Dam Data & Dates
Human-centered dating experiment organized around shared data, not swipe chrome.
Problem
Most dating apps compress a person into a stack of photos to swipe through as quickly as possible. Almost none of the interaction design is about what you actually choose to disclose about yourself, or when - it's optimized for volume, not for the moment where two people's stated preferences actually meet.
System design & approach
"Be My Cupid" / DAM turns your stated preferences into three fictional dating profiles each session - a close match, a moderate stretch, and an exploratory pick - then uses your swipe feedback to refine the next round. It's built around intentional disclosure and shared data instead of endless swipe chrome: what someone reveals about their preferences, when, and how that shapes the match they see next. Preferences stay in the browser, and Gemini generates the three profiles fresh each session - no real-person database.
Challenges
Making a swipe interface feel intentional instead of disposable runs against the grain of the genre - the whole reason swiping works elsewhere is that it removes friction, and removing friction is exactly what this project needed to push back on without becoming a chore to use. There was also a real privacy constraint underneath the fun one: generating believable, useful candidate profiles without ever touching a database of real people.
My role
I designed the interaction model for disclosure timing and helped carry the project from studio research into a working, deployed prototype.
Retrospective
Studio research turned into a working, publicly deployed prototype that generates a new set of candidates every session rather than pulling from a fixed dataset.
Treating disclosure timing as a deliberate interaction-design decision instead of an implementation detail, and building an AI-driven experience where the content itself is generated fresh per session instead of fetched from a static dataset.
- Gemini