Best of Election Season Innovation

Private confessions, citizen voyeurism, a shot at redemption, why it pays to have famous friends, and how graphic design changed politics forever.

In the year of the YouTube election, innovation in political communication spanned virtually every medium. As the big day is upon is, we look back on an incredibly tumultuous political season with our selection of the smartest, most revolutionary election-related ideas.

THE SAYHEAR PROJECT

In a political climate where the “get out and vote” message seems to be spewing out of everywhere (and rightfully so), it’s worth taking a step back and asking ourselves the simple question: Why are we voting today?

That’s exactly what design studio Gershoni did with their experimental sayHear project, which assigns a toll-free number to each of the 4 voting options – Obama, McCain, 3rd party, and non-voter – and invites people to call with the reason for their choice, then displays the results in a neatly designed interface.

You can hear all the confessionals on the project website, ranging from the fully serious to the giggles-in-the-background prank calls. Listen to one particularly funny one here.

>>> via BoingBoing

NYT’S POLLING PLACE PHOTO PROJECT

The best documentaries record monumental events that change the course of history. That’s exactly what The New York Times is out to do with their Polling Place Photo Project, the first-ever nationwide experiment in citizen journalism.

The project aims to create the largest photographic archive of the actual battleground of every presidential election — hum-drum polling places — capturing the richness and complexity of voting, a visual record of human behavior in that final stretch of choosing our political destiny.

You can already browse photos from this year’s primaries and caucuses, or upload your own. So don’t forget your camera today.

MICHAEL MOORE’S SLACKER UPRISING

Notorious filmmaker and whistle-blower Michael Moore made movie distribution history this year with his latest political documentary, Slacker Uprising, which became the world’s first feature-length film to launch as a legal free release.

The film, covering the filmmaker’s failed attempt to save the Democrats from themselves in the 2004 election by rallying people to vote with a grassroots tour of 60 cities in the battleground states, is above all a call to action in hope for redemption this time around.

(We covered it in detail here.)

WILL.I.AM’S YES WE CAN SONG

After Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech in January, artist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas got overwhelmed with the desire to prevent the “unfair, backwards, upside down, unbalanced, untruthful, corrupt” process of the last election. So he called up a massive lineup of celebrities to produce a revolutionary music video based on Obama’s speech. (We first covered it here.)

The video became the most-watched election-related video on YouTube, with over 30 million views across its various uploads, and set off an avalanche of buzz across the social web. It inspired an equally moving spinoff, the HOPE.ACT.CHANGE. project, which invites Obama supporters to upload images of themselves and rebuilds the video into a gloriously designed multimedia mosaic of them.

SHEPARD FAIREY’S OBAMA POSTERS

In January 2008, artist Shepard Fairey did what he does best to show his support for Barack Obama – he designed a poster.

Little did he know the 350 limited-edition PROGRESS screenprints would sell out in minutes, the HOPE print would go on to become part of the Obama camp’s awareness campaign, and the posters would become the most iconic images associated with this presidential campaign.

Here’s to the power of supreme graphic design and art direction.

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There were, of course, a ton of other tremendously innovative efforts. A few more of our favorites included the Obama social network; the efforts to give voice to those who are impacted by the American election but can’t vote, like the nation’s 29.1 million home-owning, tax-paying legal aliens or, you know, the world; the clever and tremendously amusing Things Younger Than McCain site-turned-book (which is funnier if you skip back through the archives); and the Field of Hope crop circle in Pennsylvania.

But what we really hope is that all this innovation is indicative of a greater cultural hunger for change. And as the 11th hour of this grand race is upon us, we can almost taste it.

So get out and vote today — and enjoy it. Your children will read about it in the history books.

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Don’t Click It

Why hover is the new click and how to undo 30 years of habituation.

The best of innovation usually involves taking something completely mundane and turning it into something completely different. Which is why we’re all over DONTCLICK.IT, a revolutionary interface that does away with web standbys like clicks and buttons, and lets you navigate in a radically new way with the mere position of your mouse.

The project was born out of an experimental idea that questioned the conventions of browsing behavior. Phase One, going on right now, invites the public to join in and explore the interface. Phase Two digs a bit deeper, analyzing users’ behavior within the interface to find out just how deeply rooted our browsing habits are.

The Button Lab showcases a few alternatives for the click — different mouse motions or a hover timer. And the Autopilot feature allows you to observe the first 20 seconds of browsing behavior of the 20,000+ site visitors — it literally replays their motions within the interface. There’s even a Mousecamp where you can get trained into getting the hang of clickless browsing.

The project has received multiple interactive awards — which is no surprise: Even though the site has been up for nearly 3 years now, it remains innovation unlike anything else out there. So go ahead, explore. Let’s see how click-hooked you are.

Bell’s Underdog: Elisha Gray and the Telephone

A lesson in entrepreneurship from history’s little-known scandals.

By common knowledge, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It’s in the history books. There’s a medal in his name honoring outstanding contributions in telecommunications. The man even has a museum.

It may be, however, that Bell’s claim to the invention could come down to a great performance at a fair, a very pushy lawyer, and some good ol’ bureaucracy.

You see, another inventor, Elisha Gray, had been working on a similar device at the same time. Gray, who had partnered with Western Union and Thomas Edison, developed his own telephone and filed for patent on a very fateful day indeed: February 14, 1876. Fateful not because it was Valentine’s Day, but because it was the exact same day Bell filed his own patent for the telephone. That morning, Gray arrived at the Patent Office a few hours before Bell’s lawyer. So his application (a.k.a. “patent caveat”) was filed first. However, upon getting to the Patent Office, Bell’s lawyer — being a, well, lawyer — demanded Bell’s filing fee be entered immediately. Gray’s fee, however, was entered with the usual pace of governmental bureaucracy and was not taken to the examiner until the following morning.

So began the greatest controversy in telecommunications. (Malcolm Gladwell calls it “simultaneous invention,” but we think there’s no room for gray in the black-and-white world of history.)

The how’s and the why’s of this race are subject to a number of conspiracy theories. But what complicated things further was that Bell was first to claim the spotlight. In June of the same year, both Bell and Gray took their inventions to the World’s Fair in Philadelphia. Gray, once again, was first to present. But Bell, a true entertainer and showman, staged a presentation for some of the era’s greatest A-listers, including the emperor of Brazil.

The rest is, literally, history.

But we mostly like the story because it’s such a great allegory for today’s entrepreneurship and startup culture. Coming up with the big idea first has little to do with making it big. Everything comes down to impressing the right people, paying the right lawyers, and giving a hell of a presentation.

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