#4

This week, I've been working largely with my group on designing our storefront project and our $200 idea. We had a little trouble getting everybody to agree on one idea at first, but by now all the kinks have been wrinkled out and we’re on track to getting all of our ideas panned out for the storefront project. For the $200 project, we had initially agreed on selling customized Brookline Christmas cards, but our group was pretty split on that venture, so we chose to switch it up. Now, we’re most likely going to sell customized T-shirts. They’ll be white with a basic design spray painted on front, such as a superhero logo or a cool yet simple design. To do this, we found bulk white T-shirts online to be bought for under $2 each, and are working with friends who have experience in designing stencils specifically for spray painting designs. This is where the fun comes in, because it allows us to be creative and have lots of fun with this idea while still making money. The only setback is that it’s currently winter time and T-shirts are geared more toward a warm, fuzzy climate. Given this issue, we’re not 100% confident in this idea for our business, but I want to proceed regardless. I feel like it seems fun and the market is still definitely there- just not as large as if it had been summer time. Oh well. One of the cool things we can do to help our designs really sell is by posting them on social media and having our audience and potential consumers vote on which are the coolest. That way we’ll be sure about the market and being able to turn profitable quickly. Thus, I’m looking forward to finally being able to start this, which should be underway within a couple weeks at most. 

#3

Initially, I was a bit skeptical about Gladwell’s concept of the tipping point, but using epidemics to show it in action really helped. We always hear about the epidemics- aids, HIV, Ebola- but that’s all they are: epidemics. We distance ourselves from what they really are, as Gladwell did a great job communicating, and instead think of them as large phenomenon that just occur as if out of thin air. While there may not be a patient zero directly responsible for each epidemic, there certainly are those who tip the balance and break the long held equilibrium. It seems so surreal to acknowledge it for what it is, but that’s largely due to how hard it must to be grasp the fact that a select few were responsible for national or global scaled outbreaks. For HIV, there was Gaetan Dugas who had sexual relations with 2,500 men. That right there is very hard to believe. But that very hard to believe imbalance is the tipping point, causing all the men Dugas infected to infect other men, spreading HIV to the point where it grew exponentially and became an epidemic. It’s sort of like a domino effect in that a chain reaction is set off, spreading the contagion, whatever it may be. Without the rapid spread, there would be no domino effect, and thus no epidemic. That isn’t to say there wouldn’t be an HIV problem somewhere, because there would be, but only in one location where it’s at equilibrium and won’t spread rapidly. It’s also interesting how small the things that set off the domino effect can be. It’s typically some insignificant thing causing the contagion to spread, forcing it out of its state of equilibrium in one location. Even though Gladwell was just accused of plagiarism, you’ve got to give it to the guy; he’s got some interesting ideas.

#2

One of the very recent projects I’m working on is with the 21^st Century Fund. We’re planning to create an incentive for Brookline High seniors to want to donate, no matter how small a donation, to benefit classmates in need of a college scholarship. Although we are a very wealthy town and school overall, there are still students who would benefit greatly from financial aid. Our idea is to use wristbands as a gift for those seniors who do choose to donate because they are very cost effective on our part, and they’re also something people would enjoy having- even if only a little bit. At this point in time, we’re sort of frozen in terms of going forwards because the actual opportunity for seniors to donate is a few months away, close to when graduation preparation begins. Lucky for us, school administrators realized how plausible and good of an idea this is, so we’re receiving much needed help and access to resources that would otherwise be unavailable to us. That in itself is amazing because it shows how students can work well and collaborate with faculty outside of the strictly academic atmosphere. As lucky as we are to have that, most other high schools aren’t nearly as blessed. This only gives us a stronger incentive to want to give back to our fabulous community. Among the awesome things the town has agreed to help us with is actually implementing the donation feature into the online store for when students need to check out their graduation gown and cap or what not. This feature makes it very easy to collect and manage the donations without having to do it old school- by hand. While I’m very new to this type of work, I’m also very excited to take part in it and very eager to see it all the way through.

#1

While the contagiousness factor of any trend is indisputable, the concept of the tipping point is a little bit more complex. He doesn't give a clear, concrete definition to the phenomena, but rather a broad and more general one. According to him, "The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point" (12). The spreading of a something that turns it into a trend makes sense, I agree with him there. Once something is done by someone and seen by others, others do it and have it seen by even more, resulting in exponential growth in how many others are exposed to it- whatever it may be. Even if the others don't copy the original and do it, they've seen it be done. That right there- just seeing it- results in acknowledging it. Acknowledgement and thinking about something can expand to talking about it or sharing it, etc. The final result is that the something became trendy, due to its exposure. On the other hand, the tipping point is a limit for that something, it seems, which I disagree with while my understanding isn't crystal clear (for now). Simply put, it's like when something is so trendy, that it's no longer trendy. Let's say an odd product started off niche. Then it caught fire and went from selling thousands of units a year to hundreds of thousands the next year. Next it, it sold tens of millions. Is it still niche? No, it's been selling exponentially more all of a sudden and proving it to be a product desired by the masses; a normal, mainstream product. Honestly, I don't think this is what Gladwell was getting at, at least not in the marketplace aspect, but I can't quite grasp what he was going for. Bear with me as I keep reading and try to get a better sense of what Gladwell's ideas all boil down to.