Week 5: looking at how we meet new people nowadays (eg. of dating apps)

My project aim is to encourage a dialogue and a conversation between homeless people and other individuals from society, through an exchange of letters. This, inevitably, involves revealing a personal side of each other: you get to know a homeless person as well as he/she gets to know you, and that obviously happens by revealing who you are, by telling things about you. You are basically meeting a new person, and, in the process of creating that exchange program, I started to look at how people meet new people nowadays and what are the mediums used to get to know new people.

One of the first things that came to my mind were dating apps, and how those have experienced a "boom" in their number of users this recent years, and have become one of the main ways to get to know people/partners. I feel like the way this apps are designed, how interactive they can be, is something interesting to look at, even if it might seem as it has nothing to do with homelessness, as I think that it could be an interesting way of presenting the homeless people participating on the exchange to the wider public/society, who often has little time and demands more and more intuitive and practical websites, something that could be beneficial so that more people become interested in the exchange and to attract their attention to the initiative, as well as a good way of presenting the homeless people stories.

(This is a totally random example of profile) (Sorry I didn't manage to get it in English)

I like the idea of it being a bit as a presentation card, where you can get to see some general aspects of the person, and that person chooses what he/she reveals of him/her and what he/she doesn't. I like how you list some of your interests and hobbies, or talk about the skills you have (what languages do you speak), but also some more general information about your age, etc...

I feel that this, if handed carefully, could be a great way of presenting the different profiles of the homeless persons that would participate in the program, because it would allow people that discover the initiative to get to know them a bit better before writing to them, and also, based on the information the homeless people have written down about them, choose the homeless person they would like to talk to. But not as a way of choosing one over the other, in a sort of competitive way, but more because the person who is going to write to the homeless person can be really interested in the story of one of them in particular, because he/she has had a similar experience or problem, or because his story has something that really interests him/her and he/she wants to get to know more about it. For example, if a woman that has suffered from abuse before in her life, could be really interested in getting to talk to a homeless woman that became homeless because of abuse, or domestic violence, to whom she could give advice, or understand her situation better. It would be a way of getting people from society to engage even more with their homeless correspondents and engage them in the project of exchange.