Building Community - One Swing At a Time
*Each Monday, Prophet’s Chief Curator and Provocateur, Andy Stefanovich, or a member of our innovation team* shares a Monday on-ramp with Prophet employees across the globe. We’ll begin sharing them here, and encourage you to join the conversation by answering questions and providing your own comments below. Happy Monday!
Often the simplest ideas provide the strongest impact. Take a Tampa Bay Florida group and their approach to community building. Rather than rely on large scale festivals or construction projects, the group has gone “micro grassroots” (my term) — showing up way below the radar. Forget book clubs and potlucks. These guys (and gals) are hanging swings.
Swings Tampa Bay is “a spontaneous community building organization! We hang hand-made hand-painted Swings all over Tampa Bay on trees, random structures, inside buildings, off of bridges…anywhere and everywhere.” That from their website.
So why swings? Co-founders Hunter Payne and Reuben Pressman contend swings, hung in unexpected places around the community “instantly sparks curiosity, refreshes our community’s perception of our environment and encourages immediate interaction with people we may have otherwise walked right past. Swings provide opportunities to share stories, ideas, and a set of arms to push each other!”
The group started hanging swings as an environmental design project. They began to notice the “simple power a random swing had on our community: people that would have never even acknowledged each other were immediately magnetized to their new discovery and began sharing warm conversation and new experiences while pushing each other high up into the air.”
A swing in a playground has a pretty distinct purpose — entertain a kid. A swing hung on the pedestrian bridge of I-275 has another purpose entirely. Viewed through the lens of momentum, Tampa Bay Swings illustrates the notion of “culture” (or in this case a community) as made up of values, rituals, and symbols.
The values - sharing, collaboration, interaction, and acknowledgement - are supported through the simplicity of a swing. Even when people aren’t using them, the brightly painted swings act as a symbol and evoke in people a sense of community — the possibilities of an interaction.
The “ritual” of swinging takes on a whole new purpose. A purpose of provoking and encouraging conversations through discovery. And using those conversations to build community.
Finally, even hanging the swing becomes a ritual of sorts. “We don’t get permission for all of them and we never really have an exact location picked out. We just find a fun place that speaks to us and go for it!” The “guerilla” approach and unexpected locations further supports the idea of community building based on unexpected interactions.
What are ways we can create unexpected interactions in our offices, or with our clients? How might these spark the formation of a community? What is going to be your office’s version of a swing?
*This week’s on-ramp was brought to you by Geof Hammond in our Richmond office.
