This was a team project that was carried out as part of my Design Ethnography PG-Cert.
The brief was to examine the boundary between friend and stranger and to look at how these relationships evolve and devolve when they exist exclusively online.
We attempted to identify the ways people could connect and reconnect in a virtual friendship space and also to look at the ways in which online/offline relationships are formed and reformed.
From this we developed our own personalised scope to investigate further, which explored the concept of distance and the ways in which it can apply to different people in different settings and also the way it may affect relationships both online and offline.
From this exploration of ours one of the key insights that arose was that sharing as part of a community can often allow people to bridge distance and as one of our participants stated:
“Distance kind of becomes irrelevant” When you are part of a community space.
To aid us in our discoveries, as well as conducting desk research, observation and auto-ethnography, we also interviewed ten people to obtain their interpretations and perceptions of distance.
