William Jewell College’s University Innovation Fellows Take On Las Vegas
co-written by Benjamin Shinogle & Bradley Dice
While the city of Las Vegas tends to be associated with material pursuits, William Jewell College’s University Innovation Fellows examined how entrepreneurship, innovation, and marketing play a massive role in the way visitors to the desert wonderland experience its opulence, and in turn, how Vegas shaped our understanding of these topics. As our group of University Innovation Fellows visited the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this January, we were confronted by questions about the nature of innovation, particularly in technology. How might we understand the value of new technologies in our lives? What is the fine line between living for technology and leading a lifestyle enhanced by it? Where does reality end and simulation begin? The Fellows of William Jewell College were able to tap into these questions by auditing the stimuli, grandiose entrepreneurship, and blaring marketing that lavishes the city of Las Vegas — and seeing the everyday experiences that lie beneath that façade.
Our primary adventure in Vegas was visiting the Consumer Electronics Show. This is an international convention of Fortune 500 companies and startups alike, sharing a platform to show off their latest technologies. Because of the state-of-the-art technologies offered, the show demonstrated the vast differences that can exist between what technology can do and what the world is ready to utilize en masse. For example, Toyota brought a radically designed iteration of their hydrogen car concept. While a groundbreaking technology that could forever change the transportation industry, the concept must become affordable and practical. Some “showcase” or “concept” technologies of this kind are straight from an R&D lab, and probably see little-to-no customer testing or feedback iteration, beyond that necessary to make the underlying science work and to have a nice one-off demonstration. From Kia’s self-driving car to drones that make decisions for themselves, see-through televisions and a wardrobe that cleans and presses clothes automatically, many promising inventions of the next few years will need an entrepreneurial mindset attached before they can be successful in the marketplace.
Our visit to the Downtown Container Park (it’s right next to the massive fire-breathing praying mantis robot — you can’t miss it) was a wonderful experimental ground for testing hypotheses and making observations about entrepreneurship and marketing in Vegas. Small shops located inside refurbished storage containers, stacked three stories high, make up the Container Park. An open play area for children rests between the blocks of shops. We explored how this unique shopping center markets to its visitors and tourists through promotion, pricing, place, and innovative products.
One theme repeatedly considered throughout our tour was a constant challenge to our previously held concepts of reality. While exploring the Venetian, Caesar’s Palace, and New York, New York, then standing next to the celebrity wax-replicas at Madame Tussaud’s, it became clear that imitations were very much a part of the Vegas experience. What is more, even those with the vaguest references to their real-world counterparts were regarded as the real thing. Often quipped a “Disneyland for adults,” the Vegas strip is certainly a fantasy; after all, we were not actually in Venice or Caesar’s Rome. Yet after a short time this fantasy becomes convincing in a way — especially when paired with such a stimulating environment — to the point that it easily becomes confused with actual reality. This pointed out the deep understanding that the architects of Las Vegas masterpieces have of their customers and of the human psyche. How might we leverage this deep understanding of how to direct human behavior through design in order to encourage civic engagement and community good?
The simulations formed by brick and mortar took a more virtual turn at the Consumer Electronics Show. One of the most celebrated technologies in this space were virtual-reality headsets that allow the wearer to look around inside a computerized room by simply turning one’s head. Donning these creates a very realistic sensation that one is indeed flying over the Grand Canyon or zooming through a Vegas party. No longer constrained by a single perspective, it became incredibly easy to forget the surroundings of a bustling convention center.
Visiting CES and seeing Las Vegas showed a multitude of ways in which innovative technologies, entrepreneurship, and tourist-centric industries collide. Both the city and the conference left our Innovation Fellows with a profound awareness of how experiences can be designed for an end-user — and a recognition that design cannot be separated from its context. As always, learning experiences like this can generate more questions than answers. We wonder, How might we change impulses to buy into impulses to create? How might we design our world to be navigated intuitively and efficiently, as tourist-centric cities must be? How might we ensure that sustainable technologies of the future reach those who would most benefit from their implementation?
