Innovative Social Thinking #2
‘Innovative Social Thinking’ combines social behavior with technology to form new connections, changing the world ever so slightly for the better. Last month, we highlighted the Be My Eyes app, WeChat campaign ‘The Voice Donor’ and Megafaces, the world’s first large scale LED kinetic façade. In the second blog post in our series our heads of creative, marketing and technology once again champion their best examples of Innovative Social Thinking.
Friend Compass – Graham Jenks, Creative Director
This idea for flight comparison site Momondo puts a fun interactive spin on finding flights to visit friends around the globe. The App turns your phone into a social compass that plots the location of friends and offers up tempting flight offers.
I really like the innovative use of the phones GPS, Facebook API and Momondo’s search engine. There is also a really nice insight here, by using friends as a starting point for travel consideration instead of a location.
After all, staying with a friend with local knowledge can really make a trip. See the full case study here.
Votr – Tom Ollerton, Marketing Director
I spent about three weeks working on an a killer social idea that we could sell to new clients, that would tie into the UK General Election, and I came up with a good one – but no where as near as good as this. It was done by two boys with a collective age of 30 – dammit.
Votr is a Tinder-style smartphone app that helps you to decide which candidate in your local constituency you should vote for. The app pulls in tweets from your local MPs but makes them anonymous so you don’t know which party they represent. As the politicians’ tweets come in you can decide whether you like them or not using a Tinder-style left and right mechanic.
Its creators say: “It’s like Tinder. The idea is that once you’ve got enough tweets, it gives you an idea about who you agree with the most. For people who don’t vote, it’s to try to engage them with politics.”
Addicaid – Matt Payne, Head of Creative Technology
Our understanding of addiction is relatively new. Since so much about drug and alcohol use is tied to cultural norms and belief systems, addiction is a destructive force in a lot of lives. Addiction can be perceived as weakness, when in some cases it’s actually an illness, and consequently the stigma attached to addicts can reinforce the habit.
There’s an app for that.
Addicaid is a smartphone app that links people trying to recover from addiction anonymously. The app encourages you to share your goal with the community and set yourself daily goals which you can share publicly. It also gives links to meetings and support groups for recovering addicts.
This is a great example of social thinking because it harnesses the power of the crowd to provide timely and compassionate support when our culture and stereotypes are consistently providing barriers to recovery.