Design Jam - New Tools – Business+Impact at Ross

UMS/Ross Design Jam

▲ Go back to the drawing board

SUN, OCT. 16, 2022

“…new tools…”

To create an enterprise – a business, nonprofit, or other kind of venture – requires putting together a set of building blocks. These typically include capital to fund the business, suppliers to provide tangible inputs, labor to do the work, and distribution to get the products or services to the public. There are also internal processes to manage putting all these building blocks together, and often a legal form (corporation, LLC) to house them.

Over the past generation there has been a revolution in accessing each of these sets of building blocks due to innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is increasingly possible to snap together the parts of a business the way kids snap together Legos. As more and more of our lives are intermediated by software on devices like smartphones, “enterprises” take on new and surprising forms.

Consider the restaurant industry after Covid struck. Many restaurants shifted from sit-down dining to takeout food, often delivered by services like DoorDash. But if food is ordered online and delivered to peoples’ homes, its provenance becomes something of a black box. Was it really cooked by a local Italian restaurant, or was it produced in a ghost kitchen by temp employees and delivered by a precarious “self-employed” delivery driver? And when we returned to sit-down dining we often discovered that our waiter and cashier were replaced by a QR code.

This was not the only possible path. New technologies can also be deployed to open up intriguing possibilities that preserve the art in food. The food truck industry is full of culinary innovations and fast-evolving mashup cuisines (kimchi burritos with harissa sauce?), all enabled by social media and smartphones. (Food trucks normally post their menu and location on social media so customers can find them and get directions via GPS, something not widely possible before the advent of smartphones.)

What might that look like for the performing arts? What are the building blocks of new ways to get arts into the hands (and eyes and ears) of audiences? Participants in the design jam shared many new innovations that open up new possibilities, which you can explore at the links below.