A beautifully decorated common space with colorful ornaments, sketch boards, whiteboards with thoughts, and books stacked. The balcony looking over the garden where people can be seen doing activities. Sounds surreal right? This is what makes coming home to a coliving space much more worthy for a lot of people. The vibe of the place set up by design and culture drives openness, sharing, and love.

It is also the sense of belongingness and purpose that drives happiness in communities. Imagine your coliving contributes to the development of your neighborhood, and you contribute to it. But, will it not give you a sense of purpose and contribution back to society.

There also has to be behavior conditioning for anyone joining a coliving space. Coliving is not for everyone at first. They need to understand and make it a part of their daily behavior. They need to understand that it's equally important to give as it takes from a community. That's what builds great communities. To foster this behavior, people use different visual cues and tools. At SimplyGuest, we use cartoons to foster the ideal community behavior. These were put across the houses the end-user touch points like refrigerators, fridge, kitchen sink, and humor, the ideal behavior was communicated. Some of the examples are given below.

All of the things above are non-quantitative ways to instill a feeling of community and happiness. But at the core of it, having a seamless operational experience is one of the most basic building blocks of creating great communities. Conscious Coliving has done a great job defining the role of community manager and explaining our process and tools in its Community Facilitation Handbook. It's a must-read for any community builder.

What differentiates a coliving community experience is that you can land into a really interesting, rich, and diverse group of people who share a common thread.