Where we’re at?

Designs for the website has been finalised and the developers notified—hopefully they are eagerly figuring out how to make this not just work, but work beautifully, be a work of art and something they are very proud of indeed.

As the last post just introduced the project, I’ll use this post to go into a little more detail:

In an attempt to document the emotional reaction to Internet usage among 13-19 year olds, we thought about getting a number of postcards created, asking for a response to a simple statement ‘The web makes me feel…’ and the reason ‘why?’.

Simple enough? Well, you’d think so, but its taken quite a while to weigh up the pro’s and con’s of asking such a seemingly obvious / vague question.

We’ve thrown around the exact wording, changed it a number of times, and considered whether it is worth doing at all. But every way we turned, the more the signals turned back to ‘yes’.

The reason why it has to be this simple, is because we:

• want to see what comes back
• don’t want to assume we know what will come back and
• its the most simplest thing (web related) that we can think of asking.

Obviously we could have made things much more complex, but this is a pro-bono project remember and there’s always next year. In fact, its probably a trial run for what might be a much bigger experiment in 2010.

Yesterday I received a box of a thousand postcards, all crisp, stacked and fresh off the guillotine. The next stage is to start the distribution of the cards to past clients and selected individuals. For those that are thinking, ‘guys you’re killing the planet with old media postcards!’—we’re not. They’re all 100% recycled and the ‘old media’ format is essential for our grand plan later on down the production line (which I’ll tell you about another time).

These postcards will be sent out to people that work directly with young people and can guarantee they complete and return them to us. We’re not looking to throw out a thousand and cross our fingers that a percentage come back—nope, all out, all back, that’s the plan. In order to achieve that, we may have to dangle a very attractive carrot in front of all the people who opt to take part.

If you are one of these people, and are interested in receiving some cards and being part of this exclusive project then please comment below stating how many young people you can reach or drop us a message here (UK only—next year we’re hoping worldwide).

More on that next time, until then, I’m going to need several dozen envelopes and whole lot of stamps.

View all The Web Makes Me Feel updates

Author: mark - 17/03/09