9/24 Assignment
Read more about the project in this Wired writeup
before continuing on to my reactions.
You can also learn more about the product on the What3Words website.
My thoughts on the article
Did you read the wired article? Ok then, you may continue 🙂
This project very much reminded me of the paper Social Innovation: Ten Cases From Benjamin Franklin that we read for the course.
Reading that article had me thinking anew about what social innovation is, and that social innovation can be more about how we structure our communities and societies on a basic level, and not just about feel-good projects that help people.
This 3words project is an example of something that, to someone like my Mom, would probably just seem absurd, yet for me, it’s extremely intriguing. I can see how, if it caught on (and that’s certainly a long-shot if, but still), this project could really change how people think about a place, and their affiliation to it.
The company makes a good case for the practical benefits: it’s easier to remember the w3w location to meet someone, mail a package, and especially for children to remember locations for their home and school. And it certainly has some interesting potential in regions that don’t yet have sophisticated postal systems, and now may never develop them with the decline of physical mail and packages.
But much larger context shifts are possible if we imagine a world in which this system is something children grow up with as a their primary address structure. If this type of system became a major yardstick for place, people may feel less identity wrapped up in government-based locations such as cities and nations. People could become more attached to a much more localized version of place, providing more of a link to close neighbors. It may even cause children to realize that the city, state and nation they were born into is, as far as their personal say in the matter is concerned, random — just like the assigned words. This could lead to greater appreciation and respect for people born into other places and worlds, and perhaps help people recognize that they just might have as much in common with someone across the world as they do with some in their own city.
This is certainly an optimistic, blue-sky look both at this particular service, and what it could afford. But I do think it is fair to say that if this system were to take hold, it would certainly qualify as a major social innovation by changing how we organize and think of ourselves with respect to place.
