Design an introduction and encounter between your partner and someone you know that you think they should meet. This should not be your standard e-intro, that says “you’re both cool I think you should know each other” and then the ball gets dropped entirely. It should be designed with what you know about both of them to prime both of them to attend to the type of relationality you hope to establish. Your design should entice, welcome, and establish momentum for the way they will relate.
There are three parts to this:
Create a preparatory experience that will establish a framework for their meeting. This should consider the themes we’ve talked about today in class: how do you establish trust, intimacy, vulnerability, empathy, etc.
Design the meeting itself, taking into account what you learned in your interview based on what they might need now and how you can offer that by way of this introduction.
The Closing. This is how the encounter ends. You need not design an introduction that will lead to a lifelong friendship, but you should consider the aftercare of the encounter/meeting itself.
This design can be loose or more tightly planned, but no matter what, you must consider where you have to relinquish control necessarily within any interactive design in order to make space for the participation of your audience.
Parameters: You are planning a single meeting that must happen in the next two weeks. Today you will have time to consider who you’d like to introduce to your partner and begin work on the design of their meeting. Before our next class, you must initiate the introduction and schedule the meeting itself of your friend and your partner. The meeting of your partner and your friend must occur by week 3 of our class (February 18/19), when your partner will report back on who they met and how it went.
What to include: You must create a kit and a set of instructions for the execution of this experience. Except in a few rare instances, your experience will not involve your physical presence, so the experience must be mostly self-directed. Your kit should be the tools for this. You must also make a user journey diagram. You can find a user journey diagram template here.
What is a kit? A kit is a collection of things necessary to the execution of the experience. This kit may be a physical box filled with objects, or it may be an email with links, or it may be a collection of things your audience must gather in the execution of their experiences. You should have at least two things (virtual or physical, or a mix) in your kit, and the presentation of the kit should be considered.
Your design may include: aesthetic elements, embodied elements, conceptual elements. You might send your audience on a journey to gather ingredients needed for food to be eaten during the meeting. You might curate several days of music and text for each of them to seed their minds with narratives. You might have structured conversations with each of them, guiding them to a common point of interest or question that could be on the table when they meet.
The encounter itself should be considered. Is there a timing and a structure? Where does it happen? What do the partners need to do to prepare? Are you involved? What do they know about one another ahead of time (if anything)? If it is remote, how do the partners each prepare before the beginning of the encounter? What are they left with? All of this should be planned out in a user journey diagram. We will get more into diagrams later, so feel your way into what this is now.
Deliverables
Week of Feb 11/12
Write a simple script of the piece. What will happen when and how. This may take the form of a text or it may take the form of a diagram. Accompany this with an explanation of your experiential aims for each of the three parts of the encounter. This explanation should be no more than 250-400 words. Upload this to the google drive by Feb 11/12. Your partner should not see it until after the encounter.
Presentation Week of Feb 18/19:
Present whatever documentation of the experience you have in a deck which can be shared in less than 3 minutes. Preferably 5 slides. You must include a user journey diagram presenting the steps of the experience you’ve created. We will provide a user journey diagram template, but you may make it however you wish. Upload your slide deck/presentation to google drive by Feb 18/19.
A very simple user journey diagram for your assignment. Can be found here or remade on any software or by hand.