My name is Lindsey and I am in the Strategic Communications program as I have recently moved on from life as an entrepreneur in order to broaden my platform in sustainability communications. While I landed a great transition job working in sustainability communications at a local venue, am eager to expand my work to include more of my creative passions for social innovation, art, design, experience & social marketing and mindfulness.
As I look over the course details and begin our first assignments I am buzzing with anticipation. While much of it will be new to me, some of it resonates with me regarding the work I was attempting to accomplish with one of my businesses. I founded an “Eco-Edutainment” company that used Avant-garde Trashion (trash fashion) to get people to think differently about their relationship to “stuff“ through public installations, interactive fashion shows, and youth programs. I was constantly trying to figure out how to define ourselves. What do you do when you combine art, fashion, the environmental, social change, experience social marketing, for-profit and non-profit all rolled into one? In seeing what else was happening in this realm of convergence I would come across bits here and there about Art for Social Change, Art and Social Practice, Tactical Urbanism, Social Innovation, and other terminology for how business was crossing industry lines to create social change. I’m excited to take a deeper dive and find renewed inspiration on how innovative communications can drive social change.
You had me at Trashion. I would love to hear more about this and definitely see some photos of some of the Trashion shows. What a cool way to raise awareness while posing a juxtaposition of thrown out materials in our material world – Madonna fans?
Others have hit on how the internet gives everyone a voice – the good, bad and the ugly. I think this plays right into your passion for social change as it can help highlight different aspects of our culture and lend a voice and provide visual context to an otherwise unseen issue.
I think figuring out how to define yourself for any company is a particularly big challenge in today’s age of every revolving technology. Just when you think you have a handle on one form, another comes along. Throughout my professional career the challenge for the companies that I’ve worked for has been staying on top of this change and constantly redefining how they were talking about themselves. Audiences and attention spans are constantly shifting. It’s a big job to figure out how to capture attention and hold it while getting the right message across in a way that will resonate.
I too was had right at “trashion.” I’m immediately envisioning the ‘derelicte’ fashion line from Zoolander. Anybody? This notion though does make me think of how the shock factor can help raise awareness of a specific social issue, and wonder whether that was part of your intent with the project.
Eco-Edutainment and Trashion — what an incredibly novel business idea. What was the inspiration behind your venture? How did it work out?
Thanks for the posts all,
Some of you hit it that yes, the goal of using the Trashion was to use a “wow-factor” to garner attention. That was the easy part. The next challenge was what to do once you had their attention; what was the right message, engagement, call to action to inspire sustainable behavior and mindful consumption? The next layer of challenge was how to measure the success of an interaction; I didn’t have the capacity to measure impacts.
Ultimately the short of it was that I wasn’t able to make the organization financially sustainable. I reflect however, that while perhaps the business was a “failure”, as I touched on in class, there is the curiosity that perhaps the ripple effect of campaigns and projects is the ultimate means to generate paradigm shift which I think is really the ultimate goal and measurement of success anyway. If anyone is curious, you can view http://www.junktofunk.org for photos and projects; I can’t quite let it all go yet so I’m keeping the website live, albeit a bit outdated.