Airea

I have summarised my research into 3 main insights: Soft Loneliness, Parasitic Proxies, and Broken Communities.

Insight 1: Soft Loneliness

• Admitting to being lonely, even to oneself, is incredibly difficult. There is a large amount of people that are suffering from (what I’ve dubbed as) Soft Loneliness. These are people that are suffering the negative effects of inadequate socialisation, but do not describe themselves as lonely. Those suffering from Soft Loneliness would like to be more social, but feel that their situation is neither unique nor deserving of special attention – it is simply part of being an adult. Consequently, they do not seek help, nor do they make particular effort to engage with the services and activities around them.

• The reality is that making new friends becomes increasingly difficult as you get older, very difficult, especially for those without kids. This is largely due to the strong stigma around actively trying to meet new people for friendships.

Insight 2: Parasitic Proxies

Parasitic proxies are activities, products or services that give us the illusion of socialisation. These can be social media and the parasocial relationships it encourages, or modern entertainment with its endless stream of content. They satiate our desire for socialisation without nourishing our wellbeing.

Insight 3: Broken Communities

71% of respondents say that the main reason they do not engage with activities within their neighbourhood is that they do not know what is going on or how to get involved. At the same time, local businesses and community activities are having to use social media ads to reach potential customers/users, bringing in the need for new skills and funds.

Introducing airea

Airea is your personalised directory of local happenings. From new business openings, special discounts for locals, community activities and volunteering opportunities, there is now a 21^st century way to engage with your local community.

Features:

For citizens

• Everything going on in your local neighbourhood in one convenient place.
• Personalised view shows you only the events you’re most likely to engage with.

For local businesses

• A cost-effective way to reach those that are most likely to be repeat customers.
• Simple to use interface that doesn’t require special social media skills.

Three Stage User Journey

1. Set Up

The set up phase is where users are onboarded, but it is much more than simply account creation. The goals at the end of this phase are to:

• Help users discover more about their socialisation habits through our Social Type test.
• Reduce FOMO and choice overload by curating their local sphere to the activities they are most likely to want to engage in.
• Go through a secure identity check of all our onboarded users.

2. Explore

Once the user has completed their set up, they are brought to their own personalised directory of the activities and events going on around them. Community events and business activities can be added by local businesses, councils, active users and local charities, all following an event approval done by the Airea team.

Examples are:

• Local businesses can offer free or Groupon-style discounts for the services or special activities.
• Local charities can offer volunteering opportunities and collection days.
• Citizens can organise a sports pick up game, or other social activities and gatherings.

3. Attendance

Once it is time for the activity the user has signed up for, they will check-in to the activity by using the Airea QR code or NFC tag, indicating that they have arrived. This allows the organiser to keep track of those that have attended, as well as provide Airea with important data on connections made. Once the activity is over, users can rate their experience and leave a review.

The Long Term

For preventative care to be truly adopted, it needs attribution models – a positive health benefit and/or cost saving needs to be attributed to an action in order to justify investment. We already have basic attribution methods for based on the language (ie. Metrics) of physical health: Step count, body fat %, VO2 max etc. However, we still lack a common language for social health. By leveraging qualitative assessments and quantitative date, Airea is the spearhead in establishing an attribution model that will allow public and private health providers the underlying metrics on which to make informed investment decisions.