Maria Sedova Kan

Product Design

We will figure it out

Maria has lived in four countries. The people she has been closest to are scattered across time zones, friendships maintained over FaceTime, reunions that require flights.

At some point she started noticing something in herself. The cap pulled low. The phone raised at exactly the right moment. The instinct to drift toward the wall when someone approaches on a narrow street. She had become very good at not being seen, and she began to wonder whether that was a response to loneliness, or a cause of it.

It turned out she wasn't the only one.

Through research into existing social practices and urban behaviour, and through a series of her own public interventions testing how strangers interact in shared spaces, Maria found the same pattern repeated: people behave in ways that make connection harder to find. Not out of indifference. Out of something closer to self-protection.

We'll Figure It Out is her graduation project — and her answer to that pattern.

A series of obstacles are placed in the narrow streets of Groningen. They are fitted with semi-transparent fabric — enough to sense a presence on the other side. There is no automatic way through. Passing requires strangers to stop, look up, and solve a small problem together.

Just a temporary community moment of unavoidable, accidental collaboration,  the kind that used to happen naturally, before everyone learned to look away.

Maria isn't trying to fix loneliness. She knows it's more complicated than that. But she believes that a temporary sense of community , the kind that comes from a shared obstacle, a small laugh, an awkward "after you" is still worth something. Maybe even enough to make someone look up tomorrow too.

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