Curating moments of serendipity.
Here’s a fact; we share this world.
We’re meant to be caretakers of the land, of each other, of ourselves. How you choose to show up and move through your day-to-day, it’s important. Here’s how we can help you show up in a way you’re proud of.
Why we exist
Connection has turned into a global discussion— we miss it. The Social Lab is a hub meant to bring it back as a natural part of the human experience.
Third spaces where connection used to happen naturally were deprioritised — and we are suffering through the consequences. Welcome to the loneliness epidemic. Social skills that were once developed through simple, repeated human contact have gradually disappeared with the release of every tool that centred technology over human, in-person interaction. Then we faced a global pandemic that kept everyone home, living life through a screen.
The effects are personal, generational, and global.
Connection is a fundamental human need, one that deserves a space designed specifically to make it happen.
What we believe
We’re building a world where connecting is a natural part of day-to-day life, where people have access to multiple spaces and communities that feel like home.
Vibez Bar Meet-up | August 2025
The Social Lab Soft Launch May 2026
How we work
The Social Lab is a multi-series social experience brand producing gatherings across multiple formats curated from research and data. Our core question: what does it take to get people in a room and help them genuinely connect?
Every event regardless of format includes three things:
A Connection Tool
A structured, low-pressure device that gives people a reason to engage. Something that makes approaching a stranger feel less like a risk and more like an experiment.
A Learning Partner
A guest individual or organisation that brings something worth learning into the room. A skill, a craft, a practice, a perspective. Something that gives strangers a shared experience to bond over.
Intentional Design
The space, the flow, the details, everything is curated so that connection is not an accident. It’s intentional (and as our past events have shown, inevitable. You will connect with someone).
Our Values
Experimentation
The Social Lab is the result of years of hands-on work in urban development, community engagement, and placemaking. Every event we host is an experiment informed by that experience. We know what makes people show up, stay, and come back — and we design for it.
Research
Before The Social Lab was an event series, it was an observation. Years of studying how people interact with spaces, with each other, and with the communities they live in. That research did not happen in a classroom — it happened in parks, plazas, lobbies, and neighbourhoods. It lives in every room we curate.
Kindness
The Social Lab is only as warm as the people in it. We ask every guest to be intentional about the energy they bring into the room — to be patient, to leave judgement at the door, and to choose connection over segregation. Kindness here is not passive. It is a practice. It is the collective agreement that makes the room worth being in.
Grit
Building something new is not linear. We show up anyway. We iterate. We keep going — because the world genuinely needs more spaces where people feel less alone.
Our Inspiration
The Social Lab was not built in a vacuum. It was built on the shoulders of thinkers who have spent their careers studying what happens when people gather — and what is lost when they do not.
David Siegel — CEO of Meetup, Author of Decide & Conquer
Community is a decision. The culture of a room starts before anyone walks in, with the values you set, the transparency you practice, and the boldness to lead without fear.
Priya Parker — Author of The Art of Gathering
A gathering is never just a gathering. The moment you bring people together, you have a responsibility to be intentional, about the space, the purpose, and the people. We rely too heavily on routine and convention when we should be designing for distinctiveness and human connection.
Tiffany Shlain — Author of 24/6 The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week, Founder of The Webby Awards
Presence is a practice. In a world designed to keep us distracted and online, choosing to unplug — even for a few hours, is one of the most radical and restorative things a person can do. The Social Lab is one of those hours.
The team at New_Public
Researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to create digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect. Their research focuses on the future of conversation, community, and social connection, and how AI will affect the everyday lives of billions.
The Founder
Founder, The Social Lab
Chasya Dove has spent years studying what makes people show up, stay, and feel at home in a space.
Her background is in urban development, community engagement, and placemaking, work that took her from public space projects and mixed-use residential communities to civic organisations and cultural institutions. She learned early that the design of a space is inseparable from the community it produces. That the details matter. That people need a reason to be somewhere — and an even better reason to stay.
She brought that knowledge to the Cayman Islands, where she has spent the past four years as a Marketing and Business Development Specialist at a private hospital — sitting close enough to the intersection of corporate resources and community need to see exactly where the gap is.
Before The Social Lab, she founded Vibeology.ky — a community experience brand through which she curated a series of intentional social gatherings across Cayman. An industry collaboration event. A community mixer. A private film screening. A recurring creative co-working pop-up. Each one was an experiment asking the same question: what does it take to get people in a room and help them genuinely connect?
The Social Lab is the most refined answer she has found so far.
It launched with a soft launch in April 2026 at Vines to Ocean Wine Bar, George Town — 40 guests, 13 nonprofit organisations, one Learning Partner, and a room that produced outcomes nobody planned. Strangers who had only known each other online met in person for the first time and left having shared resources and building their own community clubs.
The Social Lab is being built in the Cayman Islands and designed to scale globally. Toronto is the first expansion market. Every city where people are disconnected, on their phones, and quietly hungry for a reason to show up somewhere real is next.
The Social Lab creates the conditions. The community does the rest.
Where we are going
The Social Lab is at the beginning.
The proof of concept is done; we’ve piloted, we know what we’re doing. The community is forming. The model is validated. What comes next is building the infrastructure — the team, the partnerships, the legal architecture — to take this from a Cayman Islands proof of concept to a global network of intentional gatherings.
Cayman is the lab. The world is the opportunity.
If you want to be part of what we are building — as a volunteer, a partner, a sponsor, or a friend of the brand — the door is open.
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Good people. Good energy. Good impact.
hello@sociallab.ky · sociallab.ky · @social.lab.ky
Where connection is the experiment.