The Friend-o-matic

Building community resilience through conversation

The team’s goal was to act as a catalyst for a more equitable and resilient Savannah, working with and alongside Emergent Savannah, a local nonprofit. Using Wendell Berry’s maxim of "solving for pattern,” where the effects of any action ripple positively through the connected system of Savannah, the team developed four tangible and actionable solutions that enable others, including Emergent Savannah, to carry forward on their own terms. Featured here is a way to build connection by allowing strangers to communicate candidly.

prototyping the friend-o-matic

The Friend-o-matic was prototyped at the beach on Tybee Island, GA as well as the First Friday Art March in Savannah, GA. On both accounts, the participants found themselves spending between 15 to 30 minutes asking and answering questions with a stranger.

On multiple occasions, the strangers would stand up and give each other a hug and exchange phone numbers. The Friend-o-matic proved just as vital for existing relationships. In the case of a recently engaged couple, both cried as they shared more of their stories with each other than they had previously.

How it works

The team's goal was to create a space for strangers to communicate freely. This conversation between strangers builds connections of trust across Savannah. We used bright colors and recognizable Windor chairs to attract people to the Friend-o-matic. The center panel provides a sense of security for each participant to freely express themselves without watching the other's reaction.

Recent Friend-o-matic sightings

During its time with Emergent Savannah, the Friend-o-matic has been set up at Savannah's Starland Distric First Friday Art March almost every month since its inception.

Most recently, the Friend-o-matic was set up alongside a second structure dubbed the Collab-o-rator at the 208 Savannah, GA Earth Day Festival in Forsyth Park. Both the Friend-o-matic and the Collab-o-rator were used almost continuously during the festival. 

Research

Emergent Savannah is an organization dedicated to the activation of the public realm with open, vibrant and tolerant dialogue among and between citizens of Savannah. Our goal during this class was to work with Emergent Savannah in pursuit of a resilient society with active and informed citizens as both the driving force and the outcome of that resilience.

Secondary Research

The team first turned to finding precedence in community and urban resilience. We dove into examples of social design, learning from Zaid Hassan’s The Social Labs Revolution, Michiel Schwarz and Diana Krabbendam’s Sustainist Design Guide, IDEO’s Field Guide to Human Centered Design, and Design Impact’s Metathemes: Designing for Equitable Social Change. We later used the Metatheses as a matrix for analyzing our 100 Resilient Cities case study research, and later, our own prototypes.

Because we were searching for ways to foster resiliency we looked into the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities. We researched 20 different resilient city case studies, then selected the top 3 case studies that we believed best informed our project: Denver, Colorado; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Mexico City, Mexico.

While researching, the team identified two main archetypes of resilient programming; “Top Down,” where the local municipality implements a sustainable initiative or legislation, and “Bottom Up,” in which local interest groups, businesses, or individuals develop sustainable programs for the city.

Due to our relationship with Emergent Savannah, the team decided to focus on Bottom Up initiatives. We began looking at case studies from all over the world, using OpenIDEO, social media, and our own experiences. We discovered many cases of how citizens in different parts of the world come together, how the connect and how they, through fun and activities, help to build the community’s resilience. 

Primary Research

Throughout the secondary research process, the team was attending city meetings, community events, and conducting interviews around Savannah.

Emergent Savannah holds a series of community events on the first Monday of every month called Monday Means Community. In Emergent Savannah’s own words: “Monday Means Community is a collaborative event series that promotes discussion and access to information on civic and cultural life. The series highlights both local and non-local figures, current events and ultimately aims to give people the means to take action and become more connected to those working on any given cause.”

In April, members of the team attended Monday Means Community: Back in the Day to Current Day: Savannah Activism Over Time where two residents, Reverend Gilbert Hall and Mr. Grover Thornton spoke on African American life in Savannah from the pre-civil rights era to the present. (Pictured to the right.)

A local organization, Step Up! Savannah, held an education workshop entitled Government 101: We the People with the goal of teaching local residents how our governmental systems work and the roles community members play within those systems.

Through the interview process, team members were invited to Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy group’s annual celebration of the relationships formed through the organization at “The Best Covered Dish Supper in Savannah.”

The team was able to conduct one on one interviews with over 20 local community leaders, employees of the City of Savannah, members and leaders of nonprofit organizations, and community activists. Through a booth at the Savannah Earth Day Festival, we were able to gather meaningful data from over 100 community members, both residents and tourists.

Dig deeper into the process