Newsletter | Designing for Friendship
“The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people ‘we should get together!’ before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out,” writes Olga Khazan in her article “The Friendship Paradox” for The Atlantic. Khazan delves into a recently published study in which 6,000 American adults were surveyed about their friendships, which showed that the loneliness epidemic that we’ve all been hearing about is actually quite complex.
The study contains some good news: it appears that not only do Americans have roughly the same number of friends (four to five, on average) that we’ve had in past years, most of us are pretty satisfied with the number of friends we have. The bad news: many of us don’t feel as emotionally connected to them as we’d like and we just don’t see them enough. Americans now spend about three hours a week seeing friends, a 50% drop over a single decade.
Khazan focuses on the structural changes that have transformed the way we often spend time with friends. To a large degree, we’ve moved away from congregating in common settings, like churches and clubs (bowling leagues, anyone?) and toward more individually arranged meetings. The onus, as Khazan points out, is now on the individual to ensure that they spend enough time with friends – it’s not going to happen as much as a by-product of moving about our days engaged in work, child care, errands or other activities. And we’re busier, so carving out the time and syncing up multiple calendars are both challenges. As we observed in a past newsletter, there are analogies to what happened to physical activity as modern life required less movement from us and it became our individual responsibility to find alternatives (in the form of exercise). The shift toward more individual responsibility for generating social opportunities means that, as with physical activity, those with more resources are more likely to find the time and the means to connect with others – as has been demonstrated in recent research.
The good news is that friendship is both happening and very much desired, despite increasing structural challenges. As more of us spend less time in offices, movie theaters, stores, sit-down restaurants, supermarkets and other places that generate regular social interaction, we’ll need to come up with creative new ways to bring people together. To that end, we’d like to introduce Social Grocer, the latest in our series of speculative design projects.
A terrific team of students – Ivy Tseng, Varun Narayanswamy, Louise Lu and Stevie Lemons – from the University of Washington’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction + Design program, wrestled with the question of how to make online grocery shopping services healthier. Their work focused in part on how to nudge shoppers toward purchasing healthier items, but they also leaned into the potentially social aspects of online shopping and into the possibilities for bonding over food. It’s an inspiring view of what's possible – check it out.
How else might we facilitate friendship? Comments are open below.
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