Third Pillar

Inspiration

America is at a fractious and polarized moment, defined by ideological chasms, clashes over social justice, and a pandemic intersecting with misinformation. As such, bringing people together in a polarized age is no small feat, especially when Americans seem hopelessly divided along fault lines of politics, race, religion, class, and culture. But what if we could change the atmosphere of this nation by engaging those we disagree with and looking for common ground and ways to work together?

Being a group of bootcamp grads and career transitioners going back to school, this project was inspired by our desire to have the type of intellectual discourse that we had back in our academic heyday.

We named the app Third Pillar because Sophie, et al, in an exploratory article, called Intellectual curiosity the ‘third pillar’ of performance in academics.

What it does

That's why we created Third Pillar, an app that intentionally brings people who stand on the other side of a divide — together — for a conversation. The goal of each conversation is to understand the other side’s point of view, even if we don’t agree with it. In doing so, we learn the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable and look for what brings us together rather than divide us. Our target audience are people like us who long for the respectful and intellectual discourse that happened more easily in academic settings.

Once you fill out your profile to identify your ideology and more, everything you see in the app are topics from users who fundamentally differ from you in some way. As such, if for example you identify as being liberal, you will always be paired up to chat with another user who is moderate or conservative if the topic of interest involves current events.

How we built it

We built our prototype using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We were all unfamiliar with using Figma to create a prototype, so there was a steep learning curve. We also had a lot of brainstorming and challenged one another about what makes for a compelling case and think more creatively about how to go about addressing big hairy audacious issues.