Sidekick Studios was set up for one very simple reason – to use the internet in creative ways to redesign services and make society better.
Loneliness, truancy, binge drinking, political breakdown, community collapse, worklessness, rising healthcare costs…it’s not like there is a shortage of problems to solve. Now that the City have had their party, there’s not much money in the coffers to solve them with either. Getting more out of public services, for less, is our generation’s challenge.
We’re not pessimists though. We don’t subscribe to the theory that our generation has had it particularly bad. In fact, we think we’re kind of lucky. Our parents went through their own troubled times, but the thing is, they never had the internet. And the internet is ace.
The fried chicken grime videos are fun, but the best bits of the internet are about helping people freecycle, fight filth with forks and flowers, provide loans that change lives, coordinate disaster relief, micro-volunteer from their phone, or just plain and simple, get off their backside.
These examples point to a new way of doing things, where public services are reinvented, redefined, de-centralised, disrupted, co-produced and [insert buzzword here]. Basically, made cheaper and better.
So that’s what we do. The grown-up word is social innovation. For us, it’s about making society work that little bit better and earning a living along the way. Let’s see how we go.