What is the future value of the postal system?
Designers were asked to consider the following questions in order to produce a well rounded response to the above.
What external or contextual factors will impact their future value?
What current features of the postal system should remain unaltered?
What current features of the postal system should be repurposed?
What public and/or private sector partners should be engaged to bring that value to life?
Over the dozens of workshops we held, the resulting work formed emergent patterns which the facilitator and creative directors translated into the below categories.
Sustainability & Environmental Responsibility
What if the postal system's future value is innovating sustainability and environmental responsibility?
As focal points of disposable packaging and print materials, postal systems are in a unique position to influence sustainability practices. This is true across scales from consumer behaviour to business practice to policy.
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Circular economy opportunities
Postal services around the world are choked by junk mail, competing with vertically integrated private enterprise, and struggling to find a distinctive purpose in a world of mobile telecommunication. What might we do with this tremendous resource?
Digital & Mechanical Infrastructure
How might the postal system be uniquely positioned to shape digital and mechanical innovations?
Mechanical and computational automation, and how human factors shape and are shaped by those technologies, is a topic of great potential value. This opportunity space includes building new infrastructure in rural areas as well as revising existing infrastructure in urban centers.
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Balancing Human and Automated Interactions
What other services have achieved a high level of automation, and what can we learn from them? Synthesising the answers gathered from observations for the USPS allows the team to show the value in the existing human interaction of the USPS and develop strategies that add additional value with improved and new automated services.
Community, Publics and Heritage
What if the postal system's value was found in shaping the future of in-person and tangible human engagement?
Innovations in third spaces, social exchange, and cultural identity have quickly turned digital, irrespective of the long term impact of those changes. Can the original purpose of the postal system be the source of it’s future value?
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Physical Connection in a Digital Age
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Translating Value Between Digital and Physical Experiences
What social and cultural value of physical stamps can be identified and preserved in an era of digitization and optimization?
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What Can't Be An Email
Material analysis puts designers on a fast track to new insights, but designers can get caught up in status quo methods that hold them back. In this project you can see the high level of potential that a well curated object study can provide in a short amount of time. You can also see some blockers to getting the most out of this technique.
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Public Spaces for Civic Engagement
By zooming in on the second prompt of the brief, and leverage a wide variety of sites for their field work, this team quickly landed on a fresh proposition to get more value out of civic engagement efforts. What becomes possible when this is their strategy for future value?
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Building on Culture and Legacy
How much of what we perceive the USPS to be is reality? This team's designers examine the USPS through this question and narrow down on its role as a cornerstone public service. This team sees immense value in building on this aspect of the USPS legacy and culture.
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Connection is Value
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Economic Enfranchisement
How can the postal system enable new and small enterprises?
In this contemporary moment of independent enterprises struggling to compete with large global corporations, the postal system remains geographically and economically accessible to all. Is this the foundation of its future value?