We began by studying Stanford's Structured Liberal Education program, a fifty-year-old residential humanities program lauded for its unusually close community, to understand what actually makes it work. Through sixteen interviews with current students, alumni, students in the university's standard humanities program, and the program's administrative director, three factors emerged consistently: the experience is optional, meaning everyone present chose to be there; it centers on a shared task that gives students something to work through together; and it prompts collective grappling with difficult questions rather than surface-level exchange.
CONVERSATION CORNER
designing student gatherings for authentic conversation and connection
Experiential design & UX research
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign
Three-week project
The Conversation Corner is a physical installation at Stanford's student-run coffee shop, "On Call." It is a cozy seating area with a table featuring "Ask Away!" a card game we designed to incite meaningful conversation among students in an optional, low-pressure environment.
Armed with these insights, we ideated over thirty concepts before landing on a card-based conversation prompt system installed at a student-run campus café. The card format was deliberate: research showed students felt anxious about being the first to propose a deeper topic in conversation, and a physical deck with randomized prompts eliminated that social friction by removing individual agency from the escalation. We developed and tested approximately one hundred prompts with students across campus, narrowing to sixty of varying depth organized by color.
The physical design was restrained: three card colors indicating conversational depth, Cooper Black type, a stylized question mark, and a painted box housing the deck. We laminated the cards for durability, included instructions inside the box lid, and installed the corner with a circular table — a repeated observation from our SLE research suggested circular seating was meaningfully more conducive to conversation than rectangular alternatives.
On launch day, twenty participants completed a before-and-after closeness survey rating their connection to their conversation partner on a scale of one to ten. The average increase was two points. The most significant gains came from participants who began in the one-to-three range, who reported increases of five to six points — suggesting the intervention was most powerful for strangers, which was precisely the community-building use case we had designed for.
