Design Challenge

Design an AR app that mitigates chronic loneliness by developing community, authentic relationships and self-expression using AR & Art.

Loneliness

Affecting at least 30% of the population and steadily increasing, a big part of our research was to understand what constitute and what causes Loneliness.

Community

With varying perception of what a “community” means from people to people, we had to pinpoint the commonalities in order to create one that fostered authentic relationships.

AR & Art

Leveraging Augmented Reality to promote self-expression beyond the limitations of traditional art was the center of our project, as we pioneered into a field that’s is in its early exploration stages.

Introducing Scapes

Archetypes

Based on our intercepts and interviews, we realized that within our target demographic (20-35 years old, not averse to technology) there were several commonalities. That led us to creating three archetypes that served as the personas we would design for and encompassed all the needs of the people we talked to.

step1
Provide comfort zone
People who are truly lonely view the world as hostile, as they equate reaching out to being rejected and thus fear doing it
Gley de Menezes, Psychoanalyst
step2
Reduce feeling of anxiety
Small low risk interactions are helpful for getting [people] used to conversation. Small talk isn’t immediately effective, but it opens the floor for deeper discussion.”
Karri van Reeth, Residence Director
step3
Get people to open up
An element of vulnerability and intimacy must be reached. [People] need to open themselves up.”
Allison Shapiro-Davis, Residence Director
step4
Build an authentic relationship
Depth, not breadth. Quality over quantity. That is the essence of a true authentic relationship.
Kerri Van Reeth, Residence Director
step5
Build an authentic community
A community is only as strong as the interpersonal connection within that community. Authentic connections makes an authentic community
Allison Shapiro-Davis, Residence Director

Model for Mitigating Loneliness

Based on our research, we realized that there was a step by step process to helping people who suffered from loneliness to create authentic relationships. By no means we are turning Lone Wolfs into Social Butterflies, but we identified their struggles to connect and deepen their relationships and from their created a model to provide help for those needs.

Design Principles

After understanding who we were designing for (the Archetypes) and how to tackle the prompt (the Model) we then created a set of design principles that covered the biggest needs of our users and served as our north moving forward, as we used them to design our concepts and features.