Overview
What does it take to get a group of strangers to open up?
DisCourse is a curated dinner series that transforms a meal between strangers into an experiment in how we gather, listen, and be in conversation with one another.
Hosted in “The GUT” – an underground archive of the future – and led by a whimsical facilitator, the experience immerses guests in an alternate universe filled with rituals and rules, where technologies actually support meaningful connection, not just divide and distract.
Taking inspiration from immersive theatre, DisCourse is an unconventional invitation to the MIT community to reexamine their relationship to socializing, and set the stage for a collective future grounded in listening, sharing, and mutual understanding.
Design Elements
- Mysterious invites that strongly entice the curious to join and actively participate.
- Immersive worldbuilding in a fictional human archive at the brink of collapse
- Theatrical, semi-structured facilitation and guided rituals help guests hold space for deeper conversations
- A simple technological system for co-creating a spatial artifact which represent and prompt personal experience sharing
Participant Feedback
“Something special about this place that we’ve all come to is just being able to be trusting with people that you’ve never met.”
“The power of like the right set of a new set of rules… We made a new game here but that little different world we created here, it’s like a really powerful thing.”
“I think normally in conversation there’s some presumption of non vulnerability. You almost don’t wanna be too deep in a conversation to make it like kind of weird. But it was nice being intentionally vulnerable.”
Media
