relational

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Relational Lab

June 2019 - September 2023

Roles

Co-founder

Designer - Relational, Org & Product

Facilitator

A relational tech R&D lab exploring how to craft genuine community in digital spaces.

Overview

I co-founded and ran an experiential research lab exploring how people learn and create software together. I designed and facilitated the core applied-learning methodology. The modality was reflective and highly collaborative.

Through intimate group sessions and playful experimentation, we worked with emerging technologies like blockchain and AI. This process revealed powerful methodologies for collective creation—intentionally designed containers and practices that enabled teams to explore, innovate, and ship products together effectively.

At the heart of our work lay a profound question:

How can we design digital spaces that foster genuine human connection?

The practices and environments we cultivated laid groundwork for bringing authentic relationships into both the software development process and the products themselves, creating technology that truly serves human connection.

“I'd recommend working with Kristen (& Dave) when you need to unlock the magic in your project or company through the craft of of healthy culture.”

-Jordan

Stack

Pretty much anything went with Relational. We embraced a hacker mentality, while defaulting to open-source & peer-to-peer when possible to allow others to tinker with our explorations and take a peek-under-the hood of our artifacts.

Co-conspirators

Although I played a leadership role, Relational Labs was only possible with the adventurous, experimental, and playful spirit of my collaborators

Dave Gorum (co-founder)

Jon Borichevskiy

CJ Pais

Tony Llongueras

Jordan McCommons

Shahruz

Select Project Highlights

Buzzard

Collaborative writing & software building

I designed writing prompts and relational games to bring friends together in early pandemic times. This is the seed from which Relational grew. 🌱

Exquisite Land

Collaborative software building &

Emergent digital gathering experience

I designed the community and choreography of game play in Exquisite Land, a completely emergent pixel art drawing game built on the Polygon blockchain.

To launch the experience, team member CJ Pais led the build of the Exquisite Graphics engine, an open-source on-chain graphics editor. Subsequetly, Exquisite Graphics now powers several on-chain art projects and businesses

Recognized by Nylon mag as one of 2021’s best NFT projects, Exquisite Land was much celebrated by the web3 community.

Game play featured a play-it-forward mentality as opposed to a pay-to-play approach. The game was free to play during a bull run and inspired a multi-year practice of riffing on daily gm tidings in a Discord community (that continues to this day)!

“Kristen (& Dave) were indispensable in crafting a consistent theme and narrative around the Exquisite Land experience, designing the social choreography of players and audience across multiple platforms, holding the space for a writer's room to respond to developments, and generally bringing much character & creativity from start to finish.”

-JonBo

Gathern

Social gatherings x AI Notetaker

I designed the premise around Gathern based on the Lab’s typical style of convening: deeper digital connection through small-group dialogue.

Gathern was a designed to find the magic in every day conversation, gain new perspective from others, and make friends. It was based on a cafe or tavern concept where people would come together around a piece of media (a blog post, a video, a podcast episode) and talk about the impact it had on them.

It’s a simple pattern, and when recorded with a little AI magic using the “insight button” which could be pressed at any time during conversation by any participant, we experimented with methods for conversation callback and curatorial support.

Org Structure & Practices

Part startup, part school, Relational operated in a grey area. We were entirely self-funded, which gave us a high degree of agency—perfect for self-direction, not ideal for sustainability.

Through the project I cultivated many effective relational practices for building collaborative, co-creative software in a highly collaborative, co-creative manner.

Through Relational I learned

How you make directly influences what you make.

This lesson has stuck with me, influencing my work in profound ways.

Start-up Mindset

Much like a startup, we were constantly pivoting and finding new technical areas to explore from the Relational lens. This required a great amount of reflection and ongoing tracking of the energy, interest, and efforts within the lab

Relational Co-Creation Methods

The Relational methodologies for building software make-up a cross-disciplinary toolkit of co-creation. I’m still exploring how these practices can be shared more broadly, currently working with them in my community consulting practice.

Media

One cultural pattern that really took root was recording and open-sourcing our collaboration. Majority of our collaborative sessions are captured and stored on YouTube to share with other creative relational software builders.

We also curated some interesting newsletters covering the work we were doing and the information we were consuming.

Our process included a collaborative publishing pipeline using Discord, and also led to the concept work of OurShip: A Game of Collaborative Exploration.

🫶