Brief:

To design and make a multimedia artifact which encourages strangers occupying the same physical space to talk to each other, thus bringing people closer together, encouraging new friendships and hopefully make society more cohesive. The artifact should attempt to unite people in it's immediate vicinity and give them common ground on which to start a conversation.

Mini-evaluation:
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Initially I wanted to do this project as a guide to interacting with people, enhancing their social skills and teaching people how to start a conversation. However, after discussing and thinking on this idea it was decided that some people are naturally more likely to start a conversation whilst others are more reserved about talking to strangers. This is closely tied to how people are brought up, and by the time an individual is old enough to go out on their own and be in the position to strike up conversation with strangers, they are likely to be beyond the age where the rules laid down in their upbringing can be altered. The only way a shy person will become more extrovert is if they decide to, they have to want to change, and if they don't want to change then no amount of cajoling will convince them that they changing is the 'right' thing to do. Because of this problem I had to alter my idea. I still wanted to get people talking to each other but decided to change the way my artifact induced it. Instead of creating an artifact educating people how to start talking to each other my artifacts new goal is to give people something to talk to each other about.