Let’s Flip it

“Let’s Flip It” is a communication system developed by and for young people most affected by social violence in Boston. Youth interns at DS4SI’s Youth Activism Design Institute (YADI) identified how logos on sports caps were being used to communicate membership in turf based gangs, crews and cliques. This example of participatory action research and design led to our “Let’s Flip It” campaign, YADI’s longest lasting youth-led campaign against horizontal violence.

Discovery

YADI’s first round of discovery (or “disco”) focused on conversations with a handful of young adult youth workers who worked with youth in the neighborhoods hardest hit by violence. We talked about the various ways they saw violence getting started in those neighborhoods, including how youth used baseball caps to communicate with each other about what ‘hoods and crews they represented, and how seeing someone with a hat representing an opposing crew could spark violence. 

Our second round of “disco” dug deeper into how youth were using hats to communicate with each other. It included street interviews and focus groups with youth who lived in the neighborhoods hardest hit by violence, some of whom were (or had been) gang-involved. Questions included: What did they think hats signified? How did they choose their hats? We learned that the use of hats to represent different ‘hoods was widespread and well understood, even by users who said they only wore hats for style. We also learned that a strictly-hat intervention would primarily impact guys, since few females said they wore fitteds. This led us to think about what else we would create beyond the hat.

Ideation

Our first round of ideation focused on the consensus amongst the youth workers that the intervention had to be strictly youth-to-youth. It had to be led by youth and have a clear style that didn’t look top down. As youthworker Olmis Sanchez said, “If this violence is going to change, youth are going to have to flip it. We already flip sneakers, some kids flip drugs, adults flip condos; we need to flip violence!” That idea first led to an intervention featuring a comic-style “Mr. Flip”, and ideation included “What would Mr. Flip do?” and “Vote for Mr. Flip” (since it was election season.)

Further ideation got us to really thinking about the hat as a “symbol and a thing”. It was a real thing that people wore, and also something that worked on the symbolic level. We started to brainstorm how we could play with the hat in a way that would allow youth to communicate directly with each other. It felt like something that acknowledged the complexity of the lives of many young people, since sometimes they might need or want to wear a crew-affiliated hat, and other times maybe a blank hat could communicate that they needed to go about their business getting to work or school or whathaveyou. 

Specification

Before landing on our hat idea, our first round of specification included ideas about how to introduce “Mr. Flip” to Boston, including a Mr. Flip campaign that took advantage of election season.

When that didn’t pop, we looped back to discovery–this process isn’t as linear as it sounds! That next round of discovery got us to the hats as the “symbol and the thing”, and we decided to explore prototyping a “Let’s Flip It” hat. 

Initially we imagined an all-black hat with no logo, to symbolize that the wearer wasn’t repping any block at all, but something larger.  We also imagined blank white pins that guys and girls could wear, this time intervening in the symbol of the memorial pin.  We wanted to leave the pin blank to invite wearers to think of a time without mourning and a time when buttons could mean something new. 

We tested these ideas on focus groups of users, some of whom pointed out to us that the black cap communicated some negative things that we hadn’t intended. Similarly, some youth said the blank white pin might mean it was waiting for someone else to have be memorialized. Thanks to these early prototypes, we switched to an all-white cap, and decided to design a Let’s Flip It logo for our pins and materials. 

Another important thing that Let’s Flip It prototyped was methods of delivery. To its youth designers, it was critical that youth got Let’s Flip It materials (hats, stickers, pins, etc.) from other young people; it was part of how they wanted to communicate that it was a youth-led solution.

Iteration

The first summer and fall of rolling out Let’s Flip It, we relied heavily on spreading the materials through youth programs. We provided fitted caps, pins, stickers and flyers. We found that some youth really had a personal commitment to Let’s Flip It, even when their youth programs were focused on other things.

For our second summer of Let’s Flip It, we hired 12 youth to lead the campaign. In response to how some youth were motivated by the campaign regardless of whether or not they were in youth programs, they decided to have a direct “hotline” that youth could use to order Let’s Flip It supplies. They also experimented with new ways of getting the word out—stencils on the street with spray chalk, stickers on the train, and t-shirt making events.

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