Projected Personalities
28th July 2026
The idea behind Projected Personalities
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic we became aware that people all over the world were talking more and more about loneliness. For example, the British politician Jo Cox established a Commission on Loneliness as far back as 2016, and the UK appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic, when we were forced to isolate ourselves from each other, just seems to have exasperated an already troublesome issue.
We wondered if there was a way we could use technology to bring people together - to electronically project a person's personality into a space to see if it would naturally connect with another person in that space - to make that initial contact potentially less awkward with less friction. But there are many problems associated with this idea.
What magic makes people want to connect? How do you identify, classify and then use feelings of attraction between people? There are already thousands of gadgets, apps and websites that purport to do some of this - yet the whole process is still hit and miss, and to be honest probably not really understood at all.[1]
So we decided not to do the dumb thing and just build something that kind of, might have, sort of worked a bit. We wanted to try and better understand the whole connectedness-loneliness issue so that if there was anything that could be built, we would at least have an idea as to why it might work.
Our research lead us to develop the connectedness journey, a process you can follow which we hope will lead people to create more and better connections in their lives - real connections, not social media friends which are usually anything but.
We've released a first version of the connectedness journey which is freely available for people to try, and if you do we would love your feedback on how well it worked for you. Just press on the button below to get started.
[1] For an in-depth look at the on-line dating industry try and find a copy of Love in the Time of Algorithms. Very interesting book - just be afraid.