ionianStory was designed to improve emotional connections between people. More specifically, the application bases itself on improving meaning behind the relationships which connect people together as friends, family or acquaintances. These relationships are based on the shared experiences we have with others. The memories we develop based upon these experiences are what we as humans use as the building blocks for emotional connections.

The application works by inviting individuals or groups of people to build experiences in a simple graphical based user work space by sequencing together series of events based upon persons, place, activity and relative time. As experiences are developed on the individual level, others who were knowledgeable of the events or were actually in attendance have the ability to add, remove or alter the series of events which made up a particular shared experience.

It is a predisposition of the design that human interaction revolves around two activities: telling stories of past experiences or creating new ones. The design bases its focus on the activity of story telling as a means of human expression and tool used to strengthen emotional connections between individuals. Stories even give us the ability to be more creative in our own lives via a greater understanding of human expression, in turn potentially creating more meaningful experiences in our respective futures.

The hope for this application is not to provide an additional means of interaction with other individuals in an online setting, but rather quite the opposite. ionianStory was developed to place its full emphasis on the importance of the experiences which join together two or more people. By providing an organized, interconnected online setting for users to recall, share and develop components of their past experiences we have the ability to strengthen face-to-face interactions through better retellings of stories themselves.