20 Day Stranger

For the next twenty days, you will be paired with another human, somewhere on the earth.

Together, you’ll discover the unique and mundane story of each other’s daily lives. Through the app, you’ll see the small human details of life. Waking up. Eating. Working. Traveling. Heading Home. Sleeping. Living.

You’ll both be anonymous -- youll never know who your stranger is and they won’t know who you are, but you will learn just enough to begin to imagine each other’s lives. And perhaps, more broadly, the lives of strangers everywhere.

Our hope is to help build a connection between the two of you, powered by the data you create each day with your phone, and humanized by your empathy and imagination.

The 20 Day Stranger project was conceptualized by Playful Systems from the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, and brought to life by Paper & Equator, Siberia, and a number of individual contributors.

This is an academic project; there are no commercial interests for this work, and no data will be collected, archived or sold.

While weve made an effort to minimize the impact, please note that continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.