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The Team
Focused on User Research and User Flows:
Elyssa Smith, Disha Kanekar

Focused on Prototyping:
Vedant Patel, Daniel Hanick

Focused on Design and Presentation:
Sam Wong, Sherry He
The Design Challenge
Create a privacy-conscious product, system, or service that reduces the negative impact of the physical and mental barriers that people can face during social distancing to make them feel loved, supported, or connected. Jammers will research, design, prototype, and pitch a solution to this challenge.
The Problem Statement
How might we connect people and create a sense of “togetherness” while protecting everyone’s privacy?
2nd place: Bondfire - Description & Stakeholders
Bondfire -  a real-time interactive platform for isolated college students that builds meaningful connections through the power of storytelling.
The Process
We started off brain storming on Miro of different possible solutions to the problem statement. We each put down some ideas and then asked possible users what make's them feel the sense of "togetherness", along with other relevant questions to our ideas. We took that information and then went towards the idea of a platform where students can chat as if they were at a bonfire. 

We created initial screens and started working on user flow and the overall colour and design theme. We went through our work with our mentor and added a security bot to ensure users don't share information that could be dangerous, and added the option to add more firewood to the fire so visitors can continue chatting after the fire has burned out.
Feedback from the Judges - Final Project Outcome
Bondfire provides an elegant UI and user experience which allows students to connect with each other using the familiar concept of telling campfire stories. We were pleased to see a youth oriented social-media platform, which considered the privacy of their users, and provided users with easy to use mechanisms for managing their privacy. Often, these privacy management controls are conveniently hidden from users, so it was great to see an app which makes them easily accessible to end users.
Take-Aways
Our team learned that privacy and security is very important as visitors to the campsite may wish to further connect, and might attempt to share information that could endanger them. While we would implement a security bot in the final product currently, in the future we want to look into how we may implement a bot that can detect more kinds of information that should not be shared with a higher rate of accuracy.​​​​​​​

The Figma prototype above is expandable by clicking the arrow button in the right hand corner.

Quickly sketched wireframes for Bondfire during early work in progress stages. - Part 1

Quickly sketched wireframes for Bondfire during early work in progress stages. - Part 2

Inspiration for Bondfire's colour and design theme.

User flow sketch, and design guideline to follow, along with a few frames.

Bondfire's final frames, within the campsites.

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