is also one of the ways we plan to ensure Index endures. Our lease terms in Chinatown and Greenpoint go through 2040. I’ll be 47 when our leases are up. It is strange to plan that far ahead. Inevitably, it raises questions about what exactly we are trying to preserve.

If Index depended on my taste, or the taste of any single curator, programming manager, or institutional mandate, its future would depend on that person’s ability to continue making interesting decisions for fourteen more years. Yikes! I don’t plan to know what the downtown community thinks is cool fourteen years from now.

The power of a bottom-up programming engine is that it doesn’t depend on that. New people arrive with new interests, new expertise, new questions, new cultural reference points, and new ideas about what a space like Index could be used for. As business operators, my team can confidently imagine the perpetuity of our community without relying solely on our own inputs.

I have always thought of Index as a vessel, not a mold. The programs that animate our spaces define the character of our community far more than a mission statement or aesthetic treatment ever could. With sound structure and clear values, what happens inside can remain open to interpretation.

Peer-led, though, doesn’t mean hands-off. We don’t just hand someone the keys and tell them to have fun. Our role is less to originate programming than to give other people’s ideas the conditions they need to become viable.

Over the past few years, we’ve developed a process for doing that that is fairly lean, efficient, and repeatable. I think some of the practical knowledge we’ve accumulated might be useful to other people running spaces, so here’s how it works.

How we co-produce peer-led programs

First, you send us an email.

You have this idea, for instance, about how workshops are a microcosm for group behavior. The way a group of people enters a room, understands a shared task, negotiates ambiguity, contributes ideas, makes decisions, and leaves with some sense of what happened tells us a lot about how people cooperate more generally.

You think learning how to run a great workshop might therefore be useful far beyond the conventional design workshop: in business, education, research, politics, organizing, creative practice, or any situation in which a group of people is trying to accomplish something together.

So you’d like to come to Index to run a two-day Workshop on Workshops, intended for anyone interested in relational design, facilitation, group organizing, collaborative practice, or simply getting better at bringing people together around a shared purpose.

Ayaka will probably be the one to write you back.

She’ll send you our cheat sheet explaining what it means to co-produce a program at Index, and find some time to meet and talk through your idea.

Co-producing a program at Index is different from renting the space for a private event. Because the program is directed at Index’s audience, Index becomes your partner throughout the development, promotional, and event-management process.

To cover that labor, Index splits program revenue 50/50 with facilitators.

That split is important to us. The facilitator is bringing intellectual labor, expertise, an idea, and often an audience. Index is bringing space, infrastructure, promotional support, operational experience, an existing community, and the labor required to turn the idea into an actual event. The program exists because both sides contribute something to it, so both sides participate economically in what gets created.

From there, we start shaping the program together.

Ayaka, who has a background in education, might recommend ways to structure your Workshop on Workshops based on what’s worked well for similar formats.

A weekday evening or a weekend afternoon?

Probably a weekend for this kind of thing, she might advise. If you’re asking people to spend several hours thinking carefully about how groups work together, it might help if they can arrive with fresh minds rather than sprinting over from the office after a day of meetings.

Which Index location?

In this case, Greenpoint might be a good fit. It has comfortable areas for breakout groups and a variety of different types of seating, materials, and environments — kitchen, desks, sofas, roof deck — that could become useful if the workshop itself involves experimentation with how physical settings influence group behavior.

Then there’s pricing.

You may have no idea how to price a Workshop on Workshops. Luckily, we’ve run enough interdisciplinary courses and workshops to have some useful benchmarks. Greenpoint comfortably fits 30–40 participants. We also know that programs that aren’t teaching a directly monetizable hard skill tend to work better at accessible price points.

What about $80 for two sessions?

If the workshop fills, we each walk away with $1,200 — $1,600 tops. Maybe we open up a couple of free scholarship spots, too, so cost isn’t the only determining factor in who gets to participate.

Great plan.

Then we work on promotion.

We’ll send you a Notion form with a series of content prompts so we can understand not only what your program is, but why someone might care about it. What are participants going to do? Who is it for? What questions is it asking? What might someone leave knowing, feeling, or wanting to try?

We never want inadequate promotional time to be the reason a program doesn’t fill, so we’ll usually ask for this material around five weeks before the program begins.

That gives us time to suggest edits, sharpen the framing, provide feedback on promotional artwork, build the Luma registration page, and make sure the basic proposition makes sense to someone who has never heard you explain it out loud.

Ideally, about a month before the program date, we go live with a collaborative post between the facilitator and Index. We translate the event description, syllabus, learning outcomes, and facilitator bio into something that makes sense on social. In the weeks leading up to the event, we’ll keep resurfacing it through stories and reminders.

Eventually, your workshop starts filling up, and the logistics begin to weigh on you.

You’re thinking of sharing some slides. Is there a projector there? Do you need to bring a dongle? How should you set up the room? Should people sit at tables, on the floor, in a circle? Do you want breakout groups? Are you good on your own, or do you need an extra set of hands making sure everything runs as expected?

You might email us each of these questions individually, but we’ll probably tell you to just swing by. We can walk through the space together and talk it out.

People are usually much better at imagining an event once they are standing in the room where it will happen. You might decide that one part of the workshop should take place around a table, another outside, and another with everyone sitting in a circle. A unused corner of the room suddenly becomes useful. Something you thought would require a projector turns out to work better with paper taped to the wall.

If you need us, we’ll be there, making sure you’re comfortable and everyone has what they need. If fewer people register than anticipated and our share of the revenue can’t support staffing someone for the entire program, we’ll make sure you know the space well enough to run a smaller, more intimate workshop on your own

It’s workshop day at last.

People who may never have met one another spend a weekend thinking together about facilitation, cooperation, group dynamics, and what makes a gathering productive. Someone comes because they run design workshops at work. Someone else organizes tenants in their building. Someone teaches. Someone manages a team. Someone has simply been in enough terrible meetings to suspect there must be another way.

They each arrive with different forms of expertise, and leave having borrowed a little from everyone else. Which is, conveniently, the entire point of Index’s programming model.

This Fall, I’m actually running the Workshop on Workshops at Index.

I wanted to use the program as an excuse to think more deliberately about something I’ve spent a lot of my working life doing as a function of other work, whether as a designer, a business operator, or an eldest daughter: gathering people together, creating structures for participation, and trying to help groups move from a collection of individual perspectives toward some kind of shared understanding.

We’ll look at workshops as a kind of miniature social system: how you establish the terms of participation, distribute authority, create enough structure to make progress without determining the outcome in advance, and design situations in which people can actually learn from one another. In other words, many of the same questions we’ve been asking while building Index itself.

You can register for the Workshop on Workshops on our programming page. When you get there, you’ll see it sitting for a little while at the top among the upcoming events. Eventually, the date will pass, and it will automatically be pushed down the page into the list of the hundreds of other programs we’ve run.

I hope to see you there!