building empathy for the people around you

 

All Ears was a group project done for an interactive media studio in spring of 2021.The idea for this project began with the discovery of the word “sonder” from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. In short, sonder is the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. This project includes an app prototype, a web prototype, and an interactive art installation.

  • My Role

    Demographic research / Web design lead / App prototyping / User testing / Liaison between team and art gallery

  • Tools

    Miro / Figma / Adobe Creative Suite / Google Drive

  • duration

    4 months (January 2021 - April 2021)

The app

The main purpose of the app concept that we created was to promote empathy for strangers through fostering meaningful, anonymous conversations. Users are allowed to filter their interests on their profile page, then will be able to sort through numerous prompts so that they can then choose to chat with strangers about this prompt, or skip. Users are also able to save conversations to their personal journal, and have the option to get notified when another user is available to chat about their liked prompts.

 
 

the web

The main purpose of this web page is to promote the viewer to download the app. We wanted to use this as an advertising platform as well as a place to learn a little bit more about our brand.

the art

The art installation was printed at 18x12 feet and was on display in Reynolds Gallery at Texas A&M from May 4th - June 6th, 2021.

The art installation is a collection of stylized portraits that are matched with voice recordings that we collected with a google form, where viewers can walk up the mural and scan a QR code to be taken to a specific voice recording where visitors can get an inside look into a stranger’s thoughts. Another group member illustrated these portraits, I helped with the interactivity and website as well as installing the mural into the gallery space.

Here is the link to a site that hosts all of the voice recordings that we collected. The QR codes next to faces take you to the matching voice recordings on this site. You can also explore the home page of the site to listen to all of the voice recordings without scanning each individual QR code.