Dunbar's number caps the village; design accordingly.

principle — attributed to Tahira Endean

Endean references Robin Dunbar's anthropological research. Your largest stable community caps at one hundred fifty. Within it, fifteen are your core. Five are very close to you. The numbers shift across job changes, moves, and events. The implication for event design is operational. A ten-thousand-person event is not one community. It is sixty-six communities of one hundred fifty, or six hundred sixty-six clusters of fifteen. The discipline is to design for those small units rather than for the aggregate. Sessions that bring small communities together produce the memorable experiences. Sessions that treat the room as one large block produce attendance without connection.

For conference designers, large-event programmers, and corporate event leads thinking about scale. The principle is most useful when the event has grown to a size where the original design assumptions no longer hold.

dunbar-number, community-sizing, small-groups, anthropology