Designing Community

Indeed, social media are very convenient for everyone, we can get a person's information in a minute. But sometimes it makes me think how shallow the relationship can be when everything is so easy to get, people don't even try to learn others anymore. 

Sometimes I just missing the time people using the paper for thier mail, the waiting, the reading, the thinking how to respond aproperate and write back, it seems the letter have hope and my emotion in it. I think everything is so quick and so clear, social media ruine all the romance in every single relationship.

  Recently I watched a movie called: Connected. The main sentence was the how people are connected better than ever and how emotionally distant we became in the century more than ever. 

  Watch a 30 mins of a video and become a social media activist. That sums what happened in Kony2012, the video reached 70 million of people and just a few showed up in real world to put some posters on the street. 

  Are we still asocial? All those apps, social media tools are invented for us to communicate faster, better, stronger. But most of the cases, people check it just to see "how many likes I have?", or "Is my tweet got retweeted?", "My crush just added me as friend on Facebook".

   Being a social activist became a show off in social media. If you share, like, post it; you feel like you belong to that social community. How users can realize physical participation matters more? How innovators can make it sexy again? How can we shift from "Ignorance is bliss" to "You are your own hero"? 

   It's because of we become consumers of causes, political movements, debates, wars in the world, social problems like hunger, racism and so on. We are waiting for a hero to come and fix it: That's what Spider Man, Batman or any science fiction movies taught us. The problem is shown like so hard to be figured out, none feels like solving it without a major help or a hero (a smart one, sometimes with super powers). 

I thought that the “Co-Creation: The Real Social Media Revolution” and the “Meet the Hero Designer Who Publicly Shamed Showtime for Asking Him to Work for Free” to be two very interesting articles. The Co-Creation article spoke of the success Burberry has had in the way they use social media to connect internal teams and customers. They allow everyone to participate in a variety of ways and at different scales both online and offline. For Burberry, they allowed everyone to feel included and benefit greatly.

Showtime is another story. I believe they were attempting to create a feeling of co-creation through a contest for designers but it really isn’t co-creation at all and Dan Cassaro totally called them out on it. It made contestants feel used and were being asked to provide work for very little in return.

I believe the main difference between the Burberry case and Showtime case is that Burberry made it useful and inclusive of internal and external individuals. They created a mutually beneficial system. Showtime made themselves totally separate from the users and were taking a lot more than they were giving. It really was not co-creation at all. Showtime and other companies that use this strategy should take from cues from Burberry so that the design industry doesn’t become the music industry where content is just expected for free.

The power of social media has always impressed me, but until I saw the chart detailing the viral videos that reached 70 million views most quickly in the keynote by Henry Jenkins, I hadn't fully realized the true power of social media. Kony 2012 reached 70 million in 4 days, while some of the most famous youtube videos like David After Dentist and Charlie Bit My Finger took hundreds of days to reach 70 million. The article goes onto state that, "you could add together the top box office from Hollywood and the most popular TV series at the time, and you don't get to 70 million." Wow! Social media has power, and more specifically, a viral video has power. We live in a participatory culture. Everyone wants to consume, contribute, and/or share content. The internet allows people from all over the world to come in contact with the same content 24/7, which makes it easier and more accessible for viewers/users than viewing the latest Hollywood film or TV series. What's interesting to note though, is that you can't make something go viral or become internet famous no matter how much time and money you put into it. There's no magic formula. The original Kony 2012 video received 70 million views in 4 days while the follow up video has been watched 2 million times. 2 million is still a huge success but seems super tiny compared to the original video views. Invisible Children were hoping for half a million views, so both videos surpassed their original intention. Social media has power, and people vote on what they want to see more of through their views and interactions with the content. It will be interesting to see if brands/organizations/ad agencies/etc can unlock the secret recipe of making viral videos time and time again.

“All of us are makers. We're born makers. We have this ability to make things, to grasp things with our hands. We use words like "grasp" metaphorically to also think about understanding things. We don't just live, but we make. We create things.” - Dale Dougherty, founder of Make Magazine

Inspired by the Maker Faire, held in New York few weeks ago. Everyone enjoyed the event. There were exhibition and also DIY classes. I love the spirit of these makers, who do cool stuff with their own hands. Makers have created their own market systems, maker movement has been growing creative and innovative.

“The real revolution here is not in the creation of the technology, but the democratization of the technology. It’s when you basically give it to a huge expanded group of people who come up with new applications, and you harness the ideas and the creativity and the energy of everybody. That’s what really makes a revolution… What we’re seeing here with the third industrial revolution is the combination of the two (technology and manufacturing). It’s the computer meets manufacturing, and it’s at everybody’s desktop.” - Chris Anderson, chief editor of Wired Magazine

From Chris Anderson’s recently published book "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution” He address with inspirational examples and show that maker movement is going to lead the new industrial revolution. It is so true that manufacturing is getting easier through our laptops and 3D printers. 

As the technologies developed, digital tools innovated, we are now all makers. We are no longer relying on production or marketing companies. All of us can develop new products and services by our own and it is so excited to see how this movement could shift the industry.

From related articles from this weekend, I understand that co-creation is a superior strategy that makes participants have more achievements and better results. This strategy made me recalled my memory in 5% Design Action. 5% Design Action is a group conducts some workshops to curate any social issues in Taiwan. Take me for example, I joined sustainable agricultural development program. In the beginning, 5% group and related organizations just brief dilemma from current surroundings such as labor and capital shortage. After that, 5% assigned a couch to each team. Basically, our couch minimized his influence to members. He always conducted two missions: one was that he assembles members to join meeting. Second was keeping the project progress was on schedule. Therefore, we could discover almost possibility without any limitation. Finally, we leveraged all ideas we have and execute it properly. In the end, our team designed a foot cart and related products to be a marketing strategy for local preserved fruits merchant- Ogriaz.

  Talk about negative experience about co-creation. Once, I saw a public policy workshop launched by local company. I was really angry when I saw the information on signed up webpage. It showed that designers should pay 130USD for entry and the workshop held on weekdays. But, the civil servants didn’t pay any penny and they could get two deferred holidays. A workshop assembled everybody to build better policy because stupid civil servants haven’t done their job well. Civil servants was free, designers had to pay. That’s so ridiculous. Although, the organizer canceled the fee for designers few days after, I had no willing to join the workshop anymore. Moreover, due to the incident, the results from the workshop were valued mediocre. To sum up, before launching any co-creation workshop, we should make a stakeholder map to make sure anyone in whole process in relax and comfortable atmosphere especially competitive relation between these characters.

Its crazy to conceptualize that there is a community of people critiquing, on a large scale, the future prospect of products for the human community and that there is actually a company with the resources to create them. Its really a beautiful notion that hair brained unnoticed inventions that you mention to your friends or family, usually forgotten, now have the potential to hit the marketplace someday.

All of this is possible because of the power of online communities.

Behind this is the creative will for people to make changes to the problems they see from an entirely user perspective. This in itself is a radical notion, where instead of a company with a board room of “professionals” dictate what the consumer “should want,” the consumer really tells the world what they need (and sometimes actually makes it happen). Quirky, the company facilitating this community, runs a pretty interesting business model. Once a product is proposed, it is subject to improvements from the online users. If the product is eventually voted into production by the General Managers panel at Quirky, the inventor only receives 4 to 7% of royalties. 

In total, Quirky sets aside a 10% royalty for the community at large – essentially the remainder of what isn’t given to the inventor, which is pieced out through contests to set price, names, colors, and tag lines). The rest of the money goes to the company for operations. We can see how this online system does all the following things: connect circulate create collaborate The process flows in between these steps and successfully answers the question: How do we move from information to meaningful action? This is an effective transition from participatory culture into creation with Quirky as the stabilizer and enabler in this system. With all the hype coming from GE with the advent of Aros, there is a lot of potential for businesses to facilitate participation in meaningful ways, that don’t just pigeonhole people as only consumers.

Social media protest campaigns, now known as Revolution 2.0, are in becoming more and more common around the world. When used properly, social media can become a platform for people to speak out, organize, and create collective action. But, what does a successful Revolution 2.0 campaign actually look like? And how do you go from using social media to create spectacle around an issue to using it as a platform for real action.

To understand what makes a successful online campaign come offline we must first look to the Egypt Revolution in 2011. In his interview with NPR the Egyptian Facebook protest leader, Wael Ghonim, outlines what he thinks made the revolution protests so successful.

First, he talks about the actual role of social media vs. the perceived role it played. He does not discount that Facebook played a huge role in the protest, but that this role was a tool for communication, connection, and participant engagement.

At the high level, Facebook was used to update participants on meeting places, times, and to spread messages around how the movement should be framed (come peaceful, hold the country flag, etc). It was a tool to facilitate and plan the in-person meetings and protests.

Ghonim also talked about how social media was a way to connect to people individually. Facebook was used as a way to survey the participants and engage them in discussions about how to proceed with the movement. Ghonim, stresses how important it was for all protesters to participate in the co-creation of the movement.

But, what makes the Egypt Facebook Revolution so successful was that the people who were using social media to spread these messages had a stake in the conversation and in turn, the outcome. They were not advocating online for someone who lived across the globe, but they were trying to assemble and rally for a better home.

Which leads to what makes a Revolution 2.0 campaign unsuccessful. We all remember the Kony 2012 Campaign. While, it did bring a lot of awareness to the war in Uganda and devastation of enslaving children soldiers there was very little action.

The reasons the Kony 2012 campaign was unsuccessful starts where we left off with the Egypt Revolution. The people who were sharing, contributing, and targeted were not the stakeholders. It was easy to get excited and then forget about it later, thus not inspiring action.

This movement was also presented to the world by the organization, Invisible Children. It was not a co-creation of grassroots efforts, but instead was presented in a neat package. From the action points to the posters you use.  When campaigns become so well curated, branded, and desirable they can quickly shift from action-focused to fashionable and popular. To keep campaigns successful, people must feel like they have a stake in the outcome, not that they have been handed something.

Crowdsourcing perhaps previously called volunteerism, is a model of tapping into collective aptitudes and schedules of the masses. The internet, taking crowdsourcing to another level allows people to provide services regardless of anonymous or undisclosed identities and locations. Growing up in a community where volunteering my time and knowledge was at the core of our practice and a norm, I never gave thought to the darker side of crowdsourcing. The reading "Meet the Hero Designer Who Publicly Shamed Showtime for Asking Him to Work for Free" really stood out to me. A few months back, I responded to a call for designer via Facebook for an organization I am passionate about. After exchanging a few emails, I agreed to draft the materials they had asked for. Once I emailed them back showing my work, they emailed me saying it would be a few more days before they could select one design and in the meantime wanted my help on another related project. As I consulted them on the other project (not remembering agreeing to two projects) they got back to me saying they went with another design. Of course, the rational side in me convinced myself it was okay and they did what was best for them. BUT, I felt frustrated, almost upset at myself for putting so much time and energy into the drafts.  Most designers contribute free work. But those asking for the work should perhaps consider their means before initiating volunteers or "crowdsourcers" into their equation. Dan Cassaro's response is the response we all want to give to our seekers. Should there be ethics applied to the ones asking for our time and knowledge?  I absolutely think so. If we do things like- stop appreciating volunteer time and /or design knowledge, if we overwork and take advantage of people, or if we outsource corrupt internet behavior there should be a means to saying someone is violating ethical behavior.