Featured on Fast Company and Trend Hunter

For more information on the installation, the work can be found at the accompanying idontvote.us website, which details each of the five rationales, along with a project manifesto and an about section.

Challenge

The challenge was large and the ambition even bigger.  The brief was to "encourage young people to vote". There was stigmatism and apathy among young people. Voter turnout rates for the U.S. midtern elections  were dangerously low.  At the time no empirical data or field research had been collected on why millennial’s don’t vote.

INSIGHT

Research showed that young people who start to voting at an early age are more likely to habitually vote as they mature. 

Solution

The creation of a "non-voting booth" to collect data on all the reasons why millennials avoid voting.

 “I Don’t Vote”. A non-voting both concept that collects data on the reasons why young people don’t vote. A campaign was developed to coincide with election day – November 14, 2014. The campaign was grounded in a I Don’t Vote Manifesto, and in an online website and mobile web app, an in-person booth, sticker, and button campaign.

WHAT WE DID IT 

The booth contains a “ballot box” equipped with a recording device, and upon entering, young people have the opportunity to “tell” the ballot box in their own words why they don’t vote. After sharing their thoughts privately, visitors were then offered a selection of stickers from the five available options (or filled in their own with a marker), placing it on the booth in a kind of “live non-voting.” Over the course of the event, every visitor got to have an impact on the finished complexion of the non-voting booth.

HOW WE DID IT

In a workshop setting we began to dispel stereotypes of young people and why they don't vote. Then we went and met with real students at four different college campuses in New York City. We then began to create user personas and mapped out the journey for "Casey" our ideal non-voter.

Informed by user research, concepts were formed, user journeys developed and storyboards were written and enacted to convey empathy and the challenge.