On a purely personal note, I want to mention the perspective shift that my team experienced upon hearing about the pressures that international students face during their time abroad. Conventional wisdom presents such experiences as pure, romantic adventure, but there can be a real sense of displacement and loneliness for students away from home. Even more surprising, and perhaps counterintuitive, is the idea of “reverse displacement”, which is another wave of loneliness and discomfort that occurs after returning home.
When this was explained to us, something really clicked for me. Many years ago, a Danish student came to my small high school for a year. Her many friends, myself included, were all surprised when she committed suicide very soon after returning home at year’s end. No one knew that she’d been struggling.
This project took on quite a personal meaning for me, and shows how human, and humanizing, technology can be.