The Friendship App
explorations into relationships, technology and the importance of process with Arianna Kahn
My name is Arianna Kahn (she/her), calling in from Brooklyn.
What brought you to the Collective Action School space?
My partner Sam is involved in a few similar critical tech spaces and really encouraged me to apply. I was craving a radical space to learn *in community*— to explore questions I’ve grappled with as a History of Science student; at my day job, working to advance racial health equity; and from my own direct lived experience with technological harm. I’ve always been compelled by the bidirectional crafting of science on society, society on science, and I really wanted to delve into that reimagination process with interesting, thoughtful, and compassionate folks.
Who did you bring in with you to the Collective Action School space?
I brought myself as an imperfect representative of the diverse identities I hold and consider myself to be in solidarity with: Black communities and communities of color, New Yorkers living through poverty, those who struggle with addiction, with depression, people navigating the unjust legal system, homemakers, caretakers, teachers, and Gen-Z, generally.
What was your project? How did it begin?
It was a non-linear journey, to say the least!
I began Collective Action School with curiosity around the ways technology platforms can provide dignity to experiences that our society deems as shameful. I was exploring something around motherhood and dignity, but as the course went on, and a particularly difficult challenge emerged in my personal life, I wanted to try something a little more joyful. It was really hard for me to let my original, very personal, ideas go; but I also entered this course wanting to gain a new lens for approaching difficult work—with creativity and with recognizing joy as key to sustainability.
I switched to focus more on process versus content and defined my project must-haves as doing something outside of my comfort zone and as something that required me to talk to new people and learn new things. I decided to lean into leading a design-sprint-type process, that would push me to learn some new product building skills, and, maybe more importantly, really learn how to ask for help.
On content: so many different threads of interest and meaning converged here. I’ve been attempting to publish a zine teasing out “radical friendship” for the past few years (watch this space!); the Surgeon General reported on our national loneliness epidemic; our guest lecturers spoke to us about building community and resource sharing (Darius), and that ‘there are no technical solutions to structural problems, unless we think about mutual aid as a technology’ (Blunt); and I was personally navigating a friendship that was failing. I decided on designing an app for radical friendship.
Were there any challenges you encountered during the project? What did it feel like to work through them?
After trying-on a handful of ideas to finally decipher what I wanted to do, the next big challenge was working through my self-doubts towards doing something that felt audacious and that I had no experience in. Meeting with Adrian (from CAS cohort 1), learning about his process of building his archival augmented reality project really 2 9 inspired and encouraged me! Critically, it also helped me put less pressure on the output, and focus on the experience of the building process (a general life lesson I’m still continually re-learning).
And, of course, the biggest challenge was finding the ever-elusive time to work on the project the way I wanted.
Where is your project now? What’s your wildest dream for your project?
An unexpected treat of my project was that this process of trying to build a friendship app was actually, in and of itself, a really meaningful friendship-building experience. I partnered with collaborators on each step of the design sprint process, starting with my partner, Sam, and close friends Ryan and Jackson. It was a uniquely intimate joy for me to work with a version of them—as product managers, designers, UX strategists—that their colleagues know, but that I, as a friend, hadn’t quite seen before.
The highlight of my project was getting to meet and host Nsisong, Lizz, and Alison for a very dreamy in-person (!) sketching and storyboarding session. They brought so much expert knowledge, imagination and care to my project over the course of a single night, and I’m still so grateful months later.
We generated a handful of brilliant solution concepts to take forward to prototype; this is where it formally ended. My dream is that I can pick it up again soon, prototype something to test with users, and keep building towards something that is a really unique tool for investment and accountability in friendships.
I also imagine this digital tool being an accompaniment to the friendship zine I’d like to write/curate (!!!), and I want to incorporate my learnings from exploring friendship through this technologically-enabled lens into that creative writing project as well.
Anything else you’d like to add?
So much love and gratitude to Xiaowei, Emily, all of our lecturers and advisors, and to the rest of my cohort for gifting me the privilege of this really empowering experience!
