ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here
Last week we had a bit of time in the studio, and as invariably happens in studio cultures, we used the downtime to do some creative housecleaning; we closed a pair of internal projects we’d undertook a few months back with the University of Western Washington.
As an organization that earns its keep by means of a point of view, TEAGUE thrives by maintaining an informed understanding of what is happening in the various sectors that impact our clients’ businesses. Program work is of course one mechanism for this—the right client mix acts as a sort of index fund, allowing the organization to organically track the market place in ways that fit neatly into the rhythm of the company’s primary business model: fee for service. Countervailing this is yet another mechanism—internal programs, self-directed efforts that are vital in expanding our knowledge and broadcasting what we think is important in the world. As investigations that telegraph beyond the immediate marketplace and aim for a target somewhere north of the zeitgeist, internal programs are an important albeit tricky undertaking. They bubble up, take form, linger, fade, and in some cases, blossom. The one bankable thing about them is how stubbornly fragile they are –in this regard they mirror the creative process itself. Planning internal efforts is more an exercise in framing than prescribing; you can set up the conditions but what makes them bloom is a serendipitous combination of momentum, excitement, topicality, and individual drive. What’s more, even when all of those factors coalesce, the spark that sets them in motion remains so delicate that without organizational commitment and the dogged persistence of a few—they seldom move past conversation.
The projects we recently completed with the students at Western bear this stubborn truth out. Building off the ‘community’ theme that informed TEAGUE’s Chairmanship of the IDSA conference last fall, we challenged the students to explore the territory of collaborative consumption; an economic model that replaces traditional ideas of ownership with access to goods and services. Embarking from a simple brief: ‘to create a product-service offering that gets better the more people use it,’ the students meandered, backtracked but ultimately charged headlong into an investigation that resulted in two proposals—Vote+ and Local Kitchen.
The results genuinely exceeded our expectations.
A core conceit of collaborative consumption is the belief that access to goods and services frequently trumps the benefits of ownership. What makes this proposition work is the type of tightly choreographed access that communication technologies enable. As a result ‘social’ is an implicit part of collaborative consumption. The propositions the students arrived at examine this promise in two equally compelling, but ultimately very different ways.
Vote+ revisits the idea of democracy as a social experiment and ups the ante by framing voter participation as a product-service proposition. If you want the product of equal representation that democracy proposes, you’ve got to participate in the functionalservice of voting. Recognizing the motivating power of self-interest, Vote+ uses local issues to ladder individuals into broader participation in the electoral process. What’s more, by artfully navigating four co-dependent factors (self interest, convenience, security and experience) Vote+ lays out a compelling model of what 21st century democracy could look like. One where social media, Facebook-style ledger boards and choice architecture combine into a user experience that breathes new life into our admirable but admittedly dusty democratic process, resulting in an experience that’s smart, well-branded and ultimately way more engaging than the present one.
Local Kitchen, the second proposal tackles a completely different, but equality thorny social problem: healthy eating. Recognizing that healthy eating is the result of several factors, income, education and access to quality produce—Local Kitchen strives to reduce many of these barriers by combining social media, customer loyalty programs, and edutainment trends. Located in participating grocery stores, Local Kitchen provides users a fully stocked kitchen space that comes staffed with knowledgeable staff and all the supporting services one needs to prepare any meal suggested by the service. Participation begins online where users can review menu options by cost or meal type. Once a dish is selected, cost can be reduced by inviting others to join your meal or by joining other groups. On the day of their booking users proceed to participating grocery stores, purchase the necessary ingredients and check into the Local Kitchen. When preparation is complete users can choose to eat on site or box it up and take it home. By orchestrating needs and wants across retailers and consumers Local Kitchen achieves three objectives: it lowers per plate costs, it imparts knowledge, and it strengthens community. When compared to the fast food chains and other options that comprise most Americans food options, Local Kitchen offers a noteworthy vision for how we might tackle issues of community and individual health in an age of increasingly challenged resources.
Vote+ and Local Kitchen offer hypothetical solutions to complex social challenges, in each case the solutions were arrived at by playing need against choice. While the brief we presented the students anticipated a topical ‘landing’ for the effort, the results were never assumed. When the course work concluded in April the TEAGUE team chose to continue working with the students in an effort to help them better realize the full potential of their ideas. As one might imagine, this quickly became a test of resolve, but we kept at it for two reasons. The first reason was simple, we had promised the students we would help them see the work to conclusion and assist them in pushing the results out into the blogosphere. The second gets back to the value internal projects provide to extend our understanding of a given domain. In so far as collaborative consumption reconciles self-interest with collective needs, it offers a powerful model for what one might call ‘practical sustainability’; a model that maintains the free-will of consumerism while simultaneously organizing individual actions into an ecosystem of hyper resource management that satisfies the greater good.
Access over ownership is a dynamic we currently don’t get to explore in all of our client work, but with its implicit overtones of service-design I’m fairly confident that collaborative consumption has something to teach all of TEAGUE about the future direction of our offering. Choice architecture, brand experience, and behavioral economics – they all reside within collaborative consumption. When viewed in this light, the opportunity to mentor the students through these problems, while on the surface of it an act of goodwill—is in truth really just as much an investment in ourselves. This double purpose is an inherent component of internal efforts, it’s great when they hit their mark and generate traction in the blogosphere but we should never loose sight of the fact that their real value is the role they play in keeping creative teams sharp. Preparing creative cultures, even if indirectly, for the project brief of tomorrow.
