This paper draws on the authors’ experiences of implementing Communities of Practice as course leads for the UNSW School of Art & Design graduating Major Project. It considers the implications of pivoting from a blended face-to-face to a fully online modality, which occurred rapidly as a response to the major COVID lockdown of 2021. Outcomes of Major Project courses are traditionally high stakes for emerging graduate designers, due to the individual nature of the projects and ambitions of graduating students. The underlying pedagogy for the Major Project course in the School of Art & Design has evolved significantly in recent times, with less emphasis placed on project outcomes, and a focus instead on developing students’ agility, soft skills and personal attributes. The pedagogy supporting this approach draws on research into the challenges of fostering risk taking and transformation within the traditional project-based studio model. We build on this by integrating ideas from John Wood’s Quadratic Consciousness and his deployment of Leonard Euler’s model of design networks to explain the collective wisdom of communities. These ideas are explored practically through the design and implementation of scalable, agile and supportive Communities of Practice, with the view to building resilience within student cohorts.