CMU Out Loud
CMU Out Loud is a live outdoor experience that gives students space to feel heard and find common ground through shared messages.
Creating Space for Campus Conversations
The experience is made up of five physical message boards placed together in a shared campus courtyard. Each board invited students to respond to a different prompt, ranging from personal messages to campus opinions.
How did we get here?
“Study after study tells us we are becoming lonelier, more isolated. Connections through a screen cannot replace time spent together. We believe in experiences unique enough that you want to discuss them with whoever is standing close by. Spaces that are just strange enough that you will greet them with ‘Hello, what the heck is this?’”
We were tasked with designing an experience that people on the CMU campus would encounter live, outside, through joy and discovery.
Learning how strangers connect
As CMU students ourselves, we began by brainstorming the interests, routines, and motivations that might make students willing to interact with someone unfamiliar. At the center of the whiteboard, we wrote: “How do we get strangers to actually interact?” Our ideas fell into four areas:
Discovery
Familiar interactions
Reward or exchange
Low-stakes participation
Beginning with co-design
To understand what students are naturally curious about in one another, we ran a co-design session with three pairs who did not previously know each other. Each pair got a different conversation structure: a free-flowing chat, one supported by broad topic cards, and one with a shared goal of discovering three things about the other person.
Participants looked for connection through mutual friends, shared communities, majors, and reasons for being in the same place. Topic cards helped only in moderation, and the pair working toward a shared goal sustained the longest conversation. Our takeaway: strangers didn't need more topics: they needed one approachable clue that revealed a shared experience and gave them a reason to keep engaging.
Early explorations
We began with quick sketches and bodystorming, exploring how physical interaction, movement, and sound might spark curiosity between strangers in a shared space.
Exploring physical messages
From there, we explored physical ways for students to exchange messages, leaving notes in a shared space that others could read and respond to in public.
Situating the experience
Fabricating several durable, human-scale cubes proved too expensive, so we looked at what the campus already provided. By using existing tables as the base, we only needed to build lightweight, slanted writing surfaces to sit on top. A student could stop, read a message, recognize something familiar, and add a response.
Arranging the experience
We studied different orientations for the slanted boards: their visibility from approaching paths, the direction students would face while writing, and whether the boards should cluster or spread out. We treated the surrounding campus as part of the experience rather than just a location for it.
We placed the boards in a circle with the writing surfaces facing outward. Students could discover them from any direction and participate without entering an enclosed space or facing a crowd, while being drawn to walk around and read more of what others had written.
Designing for continued participation
The installation changes as people use it. We designed the structure and prompts, but students create the content and decide which conversations grow. The result isn't a finished display. It's a temporary record of what people on campus were noticing, wondering, and appreciating at that moment.
Branding the experience
We went through four visual directions before landing on the name CMU Out Loud, a playful tone that helped students feel they'd been given a voice. The identity uses orange and white: orange to attract attention without the urgency of red, and white borders to create breathing room and keep focus on the handwritten responses.
We printed signage to place around the area, drawing people in toward the boards.
Building the boards
Each campus table measured 28 by 28 inches, so we matched that footprint exactly, letting each board feel like an extension of the table. Plywood was too expensive to produce at scale, so we used cardboard (affordable, lightweight, and easy to transport), constructing each stand as a wedge with a slanted writing surface and laser-cut finger joints for stable assembly.
We also explored how to hold the marker. A protruding, half-rounded holder made it obvious and easy to grab, while a slit integrated into the base looked cleaner: a trade-off between visual simplicity and intuitive use.
Final boards
Reflections
When to use technology?
Our process moved through responsive objects, shared paths, music exchange, puzzle pieces, magnetic blocks, QR codes, a projection, and finally a set of physical writing boards. Each experiment helped us separate what was technologically interesting from what actually served our purpose. Technology can create feedback and spectacle, but it doesn't automatically create a meaningful exchange.
There was something more human about the analog experience. Students crossing campus could look up from their screens, pause in front of a large board, and discover what others were thinking, the changing handwriting its own form of feedback, shaped by many individual voices.
Working together
I collaborated with Jay throughout, and we often approached the work from completely different perspectives. I learned that collaboration is rarely as simple as dividing the work in half. Before we could move forward, we had to build a shared understanding of what we were making and why. Those conversations forced us to articulate ideas that might otherwise have stayed intuitive.
The final outcome was not something either of us would have made alone. It emerged from negotiating differences and finding common ground, much like the kind of connection we hoped CMU Out Loud would create.
