“We lack language for describing the ache when we crave for companionate emotional connection, for that friend bond. Whether it's an ache for a single close friend or a group of friends. I gave it is ‘platonic longing.’” - Kat Vellos
Kat Vellos is a user experience designer who uses her trade to help people connect authentically.
After moving to the Bay Area 6 years ago, Kat for the first time found herself struggling to make adult friends. She felt, as she describes it, a “platonic longing,” and decided to use her skills as a user experience designer to make friendship more “user-friendly.” The result of this research is her new book We Should Get Together, which tackles the four most common challenges of adult friendship: relocation, full schedules, the demands of partnership and family, and our culture’s declining capacity for compassion and intimacy in the social age. When the pandemic caused social isolation, Kat released an addendum to her book, Connected from Afar, which offers six months of weekly connection prompts that you can use to nurture your faraway friendships.
In addition to her work designing, researching and writing, Kat is also a community builder. In her early days in San Francisco, Kat created an event called Better Than Small Talk to break through the wall of small talk and get into real, heart-pumping, mind-sparkling conversations. Kat also sparked the Bay Area Black Designers community, which is described as “Silicon Valley’s largest unofficial ERG for Black designers.” She started with five or six other local designers in her living room and now has over 500 members providing professional development and community for Black designers, in particular those who know how isolating it can be the only Black designer in a company or design team.
On the podcast, we talk with Kat about cultivating deep friendships in a sea of busy, mobile people and sparking community in otherwise isolating situations.
👋🏻Say hi to Kat and grab a copy of her books here.
📄See the full transcript
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