Tele

Tele is a mobile app designed to enhance cultural learning and connection through exploring other users' forms of creative expression and posting one’s own.

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Briefly describe your project in relation to the challenge prompt.

Amidst an ongoing era of social inequality, cultural literacy has become an increasingly important skill. Our mobile app, Tele, seeks to pave the road towards greater social awareness by encouraging cultural interconnection and understanding. By emphasizing personal expression, users can share their creativity in a multimedia format. Tele supports real-time content creation and discovery of other people’s artifacts, which enables users to learn about a variety of cultures while being able to provide their own contribution to a global community. With an interactive map as the centerpiece of the app, users can select any location in the world and view creative artifacts from users of that region. Users can explore and engage with cultures from all around the world in an immersive way. Through our user research, we discovered that cultural humility provides “a greater understanding of cultures that are different from [one’s] own and helps [one] recognize each [person’s] unique cultural experiences.” By providing a platform for sharing diverse perspectives, Tele strives to bridge cultural gaps and promote a better understanding of the world’s tapestry of traditions and experiences. Tele not only enhances cultural literacy, but also encourages global citizenship, making it an essential tool for today’s interconnected world.

Source: Hook, J.N. "Cultural humility: Measuring openness to culturally diverse clients". 2013. APA PsychNet (link)

Describe your main design decisions and how they contribute to your product.

Our main design decisions center around user interaction, educational content, and usability, which are crucial to successfully promoting cultural interconnection and literacy. A key feature of Tele is the “I Learned” feature, where users can save profiles they found particularly engaging by responding to a prompt describing what they learned. These responses are stored in a user’s personal knowledge base that they can reference at any time. By presenting content consumption in an educational format, Tele sets users on the path towards cultural competency, overcoming barriers to cross-cultural understanding and building a stronger confidence in one’s own identity. Additionally, we wanted to integrate AI recommendation technology into our application to better the user experience. The global map highlights and recommends users with similar tags or personal experiences that align with a user’s preferences indicated at registration. Every time a user creates media for their profile, the AI algorithm defects its contents and strengthens the model that is used for recommendation. Users are exposed to related but different cultures that encourage cultivating cultural humility thus fostering human authenticity of exploration, oral tradition, and empathy. We also wanted to provide a safeguard against issues with authenticity, which we implemented with our unique camera functionality. By prohibiting the upload of photos and videos from the user, Tele protects user authenticity, requiring the capture of media in real time and subsequently defending artists from AI generations and fake users. This ensures that all content posted on Tele is truly genuine, creating a safe environment for reliable content consumption and learning. With features thoroughly designed and catered to the user, Tele is a platform for artistic expression and cultural interconnection, taking society one step closer to universal empathy.

Sources:

Plugins used:

  • User Profile - Used to create user profile photos within the app
  • Unsplash - Used to fill the photos posted by users within the app
  • iconify - Used to get icons for the app's UI
  • Material Design Icons - Used to get icons for the app's UI
  • Google Maps map maker - Used to get map for background of the discover part of app
  • NB Vector Map - used to make vector map for the 'I learned" tracking
  • Squiggly - Used to get squiggles for the start page

Built With

  • figma
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