Our mobile application, Flock, is a sociotechnical system designed to increase social interaction amongst friends. Flock creates a way to make one’s availability transparent for casual, one-on-one hangouts with friends. For example, if a user was free for lunch at noon on Thursday but didn’t want to text each of their friends individually to see if anyone would like to join, they could create an “Event” on the app, allow the first friend interested in going to “claim” the event, and it would be scheduled.

With this project, we aimed to increase social translucence in a specific context. The need we aimed to address can be summarised as: 

“I sometimes assume my friends are busy, and vice versa. How can I make it so my friends know I’m actively free to do something at a certain time, and how can I know for them?”

We recognised that there is some opacity around knowing when someone is busy versus actively looking to socialise. We thus posited that this opt-in system could leverage two-way buy-in to make desirable hangouts possible when they weren’t previously. Through channels like text messaging, it takes manual, on-by-one checking to see whether friends are available for these events, and creating a group chat with all friends can prove to be awkward or ineffective due to social loafing (some people respond so others stay quiet, thinking the event will have already filled up or someone else is doing the responding for them), or feel uncomfortable being in the same group as strangers.

We used React Native for the frontend and Supabase for the backend. Core functionalities of the app include: creating events, posting events on friends’ feeds, editing/deleting your events, joining someone’s event, editing your own profile, adding friends, notifications page with all information about friends joining your events & friend requests, authentication (incl. signing in with Apple).