Vibe Quest — City Exploration in a Global Pandemic
Can college students get out, have fun and explore a big city like San Francisco — while staying safe during a global pandemic?
The Minerva University and Vibemap set out to do just that.
The Minerva University has been called the future of education by outlets such as the New York Times. One of the things that makes this college experience so unique is Minerva’s global rotation. Students live in seven different cities during their experience, starting in San Francisco, before spending a semester in Taipei, Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and London.
For the Minerva students, these cities are their campuses. They make meaningful connections to the surrounding world during their studies — gaining a global perspective and an ability to navigate new contexts. Understandably, orienting Minerva students to a new city at the beginning of their term is especially important.
To kick off the students’ stay in each new global location, Minerva holds what they call a City Exploration Day. This is an opportunity for the student body — which is a mix of 80% international coeds and 20% Americans — to get to know each other as well as their new home. This past fall, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students were quarantined for the first 2 weeks after arriving in San Francisco. To kick start students getting to know each other and their new home, Minerva’s Experiential Education team partnered with Vibemap to help 60 students (these students represented about fifty percent of the first-year cohort; others remained in their home countries due to the pandemic) explore SF through a lens of vibes.
Why the collaboration? Vibemap is a city discovery app that connects you to meaningful experiences and places that match your vibe and has been working with Minerva since the summer of 2019 as civic partners in Minerva’s project-based learning program. During the 2019–2020 school year, Vibemap hosted a challenge asking the question, how to facilitate a sense of collective identity through an app-based exploration of San Francisco. A team of five Minerva students participated to help Vibemap create design mock-ups and a conceptual code for a gamification feature to increase user engagement and community connections on the app.
Minerva understood Vibemap’s core belief that in-person, social relationships are crucial to our well-being and that vibes can lead to unexpected sources of connection. With the strong foundational relationship and the shared desire to bring people together to explore and connect, the collaboration was easy. However, the experience design required an immense amount of creativity and planning to execute.
Students were invited to sign up to participate with the promise of exploring the city, getting to know other students, and being a participant in the places they visit, rather than only observers. With only 50% of Minerva’s first-years in San Francisco, however, Minerva couldn’t rely on their legacy way of making student teams. Minerva leaned into the collaboration with Vibemap. Each student picked one of Vibemap’s seven vibes (Quiet Energy, Dreamy, Old School, In Solidarity, Togetherness, Playtime, and Buzzing) to find their teammates.
What’s a vibe you ask? It’s a hidden vibration or sentiment that most people intuitively feel. We all have vibes. As do cities, places, and events. Powered by user input and civic data, Vibemap uses vibes as a way to make finding things to do and places to go fun and more tailored to each person.
Teams of no more than five Minerva students were formed based on the seven vibes. Before leaving the dorms, they downloaded the Vibemap app, donned Vibemap T-shirts, and briefly joined a Zoom session to get introduced to the prizes, rules, and expectations for their quest.
Over the next four hours, students explored the city, based on their vibe, using the app and a companion guide to explore the vibes of San Francisco on Vibemap’s website. Each team was given a must-see spot that matched their vibe; these locations came with more robust, curated content (think podcast) to give deeper insights. Students were also asked to document their journey and return to share their adventures in a virtual meetup to close Exploration Day.
The safety of the students was always top of mind, and many vibey recommendations were public, open spaces that allowed for social distancing, including San Francisco’s Alamo Square Park, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the Ferry Building. Masked and outdoor explorations of restaurants, sea lion-covered landmarks, and even toy stores were recommended to the Minerva explorers.
The final chapter of Exploration Day was a virtual closing ceremony, where students showed how they captured San Francisco’s vibe in photos, social media, and videos. Prizes were given to celebrate their work — Minerva students voted on the stories that were the most helpful to others, most vibey, and the most epic story of their quest. The three winning teams: Old School, Buzzing, and Togetherness Teams won a dinner at Papito Hayes — a local favorite that matched the winning team’s vibes.
Our takeaways? Vibes provide a fun and meaningful way for people from all over the world to connect. The city of San Francisco can be explored, even in the midst of a global pandemic. Connections come from shared experiences, seeing the world, and eliciting meaning from it. Students agreed, sharing that they connected to their surroundings in a more meaningful way and experienced the magic of the city. They “saw San Francisco with new eyes.”
