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.

Youtube have announced a massive social filmaking project called Life in a Day , aiming to tell a story about what it is like to be alive on 24th July 2010.

 It promises to be the biggest social-filmaking venture, not to mention the most ambitious and mainstream example of Crowdsourcing, ever.

They've even got two outstanding filmakers on board to oversee it.

Directing and putting it all together will be Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland)  and it will be produced by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) and his company Scott Free Productions.

Anyone can contribute -  all that is needed is that you capture  something about your own particular life on July 24, 2010, on camera, and upload the footage to the Life in a Day channel sometime before July 31.

Footage will be curated and combined into a feature-length film for next year’s Sundance Film Festival.

That means you, your boss or your neigbour's dog could have the chance to show at the prestigious event, and make history while you're at it.  If it is yours that's picked it'll be credited as co-directors and 20 of them will be flown to Festival for the world premiere .

LG Entertainment is backing the project as part of the Life’s Good campaign and to support the creation of quality online content.

Hear Ridley Scott give his take:

The sheer scale of the project, the fact that it has even been able to go ahead with such a strong backing, says a lot about where we are now in our ideas about creativity and collaboration.

It also says a lot about what socialised media enables us to achieve online, when we all get together. I'd even go so far as to say that it demonstrates a real shift in how we see creative production as a whole, sourcing footage from the crowd and then using the expert eyes of two film masters to curate the footage and sew it all together into a final piece of work.

It perhaps sets out to overturn one of the biggest oppositions to crowdsourcing as a an approach towards creative. Criticism such as this one outlined in wikipedia, the :

Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project.

It is also interesting, how, by sourcing footage from the crowd  for a story about life in one day there's the potential to make a profound statement, have a narrative that in it's nature is both internalised and introspecitve but universal all at once.

To put that in a nutshell, Macdonald says this about the project:

 “Life In A Day is a time capsule that will tell future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24 July 2010. It’s a unique experiment in social film-making, and what better way to gather a limitless array of footage than to engage the world’s online community.”

All in all, I think everyone agrees this is a phenomenal idea that has every potential to make history - not just for film, but for social creativity too.

via mashable and marketingweek