An crowdsourcing platform to solve the world’s sustainability challenges

As part of the wider platform development project of Open IDEO, we joined forces with Sony, IDEO and WWF, to design, develop and promote Sony’s Open Planet Ideas. A crowdsourcing platform tapping the talent of a wide international community to bring to fruition innovative ideas on how to use technology for maximizing the planet’s resources.

This project earned Sony the ‘Communicating Sustainability’ award at the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards! 

We created a workspace where participants put forward, share, and refine concepts across the four key environmental categories outlined by WWF: Water; Fishing and Agriculture; Climate Change; Habitat and Species.

With the direct involvement of Sony engineers, community participants saw their ideas go through each stage of development, inspiration, evaluation, and eventual realization. WWF, Sony and IDEO experts helped identify the finalist, to be realized through a possible prototype, and white paper allowing for open-source of the project.

As well as designing the website, we created a series of video animations to promote the different phases of the project, from ‘call for entries’, to a how-to video explaining the mechanics of the challenge (with more than 350K YouTube views) a TV advert for National Geographic and the case study for the final winning product, a mobile App called Plus you created by Sony. 

This final video tells the story of an amazing two-year journey.

More about this project on The Guardian, Core 77, Open IDEO