Inspiration from Series

My virtual gathering was largely inspired by my series project in that I really tried to embrace the idea of inviting people into my home and sharing memories together. From my series project, I thought of different ways and groups of people that I think I would enjoy "coming over" in a virtual sense and reminiscing together. I was also obviously inspired from the design of my series homepage, which features an abstract floor plan of my house. For my gathering, I captured this floor plan again on a different platform, Gather.Towns, where I could add more detail and make it less grid like.

Choosing the platform

I choose Gather.Towns because I thought it would be the best way to have people interact with the house and each other. It features spatial awareness, so people could break off in groups and explore different rooms while having separate conversations. It also allowed smaller groups to play games with each other and just make the gathering feel much more natural (i.e. less staged). I really wanted to avoid the feeling of this being a very orchestrated event as inviting family over to my house in person would normally be casual, and I was trying to invoke those same feelings.

I had a lot of fun recreating the floor plan on Gather.Towns and liked that I got to approach the same challenge from the Series project in a new format. This one proved to be less trial and error and more of a fun, exploratory thing where I got to play with different furniture and games and put more thought into how I wanted things laid out rather than just choosing colors for boxes and getting them to align properly.

Preparation

The guest list was perhaps the easiest thing to compile for this project as I just pulled from an existing group that I am a part of. I am very close with my extended family, and given the pandemic and social contract, I haven't been able to gather with them in person as I normally would. Thus, I felt really compelled by the idea of having a family-gathering with my cousins. This would be a group that already had a lot of chemistry together so transitioning online wouldn't be too awkward and would provide a good baseline for memory sharing as we have many memories together.

I kept the invitation casual, including emojis and text slang as I would normally send in our group chat (appropriately named FAM). There are 11 of us in total but only 6 were able to make it on short notice. Nevertheless, we had a good group that all got along well.

As for the schedule, I wanted to keep it fairly loose to allow for some spontaneity, but did ask everyone to bring a photo to share with the group and talk about. The schedule was as follows:
5:00-5:05: Arrivals 5:05-5:15: House "tour" through gather room and invitation to look at series project 5:15-5:40: Photo show and tell 5:40-6:00: Games 6:00-end: Chatting

I thought that this structure allowed us to spend time on the things we wanted to without setting hard deadlines on how much any of had to talk about their photo or play a certain game with someone.

The Gathering

I thought the gathering went pretty well and that my guests enjoyed the experience. I've included some pictures of the events below. The link to the virtual space is here.

Touring

Photo Sharing

Games

Reflection

Overall, I think the event was a success. I think Gather.Towns was, for the most part, the best platform to host this on. I maybe wouldn't have included the photo sharing section had I known more about their share screen functionality, though. In order to share screen, the person had to share the whole screen, and so had to just look at their photo rather than seeing people's reactions and being able to interact with the others in the group. The games, however, were definitely a hit and I think they really added to the event. It certainly doesn't replace the in-person aspects, but it was nice to catch up with people and interact in a new way.