There are two things that commissioners and designers of work that engages the public need to focus hard on just now:
People are leading increasingly static lives.
And to win their involvement, they need to be offered compelling, not compulsory experiences.
These two facts of life are at the centre of trends like sustainability and localism - but somehow the complexity of the words and what they refer to can get in the way.
Me and several creative/professional teams I've pulled together are working on all sorts of projects just now - and the centre of operations is the office whiteboard:
We're helping
- public and private organizations in the development sector engage with communities
- a major fashion retailer in the U.K. promote the idea of collective creativity
- people living in a low-income neighborhood share experience and knowledge using online media
- an entrepreneur to start a new food co-operative that will be the subject of a series of primetime TV shows in the U.K.
- and an international cultural relations agency support an elite "flight-school" of urban entrepreneurs
And these all involve designing programmes of user-friendly, interactive experiences that trigger collaboration and help people achieve whatever they want to achieve more effectively.
A key to success is to structure a sequence of experiences that take people on a journey that has a larger cumulative meaning - much like a director writes a screenplay or time-lapse photographer frames motion:
What's exciting is to see this turned in to real life - and it doesn't come much better than a project that I came across on a visit to the USA late last year.
City Harvest is a public project in Philadelphia in which inmates of the city prison system start vegetable seedlings in prison gardens and greenhouses:
The seedlings are then taken to maturity at dozens of community gardens across the city:
Then SHARE, a nonprofit network that provides food to area food cupboards across the city, facilitates distribution of the grown produce to low-income neighborhoods, often to the very areas in which the families of the prison-growers live.
City Harvest is an inspiration. Why?
Because it is a project that expresses all of the warmness of sustainability and localism but also speaks to their cold reality - we lead increasingly static lives and to overcome this for the public good, there's value in creating a connected sequence of industrious, easy, participatory steps.
The initiative also respects a magic ingredient that is a key to all entertainment and largely
missing from talk about "top/down", "bottom-up",
"grassroots/non-grassroots" activity led by public and private organizations: we like things that are compelling, rather than compulsory.
Things that are compelling rather than compulsory make life worth living - and that goes for X-Factor, Celebrity Big Brother, even fierce fashion worn by Daphne Guinness, not just stuff that's useful and worthwhile.
It's also a value at the centre of the most successful platform for human interaction and empowerment of our age: the internet.
Images of City Harvest courtesy of PHS (The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society). Source lost for Happy Balls and skateboarder time-lapse (sorry!)
