Reflection

While making this tea set, we wondered how much intervention from our part there should be to avoid as much conflict among users as possible and provide for the most helpful method of letting go as possible. Our use of a Headspace-like facilitator voice is an attempt to focus the conversations more on sharing experiences to let go of painful memories. There is also the idea of having a set of questions to help instigate more interaction or a more guided conversation. Jubilee’s “Tea with Strangers” Youtube series is an interesting approach to building social connections with strangers. They used 36 questions that psychologist Arthur Aron wrote, hypothesizing that it could lead them to fall in love. Based on this concept of having guided questions for conversation topics, it could provide Connectivitea users with more conversation topics through which they can connect more intimately. However, controlling or interfering more than is necessary in the way users connect could be more detrimental to their rituals of letting go. It could be more beneficial to the users if Connectivitea allowed them to connect at any point in time during their tea ritual, or if they were allowed their own way to emotionally prepare for the imminent conversation.

Moreover, our project idea has a lot more that can be explored to further develop the concept of letting go of painful memories through sharing experiences with others and creating new memories with them. For instance, one could look into different tea ceremonies, from which we could draw further inspiration to develop how Connectivitea could work differently. The possibility of a more calming mood-setting tea ritual could come from an existing tea ritual from a particular culture.