a conversation about space - physical and virtual - how it shapes our interactions and how our interactions shape it
Post-it notes for neighbors
Author: alf22 Feb
Post-it notes for neighbors: post-it notes to share knowledge and build a sense of community
I’ve just read about an interesting project Post-it-notes-for-neighbors by Cathy Chang, an artist, designer and urban planner on the Urban Omnibus.
Cathy Chang noticed that people use public spaces to post information to share with others. She also noticed that people don’t know each other (in the line of the Bowling alone argument of Putnam).
Starting from the statement:
“Residents are brimming with local knowledge, from the trivial to the empowering: the best slice of pizza, the nearest place to donate clothes, the latest news on the power outage, the lowdown on yesterday’s community board meeting. All of these fragments of local information are dispersed amongst a population within a defined area, and lots of people would benefit from the knowledge and resources of others“, Cathy Chang asks:
“For one, how can our public spaces be better places for sharing information? How can we harness the collective knowledge of a neighborhood?”
To explore this question, she created a project “I lived” where post-it notes to fill in where posted on different windows of stores in Carroll Garden and Cobble Hill where people tell about how long they’ve been living in a neighborhood and how much they pay for their place.
I like this project which again is an attempt to “make things visible” - information about people’s private lives. More generally, it’s about information sharing and building a sense of community in a physical space - a neighborhood. Reading about it I could not help thinking of my study of public online forums on knowledge management…
Last, it’s about creating this sense of community through messages, post-it notes, stuck on public spaces.
al
3 Responses for "Post-it notes for neighbors"
hey, I liked this project a lot too, and I’m really interested in community engagement and information sharing.
As gets noted in the comments on the Urban Omnibus page, the physicality and simplicity of the I’VE LIVED post-its help to contribute to their success. As a visible element of the street environment, as well as providing useful information they invite people to reflect on where they have settled and that they are part of a community.
The project seems to emphasize a sense of place and belonging - if i imagine this being done in my street it would be hard to resist filling in a note, and i think people would feel a certain amount of pride, almost, in doing so.
In the context of this conversation though it would also be nice to explore the question, alongside the concrete urban setting, of how *online* environments can be better or worse places for harnessing the collective knowledge of a neighbourhood [of course with the caveat that it’s easy to forget that only a limited proportion of the local population depnding on where you live may have access to the resources necessary to join in online].
Does anyone have any thoughts or good examples of successful community blogs and what seems to work particularly well on them and why?
cheers milena
glad you liked the project. I agree the simplicity and the accessibility is key. Moreover, as noted by Cathy Chang it seems that it’s a question that everyone is wondering about:”the need for”, the “meaning of” the information are important elements to take into account.
as for “successful blogs”, you might want to check the NY Times article I posted a few weeks ago (in January I believe) on virtual neighborhoods and community blogs. It also make the think of Eureka, an online community created by Xerox for their technicians based on the research by an ethnographer Julian Orr. Orr showed that repairing copiers was not a solitary activity but that it involved collaboration between the different technicians that shared war stories at breakfast and lunch. Eureka was developed as an extension of this informal (co-located) community of practice.
You might also look up the work of Bonnie Nardi:
her paper on Why we blog? Indeed to understand how to create and support a blog, one needs to understand why we blog and create a blog that will fulfill certain “needs”: http://darrouzet-nardi.net/bonnie/pdf/Nardi_why_we_blog.pdf
You might also look at her book with Vicky O’Day on Information Ecologies mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=3420
It looks at the role of technology in specific contexts, specific communities (offices, libraries, hospitals…). Some of these studies might be interesting to think about how to create a blog for a neighborhood community.
If I hear / read more about the topic, I’ll let you know.
al
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