Michael Cannell posted yesterday at Fast Company on design firm Blu-Dot’s fascinating new campaign, in which they are going to give away chairs by leaving them on the streets of New York, and then use GPS embedded in the chairs to track them down. According to Michael Hart of Mono, the ad firm that developed the idea with Blu-Dot:
If all goes according to plan, the video crew will use the GPS to find the chairs a few months from now. They’ll knock on doors and interview the owners–homeless people, Apartment Therapy readers, whoever they turn out to be–about why they took the chairs and how they use them. “Where does great design end up in New York? What sort of a person invites these chairs into their homes?”
Wow – there are so many layers to this. The brilliant experimental marketing layer, the Big Brother-ish invasion of privacy layer, the genius “guaranteed-to-get-talked-and-written-about” PR layer, the “no-marketing-message-included” layer reminiscent of “no-brand” brand Muji, the Chris Anderson “free” layer, and finally, the anthropological, archeological, design research find-out-where-the-chairs-go layer, which in and of itself would be a great conceptual art project or social experiment.
This project–what do you even call it? Is it a project, a campaign, an experiment?–really takes the openness and creative potential of contemporary marketing and runs with it.
Tags: advertising, anthropology, Blu-Dot, branding, chris anderson, conceptual art, design, design research, experimental marketing, Fast Company, free, gps, marketing, mono, muji, PR, privacy, public relations
The exercise has so many dimension to it but the core issue is does the action involve something that on public inspection would yield useful new knowledge while respecting all parties rights, responsibilities, duties, obligations and entitlements? If the answer is yes, then I think you could proceed. What the experiment description is lacking is any explanation of how it is conformant tot eh framework I just described. It only states the experimental procedure. It also does not make clear who would be validating that conformance occurs. I don’t think the rat hole of informed consent applies since that is mainly a bureaucratic exercise is ass protecting but something beyond the experiment description is needed.
Mike Alvarado
Comment by Mike Alvarado 11.02.09 @ 10:54 amMike, this is being done by Blu-Dot as a marketing/advertising campaign, not a research experiment.
Comment by Dan Soltzberg 11.02.09 @ 3:00 pmHi Dan,
I understand the venue is marketing but integrity is critical in my experience. So a phony entrapment is not recipe for success. I say this having been in marketing for over twenty five years.
Comment by Mike Alvarado 11.02.09 @ 4:04 pm[...] posted a few months ago on on design studio Blu Dot’s New York leave-behind/Big [...]
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