Design for Connection

How might we design responses to strengthen human connections, combat loneliness, and build healthier communities?

Published in

Foossa Files

5 min readApr 18, 2018

There is an urgent need for more designers and design entrepreneurs to focus on addressing the problem of loneliness in our communities. The following is a design brief that I developed for workshops with my design students. I am sharing it here as a resource and challenge for my fellow design practitioners and educators. I hope it can also serve as a starting point for conversations and potential collaborations with professionals working in health and public policy.

So far, my students have come up with a variety of ideas ranging from an intergenerational knitting café for hipsters to hang out with seniors to an artificial intelligence robot virtual “friend” what would serve as a conversation buddy and remind us to see our real friends in person. But these are just initial ideas.

I would love to see what you come up with, and I welcome opportunities to collaborate!

Team America: World Police https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEaKX9YYHiQ

Background

Loneliness is no joke. Loneliness kills.

Fortune Magazine analyzed findings from 70 scientific studies. They found that loneliness, isolation, and living alone all had a significant effect on a person’s risk for early death. Loneliness affects people of all ages, but older people are particularly vulnerable.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, former Surgeon General of the United States reported that, “loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity.”

Even younger people living in bustling urban spaces suffer from loneliness. You may have thousands of online followers or “friends,” but still feel the negative health effects of loneliness because of the lack of close in-person connections.

But of course, we are not suggesting that ditching our smartphones and social media completely is the cure. In fact, digital connectedness is also important for health. A recent study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Data & Society found that “mobile usage may be associated with a decrease in the probability of depression” in Syrian refugee women in Greece.

Being in proximity to other people and doing activities in parallel are often not enough to fight loneliness. You can still feel lonely in the loud din of an open plan co-working space or sweating with 20 strangers in a spin fitness class. The cure to loneliness is intimate human connection, an ever rare and precious resource, even in our increasingly hyperconnected world.

In 2000, Robert D. Putnam published the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam’s research found that “joining and participating in one group cuts in half your odds of dying next year.” He found that the decline of community and the rise of loneliness was partially caused by factors such as longer commute times, a decline of organizations/clubs, and fewer gatherings with family and friends.

An episode of Hidden Brain on NPR pointed to the social construction of American masculinity as another cause for loneliness among men and boys. And in 2017, the Huffington Post reported about the epidemic in loneliness among gay men, despite big advances in equal rights.

People facing loneliness may act out in unexpected ways. Bloomberg has done a reportage about the growing number of lonely senior women in Japan, who have turned to shoplifting in hopes of finding community and stability in jail.

But there are also bright spots of hope. The town of Frome, in the UK has instituted a collective project to reduce social isolation to improve public health. According to a report in The Guardian:

[w]hen isolated people who have health problems are supported by community groups and volunteers, the number of emergency admissions to hospital falls spectacularly. While across the whole of Somerset emergency hospital admissions rose by 29% during the three years of the study, in Frome they fell by 17%. Julian Abel, a consultant physician in palliative care and lead author of the draft paper, remarks: “No other interventions on record have reduced emergency admissions across a population.”

In January, 2018, the UK government appointed a Minister of Loneliness to tackle this issue.

Research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships has shown that it takes approximately 50 hours of contact time for people to transition from casual acquaintances to “casual friends,” 80 hours to become “friends,” and 200+ hours to become “best friends.”

Ida Benedetto writes in “Patterns of Transformation,” a guide for experience design:

Experience design offers a possible solution to our very human craving for connection and meaning in the face of increased isolation and diminishing social cooperation.

Benedetto explains that “opening people up to [emotional, social, physical] risk [real or perceived] in a caring way” through experience design is a way to “make intimate social experiences transformational.”

Your Challenge

Choose a community/population and design potential responses to help people in that group strengthen social bonds to fight loneliness.

Remember that social media and other communications technologies are not enough, although they can certainly figure into your design concept.

Focus on face-to-face, in-person interactions. How can we design ways to foster intimacy, trust, and vulnerability over time, and hopefully, for the long-term? How can we design ways to help people build intimate friendships for 50, 80, 200 hours, and beyond?

How do we design ways for people to take risks that result in intimate and transformative social experiences?

What are you designing to help combat loneliness and strengthen community? I would love to hear from you in the comments, or drop me a line at ls@foossa.com.

Design for Connection

How might we design responses to strengthen human connections, combat loneliness, and build healthier communities?

Background

Your Challenge

References:

Written by leesean