A collaboration with Phebe Bianca Raviraj, Emily Choi, Adrian Chin Quan, Danyon Downton, Olivia Fong, Jessica Kumar and Rudy Sagar
re|connect is a platform and service that aims to bring connect children of first generation immigrants and children with mixed heritage with their cultures in a fun and digestible way. Taking advantage of Facebook Messenger's chatbot API, re|connect delivers cultural knowledge to users in interesting and bite-sized bits.
This project was designed as part of a two-week hackathon by a transdisciplinary team featuring knowledge from the fields of Visual Communication Design, Business in Marketing, Mechatronics Engineering, and Applied Chemical Science. Drawing on our own diverse perspectives and cultural heritages, we asked ourselves 'How do we foster cultural acceptance and pride within individuals of non-Australian ethnicities, towards both their traditional heritage(s) and the Australian culture?'
As a team of diverse ethnicities, the team all felt personally interested in exploring the space of cultural identity, specifically in regards to what it means to be a young Australian with an ethnic background. In searching within the team’s personal experiences, it was identified that there were varying degrees of disconnect between an individual’s Australian culture and their ethnic culture/s. Drawing on the example of ABC News Chatbot as our prime inspiration, we developed this speculative social enterprise startup.
Prototyping
Utilising the LeanUX methodology, rapid prototyping was an important technique utilised during the short time frame to develop our ideas, refine content and delivery of ideas. This accompanies extensive interviewing and surveying of target stakeholders to validate or invalidate many of our assumptions and hypotheses we had generated.
This allowed us to settle on a tone of voice that was far more colloquial and catered towards young adults, who made up a large majority of the audience we identified earlier in the process.
We also considered how this service would be supported financially, looking into various financial and revenue models, settling on a 'free-mium' subscription-based service bolstered by advertising revenue. Content would be sourced collaboratively and hosted on a developed platform acting similarly to a wiki. Our plan would also be to get in touch with Duolingo for a potential partnership to incorporate cultural knowledge as part of their language education service.
