Playing Pianos and Practising Ping Pong for social good
You might remember seeing something last year about Pianos in streets. The Play Me Play Me I’m Yours / The Street Pianos Project with Artist Luke Jerram placed pianos on city streets around the world for members of the public. London, New York, Sao Paulo, Barcelona, Belfast. Here's a video:
The project not only saw people adopt pianos:
but also artists and musicians take the opportunity to leverage them for their own creative output:
Now It might seem pretty random, and it probably was for many people walking past any one of those pianos at the time. But there's a method to this randomness. It has a purpose, and that's to get people active or at least create peoples awareness of becoming involved in arty stuff. In it's British leg, the participatory arts organisation known as Sing London, was behind the event. Now they've gotten involved in something as equally playful and participatory as this.
Which leads me to why I started writing this in the first place. It came in the form of a tweet from Londoner @aimeeford
Which I noticed this morning. It is refering to the recently launched series of events Ping! London: which is seeing Ping Pong tables popping-up all across London. It's message? Stop whatever you're doing and play sport.
Now the Ping! project has only just started, I know. But it has started with a really good combination of randomness, play, relevance and timeliness.
What I feel is so good about this concept is that it does it in a way that is both timely (by capturing the imagination of the public in the lead up to the 2012 Olympic games) and is timely in a locally relevant way ( inspiration that without a doubt bounces quite naturally off this infamous drunken speech about whiff-whaff by the much loved London Mayor Boris Johnson.)
This gets me thinking. If unlikely situations provide us with the best of stories, what could be more engaging than bringing that to people as some sort of ambient event, something that gets people to engage and interact with your message in a common social space?
Not to mention the fact that it involves the pop-cultural novelty of ping pong itself. Which I hope (and I'm sure so do they) will ignite a whole new craze for table tennis in London itself, enough so that Public Ping Pong becomes pop-cultural hit, at least, resurging it's popularity on the social web.
When you think about it that way, it really is a little bit of genius. The fun factor makes it a piece of co-communication. Everyone is involved - everyone participates in the message, or the story that they are trying to get across to the public about Pianos or Ping Pong: that is, arts or sports...
If that's the case, inviting engagement - in the form of real life participation - and injecting a bit of fun is perhaps the key way you can really get your message accross. It's probably square one of social media and is what I think is at the core of social creativity.
Forget the kind of media - the real medium is the people involved and what their feeling while they are involved in it. Are they having fun?
What both of these examples does is that it gets people involved in a piece of creative communication for a social cause that might otherwise be ignored. And in the best scenario it encourages them to have fun and share it with others, by word of mouth, social networking, mobile or video.
That's probably why when it comes to communicating a social message, live acts are really effective in getting people's attention.
It shows how participation can prove irresistable when you hand the tools to play with over to your community to own themselves.
Ping! London is the result of different groups and organizations coming together. From non profits like the English Table Tennis Association and Sing London to the creative agency karmarama and Yahoo.
What both Pianos and Ping Pong appear to have in common is pretty simple. Play. That's what makes it irresistable for people to become involved, making them both the medium and the message for each project. By making participation playful, interaction - both social and creative - becomes a co-creative social experience.
