The Journey of the Catalyst

The idea for the PCE project started at my surprise birthday party that my husband threw for me. He managed to get together people I’ve known from different places in my life together in an apartment in New York City. While I knew all these individuals and couples pretty well, they didn’t really know each other at all. As the common denominator, I found myself catalyzing conversations and introducing small groups of people by figuring out what was common between them and prompting them with things they could talk about.

That popped a thought in my head - What can catalyse people to form connections with each other and how can I create a learning experience around it.

My first idea was an app called MixR!
I wanted to catalyze connections of groups with other groups based on the idea of spirit of contribution. Where you and your friend create a profile together, schedule an activity you’re already going to do (rock climbing in Cambridge) and then discover more people interested in doing the same activity at the same time. I tinkered with FigJam and Figma to create mockups and got a lot of excitement about the idea from others. However, the learning was only a byproduct of when people actually got together rather than built into the design of the app itself and I pivoted.

My second idea was an AI tool to enable hosts to make connections among the guests at their gathering, also called MixR.
Here my learner was the host, the purpose was to create and catalyze meaningful connections between people and the setting was a gathering where people came together. I used data that I collected from my friends at a Diwali gathering I was going to and fed it into a generative AI tool. It came up with prompts on what X person can ask Y person. The idea was for a host to use this data, mediated by AI to find common elements between guest and connect people especially those who are introverted and may be afraid to ask people about their lives themselves. However, I ran into a few obvious challenges – people didn’t want to enter data about themselves as it was time consuming and not enjoyable and they didn’t want AI using their personal data. AI also hallucinated some suggestions. I realized that AI can not be the mediator, but it can help the host, provided the guests fill up copious amounts of data about themselves.

This is a prompt I used with Claude
You are a party host and have collected data on some of your guests who do not know each other. You need to encourage them to talk to each other based on prompts you give them. How can you introduce each guest to each other and what will you tell them to ask each other about. I'm attaching the data as a pdf

My final project came about as a mix of the above two ideas I had been tinkering with
The strengths of MixR 1 and MixR was that it enabled people who were already at the same place at the same time meet each other, however, the purpose seemed unclear. I went back to my original proposition – What can catalyse people to form connections with each other and how can I create a learning experience around it.

I looked around me and I saw HGSE as a place with a lot of diversity in terms of students from 30 different countries and regions around the world. The purpose of Melting pot is a way for students to share their culture with each other by centering their conversations around topics like – Food, Geography, History, Music, Dance, Art and many more things.

Mixing Pot

Mixing Pot is a series of university-based cultural exchange events for current students of a university with a large international population. Its purpose is to bring the diversity of international experiences to the forefront and have people connect, share, and learn from each other.

A tabling event with
People from different countries come together with the objective of understanding what is similar to and completely different from my context.

Themes: with discussion prompts for learning from each other.

Food: These are the top 5 things I should order at a ______ restaurant and why

Sport: Who should I know about when I think of a sport from this country?

Dance: Learning Question – If I hear a song from this country, I should be able to do this 10 second hook step

Music: This is a new song/artist that I can add to my playlist

History: This was a historical event that happened in ____ country

Geography: If I had to visit this country, these are the places I must go to

Movies: This is one movie I would like to watch