Posted on Thu 21 Jul 2016
Park the Larks
Reflecting on the last couple of weeks Letting old things go and welcoming new ideas
Posted by
Anna Horton Cremin
I uses games and play to bring people together in new and unexpected ways. I uses playful interventions to talk about complex issues including what we want our future world to be like.Project
Playful Art for Public Places: Watershed New Talent Residency 2016
Exploring ways to combine art and technology, to create social and playful experiences between strangers.Another busy two weeks at Pervasive Media Studio. We found putting together the presentation for last week's Lunchtime Talk was really useful. It made us pin down some questions we want to explore over the next 3 months, and gave us a chance to present the testing we did with the Larks outside in Champion Square. It was great chance to invite feedback on our intial ideas.
We had a great meeting with Victoria yesterday to talk through our presentation and our thought processes over the last few weeks. Lots of questions were being opened up, and we decided that it was time to leave the Larks behind.
Sophie and I spent the rest of yesterday mindmapping all the ideas we had around our interest in playing in public space.
Some of the things that started to stand out:
SOCIAL
• How can we encourage people to talk in person?
• How do we stop people following the blue-dot?
• How can we make spaces more social?
TRANSIENT SPACES
• How can we interrupt the zombie flow of the city?
• What sites would be good/in need of a more social space, and how could this transform the space?
CHANCE ENCOUNTER
• How can we encourage strangers to meet?
• Being aware of their surroundings and each other
REQUIRES/SUGGESTS 2 OR MORE PLAYERS
• Encourage collaboration / co-operation
INTERACTION
• What is the invitation?
• What familiar mechanisms and visual clues can we use for person to intuitively interact?
We’re going to spend the next few days breaking this down further, thinking about what an audience journey might look like; who is the person, what is the narrative, what is the crisis, what does our artwork help them overcome, what do they take away?
Next week we’re planning to have some simple interactions ready to test out. We are both interested in repurposing street furniture as the starting point for these interactions. After our meeting with David we’ve brought a couple rotary encoders to start playing with to get bollard-plungers and bench-levers ready!