HansenThesisPaper

Go ahead, you know you want to poke holes in my arguments. In fact, I welcome any CONSTRUCTIVE discourse on the matter. Enjoy!

Bulleted lists.

Lots and lots of bulleted lists. On paper. On my clipboard. (A clipboard makes anything look more official)

For some reason writing out my plans as bulleted lists works better for me than typing it up on a computer. Something about the action of writing it down, erasing, drawing arrows, sketching next to an idea, circling, and all that jazz helps my brain sort things out more efficiently and with less distractions.

I know, weird, right?

I’ve been saying for a bit that the wireless phone industry is the next industry that will be shaken up and reinvented if the carriers don’t do anything about it.

Think like music and movies and TV and how they’ve changed because of the customers and what they forced those industries to do to accommodate them. The industries didn’t change because they wanted to, but because their customers were leaving in droves, so they had to find new ways of appeasing customers and still be able to make money. TV customers wanted a la carte channels; TV providers didn’t want to break apart their extremely profitable packaging schemes. So what did their customers do? Created their own versions of a la carte by watching TV online, either through piracy or other less than legitimate means until companies like Netflix, Amazon and HBO started giving people what they wanted: a reliable, legal, affordable way to watch only the content they felt like paying for.

The TV and Movie industries fought this at first, but finally embraced an online a la carte model, realizing it’s sort of pointless to NOT take advantage of the opportunity and ignore what your customers are demanding. The music industry still has an image problem for the way they treated piracy in the late 90s and early 2000s, and although that industry seems to now have embraced the internet and its distribution channels, It seems the TV and Movie industries saw the lessons learned from music and avoided treating their customers like criminals and enemies to be squashed, defeated, and sued into bankruptcy (for the most part).

It looks like at least some in the wireless industry knows they have an image problem. 2 year contracts are bullshit. Overage fees are bullshit. Charging people an extra fee to connect their phone to data on top of a monthly data fee is bullshit. Forcing family plans on people is bullshit. Charging $20/mo for unlimited texts is bullshit (looking at you at&t! there’s no way it actually costs that much to send miniscule amounts of data like that across your network).

So, leave it to the U.S. underdog of the wireless industry to make the first step with their new campaign: Break up with your carrier

Genius! The only thing that keeps many people from switching? Contracts. T-mobile will pay your contract termination fee for you.

This will shake up the industry and I think we’ll see some big changes in the next few months, I’m excited about it. Wireless data consumption is a big fucking deal, it has and will have huge and widespread impacts on a number of aspects of our daily lives. To make it easier and more affordable to access this information will potentially have huge cultural impacts. Imagine how much has changed in our lives since the first iPhone was introduced…now think about how much the industry changed when at&t wasn’t the only carrier with the iPhone. T-mobile’s break-up campaign has the same potential to shake up the wireless marketplace. Freeing up customers to chose how and when they consume that data will cause changes we can’t even imagine yet.

Maybe I’m putting too much importance on wireless data consumption, but I really doubt it. I guess we’ll have to watch how this plays out, but I really think this is a step in the right direction. Well done T-mobile, well done!

Last night of the fesitval in 2006, after the Scissor Sisters, this was the scene. This was the year before they implemented the water bottle exchange and refillable water bottle stations.

Kristin “Miki” Hansen
Thesis Research Paper
Practices of Design
Fall 2013

Music Festival Litter and Cleanup

It’s a warm sunny day and you are standing in a field punctuated by piles of garbage; Plastic bags and food wrappers flying in the air off to some unknown destination. Various party and show flyers, lost shoes, broken camp chairs, the occasional decorated doll head on the end of a stick, abandoned signs, sunglasses and a whole litany of other types of garbage are in every direction you look. Where are you, at a garbage dump? No, what you are seeing is in fact the aftermath of a multi-day music festival campground. Not only is the mess left behind at such festivals unsightly, it also has negative environmental and social impacts as well.

Clean up of such messes can be costly and the mess can leave neighbors of the festival with a negative view of the festival and its attendees. Many festivals have tried to offset these negatives by relying on clean up volunteers and trash trade-in programs, which have had some success. However, most festivals still struggle with how to clean up the mess that is left behind. Is there a way to improve upon the programs already in place and take them to the next level? Can interaction design be used to encourage festivalgoers to behave in a more responsible manner? I believe so, and that is what I aim to prove.
Although many people may say this problem is not an issue of design, but rather one of education, I say, what is design other than trying to convince or educate others that your point of view is more correct or better than other views? Looking at two other programs, which offered a partial solution to this same issue of festival clean up, we can see how design could improve the acceptance and success of such programs.

Coachella Water Exchange Program

In 2006, I attended the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for the first time. One thing that stuck out in my memory of the festival was at the end of each day, the polo fields on which the festival was held were TRASHED. (Insert photo here) Upon review of the attached photo, you may notice that a good percentage of this trash is plastic water bottles. In an attempt to address the issue of trash, the next year, a new program was implemented consisting of two parts; a reusable water bottle was sold with exclusive cold-water refill stations, and a used water bottle recycling program. The refillable water bottle offered an exclusive, souvenir bottle for a small fee of $20, which included access to water that was cold (a very enticing incentive for a festival held in the So Cal desert) and was extremely popular. (Insert numbers here if Goldenvoice provides) The used water bottle recycling program provided the incentive to festival participants to pick up after themselves by offering 1 free bottle of water for every ten empty bottles festival goers brought to designated recycling stations. Both programs were considered great successes, and are still in use at Coachella today, and have even
been copied at other festivals.

However, the use of interactive design could improve the reach and acceptance of these programs to bring greater effectiveness and result in less time spent on cleanup.

She was a lot funnier than I thought she would be. I thought she would be a super-self serious typography person, but apparently not

Some points she mentioned that resonated with me: The toasters (So what if it looks good, does it work?), the pillows (I am guilty of this at home) and especiall the discussion of the shift back towards craftsmanship in design and other industries.

With easy, cheap access to machines and resources that used to be available only to specialists, people are publishing their own books, and creating content and items for consumption that may not have been available before because some corporation didn’t deem it profitable enough.

The computer and the Internet have given us the incredible ability to learn, create and share that did not exist even 20 years ago. No longer are our tastes and fashions dictated to us by large multi-national corporations, but now also the writer down the street who posts his own fiction online, or the jewelry designer mom who sells her products on Etsy, have as much influence on our tastes.

So, how does this relate to my thesis question? Many festivals with camping have miniature cities pop-up over the duration of the event, with their own economies, (think trade blankets, the kids selling “stuff”, posters, jewelry, stickers, t-shirts and even trading help and services.) So, yeah, creating, in it’s many forms is encouraged at many festivals (think recycling bins at Coachella, design contests, video/picture contests) Can I leverage this spirit of creating and helping? It seems many people are already open and receptive to the idea of a community “together”, so can I use this “togetherness” to encourage people to modify their behavior in a more environmentally/community responsible matter.