Skills
UI/UX Design, Brand Development, Graphic Design, Motion Media, CAD
Team
Chase Waldman, Ellen McCanless, Aarya Mahapatra, Yael Dobos,
Timeline
5 days
Role
Prototype and Developer Lead and Information Architecturer
The Problem: Traditional networking forces people to perform socially in high-pressure, unstructured environments that are surface-level small talk with no real starting point, where a bad conversation feels like a personal failure rather than a design flaw.
Shift networking from performance to co-creation, so people leave events with real connection instead of a stack of LinkedIn requests.
The Solution: Colligo is a gamified collaboration experience for career events, networking spaces, and team-building environments. Two participants sit down, answer six strategic business questions together (Always / Occasionally / Never), and watch their answers build a company in real time — leaving with a custom business card for what they built together, not just a name and title.
Discovery
The idea came from something we'd all experienced firsthand, networking can feel performative, awkward, and transactional, and it's hard to turn into something memorable. Surface-level exchanges. "Where are you from?" "What are you looking for?" That's how networking works right now; we expect people to perform socially in high-pressure environments with no structure and no real starting point. We heard the same thing about team building, echoed directly by judges on our panel, it can feel forced and unnatural too. Both point to the same problem: nothing in these environments is designed to help people succeed, and memorable connection doesn't come from introductions, it comes from collaboration. That's what led us to transform introductions into structured co-creation, where people debate, share perspectives, and tell stories, explaining why they chose what they chose, and when they reach alignment, whether through compromise, adjustment, or shared understanding, a piece of something real takes shape in front of th
Constraints and Tradeoffs
One of the hardest things to do was bringing this idea into a physical workspace. One of the requirements of the competition is to make human connections stronger through techonology and techonology itself is really good at seperating human interactions
Design
For Colligo's design, we focused on making the experience feel calm, comforting, and low-pressure rather than another stressful, performative networking moment. We built the core interaction as a video game — turning the exchange into something playful and low-stakes makes people relax and open up more easily than a face-to-face "networking conversation" ever could. That same intention carried into the business card, the physical takeaway from every session: a soft, muted color palette (dusty blue, coral pink, and deep indigo against warm cream) with angular, ribbon-like color blocks echoing the building blocks formed during play. Each card becomes a small artifact of the company two strangers built together, with their names and shared philosophy pillars front and center
