Brett
How to Make Friends
Using design thinking to help people ages 23-40 who are not from Berlin find meaningful social connection
After graduating, I felt confused about why it was suddenly so difficult to socialize
When I moved back to my hometown after university, I found it incredibly challenging to make new friends. It didn’t help that I was very prone to social anxiety, but it felt like I had no idea how to do it in the real world. I experienced something similar after moving to Berlin, where it took me close to three years of active socializing to feel socially integrated.
I had such close friends in university, why was I now seemingly unable to form those types of connections? And was I the only one experiencing this?
It turned out this was a HUGE problem and that people are getting lonelier
As I began poking around and talking to friends back home, it became abundantly clear that this was an enormous problem for a huge swath of the population. It turns out close to 25% of the world is lonely and that we seem to be getting lonelier!
I became determined to learn everything I could about the problem in order to address social isolation and loneliness, starting with younger people in Berlin.
I became more active in researching and prototyping
I started with secondary research, consuming every book and article I could get my hands on to try and learn everything possible about the problem space. I used Bumble BFF in parallel to start learning about people who were actively looking for more social interaction and to find out why they were doing so. This provided a base understanding from which I generated interview questions that I used to interview seven people from my co-working space. I began mapping gains, pains, and jobs and creating user personas.
Over the next several years I would organize 30+ hangouts with 100+ individuals to test solutions; continue learning about who is affected by this problem; and learn more about how they are affected by it.
It has been a messy, challenging journey, and I hope to continue it soon
There have been a great many bumps in the road throughout this project. Here a few I encountered repeatedly:
Lack of constraints: The lack of constraints in this project has afforded the flexibility necessary for exploring such a complicated problem, but has also allowed it to go on far longer than I had initially anticipated.
Recruitment: Gaining the trust needed for user research is a tremendously difficult endeavor when you do not yet have a product and intend to ask potentially socially anxious people personal questions about their friendships (or lack thereof) without financial incentives. The 100+ people I have spent time with for this project are but a small fraction of the people who initially expressed interest and then backtracked.
Reluctance to “force” friendships: Interventions to address loneliness are not at all the norm societally, and people—even the loneliest of them—have proven highly resistant to the idea of over-engineering their social lives.
I eventually compiled my findings into a guide on how to make friends and hope to continue working on HTMF soon
In February 2024, I aggregated many of my findings into a guide called “How to Make Friends: A Guide to More Meaningful Social Connections” and distributed it for feedback on a Berlin subreddit—the feedback was primarily that the guide was too long, so I also created a more condensed version.
The project is currently on hold while I seek employment, but the next step is to build an MVP that incorporates much of the information in my guide and begin iterating toward a more robust, scalable solution.