Group Eat & Meet -Improving the social relations among KU students

Our project is to solve the communication problem which exist for a long-term and create a table which can improve the social relations between Koç University students.
However, Koç University seems as a social university, there exist grouping due to the clubs and organizations in the school. This grouping cause prejudice on people and they become isolated. Most of the student spend their time in the campus, but due to the academic responsibilities, the amount of time that they can spend for the social activities is bounded. Even some of them, can’t spend time. We focus on the time that spend in the cafeteria to be able use time efficiently. Thus, we thought that it could also improve limited communication relations between students.

During the research process of this process, we saw that students feel that they don’t feel that they can socialize sufficiently and generally their friends are from the same major with them, they don’t have many friends from other departments.
Also, they mentioned that some departments have prejudice to other departments due to the insufficient information interchange. Due to the hierarchy in the clubs, relations can’t have sufficient sincerity. We observed that people who cannot socialize, also eat alone in the cafeteria. To be able to find a solution to these problems, we considered to create a table for people who want to socialize and eat alone. This table can bring people close together. We named this table as “Eat&Meet”.

The reason why we chose the dining hall was that it was a place which gathered every type of person in a single area inside our school. Also, we came into the realization that the amount of time we spent in the dining hall could be used effectively. We expect to see that the table, which will be designed as a symbol for gathering people together, to turn into a tradition in our school so that it can continue throughout the years. We want to expend the effect of our project in to the individual’s normal life so as a next step we want to bring the people who sat on the table together by a social network platform. We could use a QR code scanner which will add the individual to whatsapp group if the person scans the code from the QR cardboard which will stand on top of the table. We aim to create an environment where those people could be able to form their own activities and manage them. For example, if someone from Eat&Meet wants to go for a walk but hesitate to do the activity alone then he/she could be able to reach out to our group. We wanted to set our system away from a normal student-club’s functioning so we thought of a non-hierarchical system. Additionally, we wanted to expand the meeting points so we thought that there could be Drink&Meet in
Kahvehane, Breath&Meet in Henry Ford and Play&Meet in gym.

With the effect of this project we expect to see a change in the amount of stereotyping we do for each other without questioning and lack of communication between individuals inside our school.

Team Members and Credit: Adil Çetinkaya, Aslı Nur Kaya, Begüm Önsal, Sude Acı