Perspectives

Inspiration

Our team’s mission is to create a space of understanding, compassion, and curiosity through facilitating cross-cultural conversations.

At a time where a pandemic and social media algorithms keep us tightly wound in our own homes and echo chambers, we’ve made a platform to push people out of their comfort zones and into a diverse environment where they can learn more about other cultures.

Cross-cultural conversations are immensely effective at eliminating biases and fostering understanding. However, these interactions can also be challenging and awkward. We designed Perspectives to eliminate that tension by putting the focus back on similarities instead of differences. We hope that through hearing the stories of other cultures, users will be able to drop their assumptions and become more accepting of the people around them.

What it does

Perspectives guides users through cross-cultural conversation with prompts that help facilitate understanding and reflection.

Users have the ability to create a user profile that details their cultural identity, cross-cultural interests, and personal passions. Then, through the platform’s matching system, users are connected through video with like-minded individuals of different backgrounds.

How we built it

The main codebase for our project was the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js). We used the Daily API for our video calling and RxJS to handle our async events. We spent most of our time either planning different features for our application or coding over Zoom together.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge we encountered was deciding on what peer-to-peer communication platform we should use for our project. At first, our project was structured to be a mobile application, but after evaluating our time and resources, we felt that we would be able to build a higher quality desktop application. We knew that video calling was a key component to our idea, and so we tested a variety of the video call technology platforms in order to determine which one would be the best fit for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With so many moving pieces and only two of us working on the project, we were so enthusiastic when our project was able to come together and run smoothly. Developing a live pairing and video call system was definitely not something either of us had experience in, and so we were ecstatic to see our functioning final product.

What we learned

We learned that ideation is EVERYTHING. Instead of jumping straight into our first couple project ideas like we’ve done in the past, we decided to spend more time on ideating and looking for pain points in our everyday lives. For certain project ideas, we needed a long time to do research and decide whether or not they were viable, but in the end, our patience paid off. Speaking of patience, another big piece of wisdom we learned is that sleep is important! After tucking in on Friday night, we were rejuvenated and hungry to work through Saturday, where we definitely saw most of our productiveness.

What's next for Perspectives

A definite next step for the project would be to develop a Perspectives mobile app which would increase the project’s accessibility as well as introduce a new level of convenience to cross-cultural conversation. We are also excited to develop new features like in-app speaker panel events and large community discussions which would revolutionize the way we communicate outside our comfort zones.

Built With

• axios
• daily
• express.js
• javascript
• mongodb
• node.js
• react
• rxjs