Overview

The world is getting more and more polarised. We get so sucked up in our own identity politics, we make assumptions about others' beliefs, impacting our ability to empathise with each other and focus on what we have in common.

Common Ground is an online experience where players are rewarded for building empathy and challenge stereotypes.

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Bringing design to life

Love is finding the common ground through which we can understand and maybe even love one another

Players are paired together based on their answers to questions about polarising topics, but won't know this until the end.

They are assigned a partner and then are asked to:

• Complete an icebreaker challenge together
• Answer questions about themselves - e.g. describe in 5 words what it's like to be you
• Complete another challenge requiring team work - e.g. a puzzle
• Make a decision - they're shown how they answered the polarising questions. They have the option to settle their differences over a shared reward, or walk away with nothing.

We may have differing views or backgrounds, but through listening and working together, we can still find common ground in a polarising world.

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Key Insights

• The sharp rise in polarising views has already led to partisan media strategies, increases in politically motivated violence, and even reductions in the number of people willing to marry someone with an opposing political view
• 'Pernicious polarisation' affects all parts of life; race, identity and gender, our relationship with the planet, our ability to trust what we read and watch. Research has shown that high levels of pernicious polarisation since the 1950s has a strong correlation with lower levels of democracy.
• All of this creates significantly increases costs of running countries and communities, but more importantly, builds an emotional deficit in us as humans.

Prototype

• Common Ground is built on a childhood principle of 'learning through play. Instead of presenting a point of view, it's an invitation to play; and the only way to 'win' is through collaboration.
• This means listening to different points of view than your own, creating deliberate moments to reflect on whether someone's opinion defines who they are (or not) and deciding what to do next.
• Receiving a shared reward for continuing to build a relationship, despite differences, is an opportunity to create lots of small anti-polarising interventions, leading to a larger scale change.

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Inspiration

• Conversations with Indian and Pakistan families in 1970s overcoming political differences through shared values of hard work, and shared food experiences
• Polarising world events - Brexit, rise of the hard right and left, Trump's America, murder of Jo Cox MP, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Israel-Palestine conflict
• Chat roulette
• Daryl Davis - 'Why I as a black man attend KKK rallies'
• Heineken's 'Worlds Apart' campaign

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Next Steps / Key Questions

• Taking part requires having some degree of an open mind - what's the best way to pique someone's initial interest?
• What kind of reward or inventive would be most effective? Needs to feel proportionate
• How can we design an algorithm that matches people based on opposing views, but who are still likely to have a positive experience? It's the anti-match.com algorithm.
• Can we prototype a low-cost physical experience first, before exploring a more scalable, tech-enabled one?