Design the Audience

Remember that the twist on the assignment is that you will be evaluated not just on the service concept but also on the creativity and insight you show in defining and describing the audience. Mat is hoping for you to come up with an audience that is interesting, unique and ultimately surprises him - based upon your understanding of the untapped feelings, sentiments, obsessions or behaviours of people.

For example:
Last night, Al Gore gave his "An Inconvenient Truth" presentation at UofT. We might reason that this presentation has gained a lot of public attention because it responds to a shared belief that we need to rethink relationship with the environment. We should also recognize that some people feel guilty about their current actions (eg. driving an SUV when you believe in the danger of CO emissions).

The obvious audience here could be loosely characterized as 'people who feel compelled to learn more about their environmental footprint and want to learn what they can do to help reduce their impact.' This audience is obvious, exists and is already understood (to the tune of $23,727,472 in box office, $7,270,000 in rentals.) For this assignment we want you to use your personal insights to uncover a unifying motivation that will collect a less obvious group.

In this case, we might could recognize that some of the people initially collected by Gore's presentation are getting sick of feeling guilty about things that are "too big" or "beyond their control". So to pull these people into an audience, we might design a web-based mobile service that personally congratulates or even rewards people (perhaps in a humourous way) for their environmentally destructive behaviour - when and where they do it.

(unfortunately the domain name www.fucktheenvironment.com already exists.)

Not a very socially consious example - but I hope it helps.