o ANTHROPOLOGY & SYSTEMS

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AS A CLASS, WE REFLECTED THE
AGE RANGE WE WERE TARGETING,
AND WE CONSISTED OF BOTH
VOTERS AND NON-VOTERS.

IN ESSENCE, WE WERE DESIGNING
FOR OURSELVES.

Wd

An important part of the process was a meeting with representatives
from Elections BC for a project briefing. We hoped the meeting would
help us to identify a clear direction for starting our process. In the
meeting, Elections BC expressed three main issues that they needed

to address with the campaign: registration (getting voters to register
before going to the polls), the flexibility of voting (explaining the conve-
nience and ease of voting), and eligibility (informing recent immigrants
and youth of their right to vote.)

After our meeting with Elections BC, we started collectively brainstorm-
ing the three issues that were mentioned in the meeting. We discussed
the type of approach we felt would be most effective at reaching those
who fell within the age range of 18-25. We did not want to build on the
attitude “you don’t vote and you should,” which we felt would be too
negative. We felt the attitude of “you want to vote? Let us show you
how” would be more effective with the youth demographic. We initially
considered the use of humor in order to break from the serious nature
of materials that had been effective with older generations. Through
researching other youth campaigns, we discovered that our age group of
18-25 does not respond well to the use of guilt to motivate action. The
best way to reach youth is though humor.

CO-CREATION

In his article, Design and Democracy, Gui Bonsiepe speaks to they way
design should “interpret the need of social groups.” [1] In the last few
years, there has been a movement within the design community to
connect the designer with the user though co-creation. We created a
co-creation kit to gain insight into youth attitudes towards the voting
process. The user created a collage of the obstacles in his everyday life
that might impede him from taking part in the voting process. The
co-creation session yielded valuable insight into the attitudes toward
and the importance of voting within the everyday life of youth. We live
in a fast paced world heavily reliant on technology; 18-25 year olds do
almost everything online. Through the co-creation kit, we learned that
convenience plays a huge role in whether or not youth voters make it
out to the polls. Consequently, we narrowed the project scope to focus
only on location and ease of voting.

ITERATIONS

During our meeting with Elections BC, they brought to our attention an
interesting piece of information: in BC, when voting in a provincial elec
tion, voters are able to cast their vote at any polling station in BC. This
was a jumping off point for our development of the idea of focusing on
the convenience of location. Numerous iterations were created around
the concept of “location”. One iteration was a bus poster mapping out
the 99 bus route in correlation with the locations of polling stations
(shown by green dots). Ideally, on election day someone riding the

bus would be able to check the polling station closest to the stop they
need to get off at. Another iteration focused on placing an image of a
voting booth in public spaces around Vancouver with the tag line “it’s
that easy”. The strategy was to place the booths in busy public spaces to
communicate the idea that polling stations are closer than you think.

BRANDING

After viewing all the iterations, we came together as a class and decided
that our scope was too limited; the idea of “location” did not successful-
ly address all of the issues put forth by Elections BC. The main question
we wanted to address was “why vote?” We collectively went back to
brainstorming. We first had to figure out the questions we needed to
ask to get the answers we wanted. We identified common attitudes
about voting held by non-voters. The attitudes are as follows:

* Voting doesn’t affect me; | have no effect

* Voting takes too much time; I’m busy

¢ [don’t know enough about the political parties

« | don’t know if | am eligible; how would | register?

To be successful in motivating youth to vote, we needed to address
these four attitudes. One student came up with the slogan “VoteBC”
(with BC considered an abbreviation of “because” as well as British
Columbia). We used the slogan “VoteBC” and narrowed down the four
attitudes into 2-3 word subsections (see Figure 1):

* Vote Because — It’s Important
* Vote Because — It’s Easy
+ Vote Because — You Know Stuff

« Vote Because —- You Can

NOTE Y VOTE\Y
—

YOU CAN

VOTE,Y VOTE{Y
ay,

FIGURE 1. Kieran Wallace and Megan White's VoteBC branding strategy aims to

motivate youth voters by addressing common attitudes and deterrents.