The Merced Project

The City of Merced, known as the “Gateway to Yosemite,” is home to a population of nearly 80,000 individuals, about 30% of which are currently living below the poverty line. Homes at the median level in Merced saw a dramatic loss in value, 62%, the biggest drop anywhere in the country, according to data from Forbes. According to Zillow, by the end of 2009, house prices in Merced had returned to the levels seen over a decade earlier. This crisis has established a strong community of individuals and organizations that are actively seeking rich new ways of thinking about commerce and innovation, in order to transform the community into a rich space for survival, ingenuity, and break through.

Several organizations within Merced decided to take action on these aspirations by developing a town-hall meeting of sorts to bring leading voices from around the nation to lead the community into new modes of thinking. I was fortunate enough to have been approached to develop a workshop for the community of Merced at this gathering.

The attendees of the gathering were a richly diverse audience of about 100 individuals that collectively represented the community of Merced. From farmers to students, all cultures and professions within the community were accounted for, making it a rich space to design a workshop that was very specific to the context and histories of Merced.

In this space, I piloted a version of my Serendipitous Business Plan Generator (SBPG) that was designed specifically for this gathering. The SBPG works by juxtaposing three components: Scenario, Opportunity, and the Modify Element. In this exercise, one component from each of these three decks are drawn by the participant, often resulting in a bizarre mashup of ideas that are then played straight through the development of a business plan.

Scenario: The situation (i.e. Growth, Collapse, etc.) in which the participant is starting their business. This element is  designed to give insight into the resources they will be able to leverage for their business plan.

Opportunity: The emerging opportunity (i.e. Augmented Reality, Cyborgs, etc.) that the participant can take advantage of and consider when conceptualizing their business plan.

Modify Element: The specific space, industry, product, or service (i.e. Coffee Shop, Lamp, etc.) your business plan is in conversation with, adapting, or transforming.

While the Scenario and Opportunity decks were only slightly developed from earlier iterations, the Modify Element deck was completely re-visited to speak to this specific community. For the Modify Element deck, students from UC Merced were prompted to explore the community, and take photographs of spaces that illustrated both an essence of the community, and prominent issues at hand in the county. By getting the students (residents of Merced) involved in this preliminary aspect of the experience, the system became specifically designed for the City of Merced as a way to tease out ideas and concerns unique to this community.

These images were placed on 10 different roundtables around the community center, and participants were prompted to select their seat based on the space depicted in the photograph, assuming that the participants would select based on some kind of prior experience or emotional connection with the imagery depicted in the photo.

Shortly after, the additional two cards (opportunity and scenario) were administered to the participants along with a business plan template, and full instructions for the exercise.

In 30 minutes, the participants were prompted to develop a concept for a business that would exist in Merced that considered all three of the generated components as restrictions in the making process. In order to foster a bit of friendly competition amongst the groups, the community was informed half way through the exercise that some tables were given the same opportunities to capitalize on, thus creating direct competition between the groups in order to push the ideas beyond the top-level, initial, concepts.

After 30 minutes of rapid business generation, each group delivered a pitch to the audience as a whole, presenting the details of their business plans while their ideas were noted on a series of posters. After each presentation, the posters were pinned to the walls of the community center, and the community was asked to vote on the venture that would best benefit the community at large.

The problem with Social Innovation is that it puts the entrepreneur(s) on a pedestal. In doing so, the process of innovation becomes framed as for the community as opposed to with the community, inevitably neglecting the edges of an issue at hand, resulting in a lot of clean looking shiny things that impose a set of values and beliefs around a community’s problems. I am interested in how The Merced Project was able to leverage corporate innovation tactics within a specific community as a way to tease out information about the culture of this space of crisis. Ethnographers often work with entrepreneurs in communities to seek new markets and opportunities, but what if the end goal was not to walk away with a set of solutions to capitalize on? The Merced Project begins to explore design’s ability to shift the role of an entrepreneur away from solving problems, focusing instead on working with a community to tease out new problems specific to their interests. I am interested in how this trajectory could be pushed even further through the development of a series of design interventions inspired / informed by the results of the workshop in order to bring the ideas to the forefront of the community at large.

Special thanks to Kate Slovin for the great photography work.

Science Fair (aka Thesis Work-In-Progress) Exhibition Install

My space is officially set up and ready to go for the midterm review / adjunct advisor meet and greet tomorrow morning. Two of my projects will be on display as well as a series of posters illustrating concepts for other projects in the works. More posts to come…

Serendipitous Business Model Generator (SBMG Part 06) – User Studies Round 02

After a successful first round of user-studies, I chose to shift my focus for the second round away from the design audience, and invited my colleague Kelvin Ho to participate. Kelvin received his MBA from UCLA, is the Executive Director of My Own Business Inc., and is a Board Member of the Social Enterprise Alliance.

Because it is in a designer’s nature to think in the speculative realm, I was not surprised that my initial series of user-studies did in fact produce these kinds of results. I became curious if these outcomes could be replicated across disciplines, taking it into the business world itself. A bit to my surprise, I found that, while the results were still interesting, the imaginative qualities produced by the designers in the first round of user-studies were not replicated. Regardless, the study lead me to a series of discoveries that will greatly influence a second prototype of the decks.

The following are a list of changes that I will be exploring in the second prototype, which is currently underway:

1. Re-frame “horizon element” as “opportunity.”
2. Eliminate point system / competitive aspect. While this may be re-introduced, the system as it is does not work, and is not desired.
3. “Opportunity” deck should not include opportunities that already exist, but instead focus on concepts with more layers of interpretation.
4. “Scenario” deck should not include “transformation,” but instead should include more instances of collapse or constraint.
5. Make the user independent. The cards each require explanation – this should not be the case, as the system will eventually require an independent understanding from the participants.
6. Initial framing of the system needs work. How much time should be spent? How many people should work together? One-on-one is not the only option.

Serendipitous Business Model Generator (SBMG Part 05) – User Studies Round 01

After arriving at a full prototype of the Serendipitous Business Model Generator, I held a series of user-studies amongst other students in the Wind Tunnel. While Media Designers are not necessarily my target audience for this project, I wanted to get the ideas out there and see what could be made from this system.

After providing instructions on how to use the SBMG, I provided each of the participants with a template for writing a business plan. Together, we would walk through each section of the plan to play out the following:

1. Company Name
2. Executive Summary
3. Products / Services
4. Market Strategy

The results of the generator were fascinating. From video game hospitals to cyborg apartments, the cards were successful in generating serendipitous business that was outside the realm of expertise that the participants each brought to the table. See below a selection of the generated businesses plans (please click on the images for high-resolution):

One concept, and the reasoning behind requesting the participants’ email address, is to create an artifact from the created company as a take-away for the participant – perhaps a business card. I am still thinking about what might be a successful, physical, takeaway for the Fictional Entrepreneurs that take part in the exercise.

Based on these studies, I have decided to eliminate the competitive aspect of the system, thus refraining from referring to SBMG as a “game.” Instead, I will focus my language on “generator.” After reflecting upon the results of the workshop, I found that, while the results were interesting, they were not going far beyond concepts that could exist as true opportunities. I realized that this issue was a result of my “HORIZON ELEMENT / OPPORTUNITY” deck. The content of this particular deck consists of opportunities that already exist (i.e. Augmented Reality, Gestural Interaction, etc.). Perhaps, to get more interesting results, the opportunity deck’s content should be re-considered, allowing for horizon elements / opportunities that do not yet exist (i.e. reverse entropy, and other instances of collapse or bizarre transformation).

I have one more scheduled user-study tomorrow with an entrepreneur, Kelvin Ho, of MyOwnBusiness, the leading online resource for business education. I am excited to see how the results compare or contrast to the work of the fellow designers, and will use the discoveries that result as continued points of evaluation for moving the project forward.

Storefront Stories – project introduction.

Storefront Stories is a project that culminates much of the work I have been doing in my thesis studies thus far. In partnership with the City of Pasadena, the work is proposed to be installed in a vacant storefront in the Pasadena’s Playhouse District. I am currently working with the City Council to make the following project proposal happen as part of the city’s initiative to install public art works in empty storefronts around the city.

In the first phase of the installation, users encounter three posters in the storefront window, each representing a different “coming soon” advertisement for three separate, fictional, stores. The three businesses portrayed in the coming soon posters are each generated with the Serendipitous Business Model Generator, a card game I have developed that uses chance to craft scenarios for imaginary businesses and the products / services they offer.

Using an SMS voting system, such as “SMSPOLL,” or other social media outlets such as Foursquare, participants vote for the storefront they wish was there. In doing so, the practice of entrepreneurship is framed as a democratic process. The fictional storefront that has the most votes is installed, complete with a brand and storefront items from the fictional world the store exists. My intention is for the store to blend in with the environment – creating a space for imaginary business in our everyday cityscape.

Download my initial proposal (PDF format), that was recently approved to go to the next stage of development, here.

Conversations: David Kelley

I flew up to San Francisco for the day to attend a lecture by David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the d-school at Foothill Community College. This talk was part of a series of lectures arranged by the school to celebrate the opening of the Center for Sustainable Futures at Foothill. Thanks to a friend of mine who is an employee of the college, I was able to sneak into an auditorium full of Foothill students, faculty, and staff. The talk, a unique perspective of the inner workings of the school, was interesting in the context of my thesis direction as it consists of a series of methodologies, processes, and systems that David and his faculty developed together. These methodologies have famously lead to break-through innovations and entrepreneurial ventures by many of the students.

The following is my discussion with David regarding my thesis work. This interview is written from memory, and may or may not be accurate word-from-word, but nonetheless provides the spirit of the conversation:

Matt: I am very interested in the processes you have developed at the d-school that allows for the facilitation of entrepreneurship and innovation amongst these students – certainly there must be moments in the process in which the students enter realms of intangibility, with wildly impractical concepts. How do you filter that back to practicality and viability, and should that happen?

David: Empathy. We ask the students to take their concepts, ideas, prototypes… and introduce them to the people that will use them. What this does is it creates an empathy for the user – this inspires the development of the project. The students want to make it real for that user. This allows design to have a profound effect on an individuals life.

Matt: But does something that is empathetic, or something that creates a change, or effect really have to be a real thing, or can it be an intangible concept?

David: No. It has to be made real, it has to come back to the user. You see, my generation was more than happy with coming up with an idea, coming up with another idea, coming up with another idea… but your generation wants to create impact, you want to create change with what you create. That is how the field of innovation has changed.

**

I am interested in this concept of empathy, the root of David’s “human-centered design” as one possible, tangible, starting-point of my imaginary systems. This conversation brought up interesting ideas about the value of my work, and the idea of watching fictional entrepreneurship become diegetic business – the intangible to the tangibly intangible. How can the unreal be crafted in an empathetic way? Can fictional entrepreneurship result from a human-centered design process in order to design for people in a different way?

Workshop for Fictional Entrepreneurs @ Occupy L.A.

Reflecting on the Occupy events across the nation, I decided to focus on the individuals of this movement as a specific audience for a workshop on Fictional Entrepreneurship. I realized the significance of the movement had some parallel aspects to my thesis work thus far – specifically “defiant devices,” a project about severe constraint as creative restriction.

“Hey. Now that’s some great art!” – LAPD

In response to the initial worksheet’s results, I re-designed the form as well as it’s language to more clearly state the purpose of the exercise: create something new by defying the provided machine’s purpose. The new workbook also included varying levels of difficulty (1,2,3,4) as well as an example. As a result, the inventions that came of the prompt were much more concise, and successfully demonstrated defiance as an alternative approach to entrepreneurship.

The most interesting response to the worksheets was developed on sheet Level 4 – this was the one machine whose function even I did not know. However, the participant, a man with a soda bottle balanced on his head, and a stuffed snake around his neck assured me he knew exactly it’s purpose. The sheet’s two sections, “draw” and “describe,” then adapted to become a space for explaining the machine itself, as opposed to the machine of the participant’s design. I found this to be an interesting exercise in understanding the stance of the participant before prompting them to “defy.”

After speaking with Ben, I realized that this result could be replicated across all participants by abstracting the machines further, through a lack of description, or the design of a flowchart – with room for subjectivity from the participant. This, as opposed to the current illustrations, would open up the illustration itself for more interpretation to perhaps get more unique inventions from the user.

Serendipitous Business Model Generator (Part 04)

This post is a tiny bit overdue, but a full prototype of the Serendipitous Business Model Generator has been completed! After a series of experiments, the deck is ready to be tested on users. A diagram explaining the anatomy of the playing cards can be seen here. The rules are as follows:

The generator consists of three decks:

1. Scenario: the conditions in which our business is being started
2. Opportunity / Horizon Element: the emerging technologies / phenomenons that will be leveraged in our venture
3. Modify Element: the existing business, product, or industry that will we modify / develop

Draw one card from each of the three decks to form your business. While the generator can be used by an individual, it is recommended to play with an advisor / partner. The key / rule is that your generated business be made tangible in some way – example: business plan.

Fun fact – each of the 90 cards in this full prototype were hand drawn. Yeah, it sounded like a good idea in the beginning… I figure that if I decide to run a kickstarter campaign to fund the production and distribution of the end result I can use these original hand made prototypes as incentives for the investors.

 

The Institute for Fictional Entrepreneurship: Executive Summary v 10.04

“…if we look at the big hitters in the 20th century, like the Xerox machine, like the personal computer, like the pocket calculator, all of these things did something else. They weren’t contaminations of existing things. They weren’t finding a need and filling it. They created a need that only they could fill.” -Alan C. Kay

Since the 18th century, the written definition of “entrepreneur,” and thus the notion of an entrepreneur’s role, has been in a constant state of flux. From the transformation of demand into supply to the creation of something new under “extreme uncertainty,” the practice’s meaning has evolved closer and closer toward undefinable, perhaps fictional, spaces. This evolution opens up new uses for the field that go beyond capital-driven arenas, reframing itself, instead, as a tool for speculative and social engagement. However, pre-conceived notions of business have held back the ability for such a transformation to come into fruition. This embryonic revolution begs for a new ecology of processes that can foster, and contribute to, this emerging paradigm shift in the design of business.

At The Institute for Fictional Entrepreneurship, our vision is to subvert the conventions of business, and radicalize entrepreneurial practice, through the design of participatory systems. Through an engagement with our systems, participants are invited to seek out voids within the daily lives of our future selves, in order to design for those situations, fulfilling needs that have yet to exist. This series of experiences leverage speculation, serendipity, augmentation, and hybridity as tools for creating business. Our work investigates how these systems can create a space for participation that introduces theories of entrepreneurialism to a new set of values and disciplines in order to author the next stage of the field’s evolution. These processes create a massive impact on the field by shifting the focus of entrepreneurs toward problem-making, as opposed to problem-solving, as a means to better engage with the edges of reality. This distinction, an inversion of current entrepreneurial practice, is key to understanding our perspective. Our systems celebrate an energy of acceleration toward the realm of intangibility by re-framing the design of business as an entry point to the study of the future, and the development of fiction.

The Institute for Fictional Entrepreneurship was established in 02011, and is currently based in Los Angeles, CA. We are comprised of a team of fictional entrepreneurs with a multi-disciplinary background that blends experimental business-design practices, social entrepreneurship, media design, and international business development.

Categories of Fictional Entrepreneurship

A growing list of categories within the filed of Fictional Entrepreneurship. I am currently running experiments within each of these distinct categories / approaches.

Augmented: Fictional Entrepreneurship that results in new layers in our digital and / or physical environment. These ventures are publicly crafted, and “dropped” at site-specific locations.

Serendipitous: Fictional Entrepreneurship that takes a chance-based process. Through an engagement with games, or a set of rules / restrictions, a business is developed.

Defiant: Fictional Entrepreneurship that breaks things to make things. These innovations are created through puzzle-solving, and develop new competition for imaginary business.

Narrative: Fictional Entrepreneurship that leverages storytelling and critical design as the primary means of communication.

Hybrid: Fictional Entrepreneurship as a means of combining and juxtaposing two systems to create new, or alter old, business.