We're All Dating, All the Time: Lakshmi Rengarajan, BayCHI Program
Channel: BayCHI, San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
Date: 2023-01-23

October 13, 2015
https://baychi.org/calendar/20151013/
Lakshmi is the Director of Event Design at Match. She designs and hosts Match events to encourage interaction. Early in her career, Lakshmi reluctantly referred to herself as a designer. Designers, she thought, knew how to make beautiful graphics and went mad over uneven text. Now, she thinks of a “designer” as someone who notices things other people don’t, someone who is keenly aware of and feels a call to improve subtleties that the rest of the world pass by unaffectedly.

Lakshmi found her passion for designing spaces that foster interactions while working bartender gigs. She found a natural interest in defining conversation techniques and hypothesizing how environmental factors affect connections and chemistry. Now, Lakshmi hosts structured dating events crafted around design challenges. She investigates challenges such as a user need or a pinch point in the dating process, and designs the event to provide a solution to the challenge. For example, dating across Chicago’s subway lines can feel like a long-distance relationship, so Lakshmi created an exclusive event for people who live on the Brown and Red line. Name tags displayed people’s subway stops, which served as a great conversation topic, since most people feel pride for their neighborhoods.

To delay early judgment, she created an event called “ME so far,” designed for dimensionality and gradual attraction. Ten (10) people volunteered to give a 5-minute presentation to a group of 50 listeners, followed by a 90-minute happy hour. Presenters spoke from a prompt to reveal themselves, rather than pitch themselves. They were discouraged from speaking of anything shown in their online dating profile. The idea came from a tendency to pitch oneself on a first date, when ultimately, showing reveals more meaningful information than telling.

To encourage showing, she suggests exchanging credit card statements, rather than asking what each other does for fun. She suggests sharing browser history, rather than asking about interests. While these activities might make some people uncomfortable, the challenge of getting people to show rather than tell can be accomplished by slightly tweaking typical dating questions to break down the pitch and expose more meaningful information. A great question begs for a story, not an answer. A few examples of her carefully crafted questions are below.

Rather than: What do you do for work?
Ask: When have you felt really connected to your work?
Why: Keeps it positive, begs a story, is more relatable than trading titles.

Rather than: What is your family like? Are you close?
Ask: What was one really great thing about your upbringing?
Why: Keeps it positive, begs a story, steers away from limiting response to “family” which isn’t necessarily defined the same way by everyone, avoids superlatives, offers constraints by requesting “one great thing” rather than something more open-ended.

Rather than: What kind of music do you like?
Ask: What is a song or artist that shaped your taste in music?
Why: Begs a story, offers an opportunity to connect and reminisce.

Lakshmi limits events to 75 people, and designs them in direct response to a dating challenge. Through consideration of the needs of the dating community, Match event designers create safe environments and openness activities that support meaningful interactions between willing participants.