A Primer in Social Experiments by Chris Cloud (@thinkdoer) and Marie Dupuch (@mjdupuch).

1. A Primer in Social
Experiments

2. What is a social
experiment?
Social- n. social gathering, especially one organized by a
club, congregation, etc.
Experiment- n. procedure for testing a hypothesis, etc.

3. Social Experiments
before 2010

4. Bottle Bank Arcade
Theory:
Can we get more people to use the
bottle bank by making it fun to do?
"socialhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSiHjMU-MUo&feature=player_embedded
experiment"

5. The way it worked:
Wait for light and put the
bottle in the corresponding
hole to collect points.
The Bottle Bank Arcade had
nearly100 visits that day.
Meanwhile the conventional
Bottle Bank across the street
received only 2.

6. Theory:
“... could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and
streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative
about our relationship to space and our willingness to
interact with what we find in it?”
http://www.tweenbots.com/

7. “As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step
closer to attaining its destination, the significance of our random
discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast
space made small by an even smaller robot.”

8. “The results were unexpected. Over the course of the
following months, throughout numerous missions, the
Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point
to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers.”
“But of more interest to me was the fact
that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven
primarily by human empathy for an
anthropomorphized object.”- Kacie Kizner

9. Theory:
What would happen
if we left a chair
Blu Dot alone on the street?
Where would it go?
http://vimeo.com/8202858
“...it’s surprising, but I suppose in this day and age it’s only a matter of
time that something like this happens to each one of us...”
- Personal Interview (Curb Miner)

10. To celebrate its birthday as well as the
resourcefulness of its New York City home, we took
to “curb-mining”: the obsession with both placing and
taking furniture home from the street. Our mission:
place 25 of Blu Dot’s signature Real Good Chairs all
over the city, free for the take. The catch: we enabled
many of the chairs with GPS to see where they’d go.
The two-day experiment — comprised of real-time online
tracking, a live Twitter feed and a follow-up
documentary video — garnered over 136 million media
impressions for the brand in just two months. The idea won
the hearts of editors from the New York Times Magazine, the
Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Dwell, Creativity
magazine, and CNBC, not to mention a handful of New York
scavengers who created epic blogs dedicated
to their chair pursuits.
Blu Dot gave good design to 25 people. In turn, millions more
took notice of Blu Dot.- mono

11. Social Experiments
in 2010

12. DATING BRIAN
Theory:
What if I crowd sourced my dating life?

13. “With more than half of New Yorkers single and
available, it's a jungle out there and there's no getting
just dipping your toes in. So Brian is taking the plunge
and going on 30 dates in 30 days with 30 different
women. But part of the challenge is he's crowd
sourcing all the decisions: who he dates, where they
go...” http://datingbrian.com/about/

14. To date (Aug. 5th, 2010):
Facebook:741 fans
Twitter: 1,584 followers
Youtube views: 29, 874
Featured:
All Things Considered
WGN
Village Voice
Mashable
...to name a few.

15. SIX ITEMS or LESS
Theory:
What do our clothes say
about us? Why do spend
so much time on what
we wear? What happens
when we don’t?

16. Each participant gets to choose six (and only six)
items of clothing and pledge to wear only these
six items of clothing for a month.
...it’s about putting a challenge out there and
seeing what people bring to it, do with it and
talk about.- http://sixitemsorless.com/the-project/

17. Featured:
New York Times
Good Morning America
The Today Show
PSFK
....
About 100 participants worldwide.

18. 30 DAYS of
CREATIVITY
Theory:
If presented with the task to create something/
anything for 30 days, what would people create and
most importantly, would they?

19. 30 Days of Creativity was a social
initiative encouraging people to create
stuff, anything, every day for 30 days in
June 2010 by folks in the Minneapolis
creative community.

20. Stats:
Over 3,000 creations and counting
Twitter followers: 595
Pledgers: 350 +
International following
(Creators in England, Australia, Denmark, New Zeland,
Brazil, Bahamas...)
Featured:
Make
PSFK
....

21. What makes an
experiment social?

22. 1.) SOCIAL
It’s collaborative.

23. 2.) THEORY
It’s unproven.

24. 3.) ONLINE/OFFLINE
It lives in either space.

25. 4.) MEASURABLE
It’s effectiveness can be shown.

26. 5.) SUCCESS IS
OPTIONAL

27. “We have always wanted to be autonomous, competent, and
connected; it’s just that now social media has become an
environment for enacting those desires, rather than
suppressing them.” - Clay Shirky

28. Chris Cloud (@Thinkdoer)
Thinkdoer.com
Marie Jeanne Dupuch (@mdupuch)
dupuchart.tumblr.com