MySpace — YourSpace — OurSpace
a participatory project for futuresonic
coming to Leeds in january 2009 &
space studios in London in June 2009
the chance to create your own RealSpace (NOT trademarked)
We would like to send all our thanks to the people who came to the café and made so many wonderful Spaces. We overwhelmed with the response and 95 Spaces were made.
During the five days, the networking aspect of the project, where you could leave messages for other participants, really took off. We had people finding flats in Cologne and school children from different schools exchanging phone numbers.
On the third day the project went viral with people bringing friends along, phoning each other to say that they had messages to pick up and spending time either in the café or outside the window. Some people had seen what we were doing and bought images or objects down to be included in their Space. Two people took the empty boxes away overnight and returned the next morning with completed Spaces.
There was an instance of account deletion, where a girl who had made a Space wasn't satisfied with it, made another one and asked us to remove the first one she made. We even had a couple of incidents of spamming where people leafletted Spaces that they thought might be interested in their club night based on what their Space looked like.
One morning, we even had a 'server crash' where one heavy Space was knocked out of the shelves, pulling two whole rows down with it.
People really took the project to heart and we feel extremely happy with the response from the participants, the support from Futuresonic, who found us the perfect space in the Northern Quarter and our hosts, the wonderful vegetarian Café Pop.
We would like to thank Kit, Drew and the Futuresonic team, the sociologists and ethnographers from the Universities of Manchester and Lancaster, Mat Fenton, Martin and Lee at café Pop and of course our collaborator for this project, Sian Robinson Davies.
MySpace — YourSpace — OurSpace is scheduled to be appearing again at Space Studios in London in June and Leeds in January 2009 — keep watching ThisSpace for more news.
more images on flickr
