Do You(th) have the X Factor?

As part of the European conference Advertising Week 2015, 100%Open is running FutureVote with our friends The Advertising Association, The Ideas Foundation and News UK. With the general election around the corner we thought it would exciting and important to look at encouraging more young people to engage with politics.  

Only 39% of the 18 to 24 demographic voted in the 2010 election. Our research showed that young people do care deeply about policy issues that directly affect them (such as tuition fees and the voting age) but they don’t readily connect these with the elections.

So as part of the News UK Innovation Café series of events we’re running a prototyping workshop with 30 16-18 year olds, designers and mentors from the creative industry. We’re going to invent and co-design new methods for encouraging young people to vote or otherwise participate in the democratic process.

On the day we’ll be exploring the barriers to getting involved and having ideas for new services, technologies or messages to overcome them. Finally we’ll be using our prototyping techniques tool to build and test the best ideas – chosen democratically of course!

Our workshop will be about the experience as well as the innovations. We hope that our young delegates will benefit from working with senior industry figures and learning new techniques for innovation. And conversely that the media folk will be encouraged to hire young bright and diverse talent.

In fact, if you’ve got any ideas about new ways to engage you people yourself, please post them here!  Rumour has it a senior politician will turn up to browse the ideas.  So maybe we’ll get a real chance to change things. As an innovation guy and father of two daughters I hope so.

David Simoes-Brown