By supporting groups to co-design activities that enable people to experience and share feelings about public spaces they are passing through in a fun and yet meaningful way, they might be able to better understand what people feel about their neighbourhood and how to make it a better place. But it’s important that these “missions” are knitted into the social and physical fabric of the public space they “pop-up” in:
Random spots of kindness — “spot the smile”
Have you ever looked at cartoons of objects that come alive and wished you had that where you live? You may think that this is the least sophisticated of all the missions for a treasure hunt on economic alternatives, but sometimes it’s the simplest actions that have the biggest impacts, and that’s why chose it for the Transeuropa Festival.
Looking for smiles across the market nudges people to discover the nooks and crannies to go off the beaten path, to discover the unknown.
It also encourages you to look for smiles, not just smiles on stickers but smiles on people’s faces and seeing smiles suddenly makes you feel good (so much so that the person putting the stickers got addicted to it and put up so many stickers of smiles that no-one found all of them!).
It makes you look away from what makes you feel unsafe to look around to who you could interact with.
If this approach could be a cousin to the “spot the fly” technique described in Nudge, what “spot the…” could you use where you live?
