CO:LAB
Human Right Here Campaign / Honorable Mention: Education + People’s Choice Nominee
The Human Rights Institute is an academic organization and part of the University of Connecticut. The Institute coordinates human rights initiatives and supports faculty and students who study human rights. They also promote human rights scholarship based on research in the social sciences, humanities and law.
Every year, the Institute hosts a conference with dozens of high profile scholars dealing with a key human rights issue. Typically these have focused on topics such as transnational concerns and inflicted suffering—things that happen “over there” on foreign land.
For 2009, the conference took a significant departure: the focus was turned to human rights issues in the USA. The campaign CO:LAB developed for the Human Rights Institute 2009 conference initiative focuses on a simple premise: by declaring our humanity right here and right now, we also declare that there is no distinction between “over-here” and “over-there.”
As part of a vision to intensify outreach efforts into both scholarly and positive-activist groups, CO:LAB developed a mark that combined both the intellectual content of the Institute and the more emotional evocation embedded in the idea of human rights.
CO:LAB developed a simple t-shirt that doubled as an all-inclusive “flag-in-the-ground” and global position indicator for anyone willing to wear it. They then used social media tools to recruit photographers from across the country to participate in the project. CO:LAB shipped out shirts to willing collaborators who then documented portraits and stories in their respective communities, capturing the spirit of being human in the USA. The photographers all gave broad permissions to use their images for the greater good. From those photographs, CO:LAB generated a poster and postcard campaign to promote the cornerstone of the initiative: the conference, itself.
Additionally, CO:LAB created a micro-site that archives the initial portraits and correlating stories from the first round of documentation. The micro-site serves as an impetus for viewers to continue narrative contributions to the project, and encourages them to learn more and to participate. Therefore, as a campaign, what starts as a dialogue using social media also resolves with a dialogue using social media as users share their own images, stories and encouragements in an on-line group. Before the conference, t-shirts declared the wearer as being “human right here.” Coming out of the conference, participants are given shirts delivering the by-product of their new deepened insight with the graphic “human right now.” The intention here is that wearing the shirt would lead to more discussion, and through those discussions more awareness—and then, to the change we all want.
CO:LAB + The Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.
do-gooders:
Creative Director, Designers / CO:LAB
Photographers / Derek Dudek and volunteers
