Boston Globe Editorial, August 2, 1999
Elevation on the Internet
The Internet is technology's golden child, but it hasn't achieved its legendary potential. Too often the Web is seen only as a convenience - an easy place to shop, check stock quotes, read newspapers, or chat. Innovations are emerging, but they need research and development support...
Another Internet invention comes from Web Lab, which supports new uses of communications technology...Web Lab's projects can't be called digital libraries, museums, or other common nouns because they are unique - and as-yet unnamed - forms. A new site called ''NeedCom'' (www.pbs.org/weblab/needcom/), subtitled ''Market Research for Panhandlers'' is devised by California photographer Cathy Davies. This site exemplifies the word interactive. Visitors take a panhandling effectiveness survey - deciding based on photographs and sound clips how much money to give each of a group of panhandlers. The site gets users to review their criteria - how factors like race, gender, signs, clothing, point of contact, and verbal appeals affect their decisions.
The rest of the site is an information hybrid. Interviews of panhandlers detail how long they've been soliciting, why they do it, and daily 'salaries.' Users who answer poll questions - such as 'Do you prefer panhandlers who perform a task for you, like opening a door?' - can go to a page that compares their answers with the votes and comments of other visitors. It is a way, Davies says, for Web users to learn about themselves.
October 5, 1999
http://www.zdnet.com/yil/stories/strange/1,4982,2347853,00.html
Begging For Feedback
By Scott Alexander
Don't you just hate it when someone on a street corner gives you a lame pitch for spare change? Couldn't they come up with something original? Or at least less offensive? Well now you can do something about it. Need.com is conducting the first ever panhandling focus group on the Web, and they want your input. Check out the pitches and choose how much money you'd give to each one. Are you a "Give me some money! Just give me some Goddamn money!" type person, or do you prefer the silent cup-shaker? Would you be more likely to give money to the guy who tells you he's going to spend it on booze, or the one who lies about spending it on food? Complete the survey and do your part to improve the quality of panhandling worldwide.
MSNBC.com Wireside Chat By Lisa Napoli
The article:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/315403.asp
The audio:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/asx/audio/28/wiresidechat_napoli_990924.asx
There is more to the Web than dot-com dough. Ask Marc Weiss and the team at Weblab.org. They are working to nurture projects on the Web that aren't about money, but that have got soul. Weblab is to the online medium what public television used to be to the tube.
Need.com is the latest example of that. The site is designed to make you think about the style of the people who ask for money on the street, by asking the user to rate each panhandlers' technique. American Love Stories is the companion piece to the PBS documentary, "American Love Story," about an interracial couple, where users can dialogue about their relationships and love. Working Stiff was a place where people could go beyond Dilbert and talk about the workplace.
Those are just a few of the projects that have been given life by Weblab, and the reason I wanted to talk to Marc for our first Wireside Chat. So click on the link for the interview and our discussion of his Web sites.
Min's New Media Report, 8/30/99
Case Study: NeedCom: Will Work for Page Views
Demography is not democracy. Tailoring content to the tastes and views of a narrowly defined audience may get publishers in good with readers on one level. But does it inspire the kind of lively, thoughtful exchanges that make online discussions hum? As user- generated content becomes more valuable online (see mNMR 6.7.99), editors should consider becoming facilitators, even instigators, of more thoughtful discussion content. Hosted by PBS Online and funded by Web Lab, NeedCom: Market Research for Panhandlers (http://www.pbs.org /weblab/needcom) is a brilliant experiment in moving beyond the pithy poll question or banal "What Do You Think?"plea.
Berkeley designer Cathy Davies marshals a sophisticated understanding of information architecture and interactivity in order to confound rather than stroke user expectations. First-time visitors must interact with a "Panhandler Effectiveness Survey," six audio/visual pitches from actual New York City beggars asking for a handout, and decide how much to give. The unsettling process effectively goads users into deeper consideration about poverty and their criteria for charity. It is one of the most interesting online experiments in recent memory, a blend of performance art and social provocation.
Frustrating the User
In writing the script, Davies and collaborator Drew Gorry "wanted to frustrate people into having more significant responses," so they made the initial survey deliberately constraining - "a very flat Web experience," says Davies. A snapshot, a curt pitch from each panhandler and five payment options is all you get. "I wanted people thinking about panhandlers facilitated by this extreme panhandling experience," she explains.
And even on the back end, users declare only one of three charity strategies (Give a lot, sometimes or never) before posting. "We wanted to provide them with too few options to be satisfying. People are going to see this and say that panhandling is much more vibrant than that."
Her cagey design of the survey results page graphs out the visitor's pattern of giving against user averages, allowing us a unique way of pondering our own generosity as well as any prejudices or unexamined assumptions that informed our decisions. In gathering all six panhandlers on one screen along with the handout results, correspondences between a user's generosity and the beggar's ethnicity or gender become clearer.
While arguably manipulative, the process "asks people to examine their strategies, their stereotypes of neediness." And it prepares the visitor to answer more thoughtfully "focus group" questions about panhandling that are more imaginative and sophisticated than the pat feedback questions on most Web sites. "Is panhandling like your job?" "Does it matter if a panhandler opens the door for you?"
Provocation With a Smile
In the site's mission statement, Davies declares her intention "to use satire to slip past intellectual defense mechanisms and stereotypes of poverty, a method that gives us better tools (more data!) to understand our own perceptions of the needy, the worthy, and ourselves."
Undoubtedly, some visitors seem offended by what they see as the site's flippant take on a serious issue, but most seem to catch its wink-and-a-nod design. Davies effectively bathes us in knowing irony. The retro design gives a humanitarian issue the robotic, antiseptic feel of a 50's luncheonette. The market research metaphor --graphing, focus groups -- extends into every area of the site.
The most subtle but effective part of Davies' design is the visual execution. All but one of the images depicting well-heeled office-dwellers are black and white stock photos, because "stock does an incredible job of illustrating symbols - people symbols." In ironic contrast, she individuates the panhandlers, replacing the single, top- source lighting of photo-journalistic depictions of the poor with rich color and studio setups on the street. "I wanted to take these symbols of class and rub them up together in my photo collages," Davies says.
Once this tightly controlled survey "experience" is over, however, users get to swim more freely into pools of deeper information about the panhandlers themselves and then opportunities for posting responses. The site deliberately violates every apparent "ease of use" doctrine in the catechism of Web design, but its sheer creativity and relentless irony is enough to carry users through to the payoff. "We think of interactivity as a way to frustrate people into confessions and curiosities and responses," says Davies. And in large part, the process works. More than 6% of nearly 7,000 survey- takers have posted comments, many of which are much more lengthy and thoughtful than normal.
While mainstream publishers might shrink at the idea of taking such risks with an online audience, Davies has illustrated an important path along which the user-generated content format might evolve. In old media, publishers were imperious broadcasters of ideas, while our user-centric world of Web content can make editors feel like quiet hosts at an open-microphone night. NeedCom reconstructs the content provider as an active, creative facilitator of thought.
Better still, some of the site's lessons about soliciting unearned handouts might come in handy at that next pitch meeting with a VC capital group. Who better to advise Web start-ups than a panhandler?
San Francisco Weekly, 7/21/99
http://www.sfweekly.com/1998/072199/tudor1.html
The House of Tudor
Friends from other "developed nations" always express shock at the number of people begging in our city streets; they are bewildered by the casual way San Franciscans dismiss or toss coins at outstretched cups. "What makes one person more deserving than the next?" they ask. "It's just a matter of taste," I blithely respond. Is it cynicism to believe our capacity for charity is subject to our predilection for a particular pitch? Edward Bernays -- father of public relations and market research, and consequently interstate highways, political lobbies, and a CIA-backed insurrection in Guatemala -- would say it's just common sense: If panhandling is amoneymaking endeavor, panhandlers should know their market.
Twenty-four-year-old Berkeley artist Cathy Davies probably didn't have Bernays in mind when she developed NeedCom, but Bernays would surely commend her technique. NeedCom is a stylish new Web site (sleek wintergreen logo in '50s script, modish black-and-white animated photos, multiple-choice bubbles) that asks you to rate the approaches of six panhandlers with cybercoin -- the $0.00 bubble for those you abhor, up to $1 for those you condone. The panhandlers are real -- the result of countless interviews and hundreds of hours sitting curbside in New York and San Francisco -- and include men and women of different ages, races, backgrounds, and mental and physical constitutions.
At the end of the "Panhandling Effectiveness Survey," folks are invited to give their opinion on a number of topics pertaining to poverty, charity, panhandling, and work ethics. "Customer" responses are tallied and categorized for easy reference, as are very candid panhandler remarks on stench, blindness, hustling, taxes, "workday" shifts, and gross annual incomes.
In a more idealistic time, Bernays used market research to negotiate taste and bias by accumulating data about belief systems. In the cynical time of Davies, market research is taste and bias and she uses our appetite for accumulated data to negotiate our belief systems. It's clever, it's fun, and it's free.
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