This is some research into some initial ideas for our design practice brief on getting people to give more knowledge.
I had the idea of using notes and holding an event where people would write down a piece of knowledge on a note and stick it somewhere, and then you would build up a massive array of knowledge.
Heres some research into that methodology:
This a photograph i found on flickr, it had the caption "The walls of an old tavern in Verona, said to be Juliet's house, is covered with these love notes."
This is a story about the power of post it notes.
The Power Of A Post-It Note
My father recently ended up in the hospital during the same week the fall semester began. In the midst of several days of uncertainty and worry, I had to leave for one of my classes just as he was going into surgery. A classroom full of unfamiliar faces was the last place I wanted to be that day, and the entire 20-minute drive to campus I felt like turning around and saying, “Screw it, a one-credit course isn’t that important.”
Because my mother was still at the hospital, I decided not to bail on class. I walked across campus, which was empty and lonely since I was enrolled in an evening course. But when I approached the entrance to the building, right at eye level was a pink Post-it note stuck to the glass door. I peeled it off; it read, “You are LOVED.”
It’s hard to describe how something so small and so simple made me feel like the world was on my side in such a stressful time. I stuck the Post-it inside the front cover of my textbook and kept it there as a reminder.
When I left class an hour later, the Post-it note I’d taken had been replaced with another one. This time it read, “Thank you for existing!” I left it there for someone else to find—someone who might coincidentally stumble across it after a particularly hard or demanding day.
We all exist on the planet together and we seem to underestimate the power we have to impact the lives of one another. Even though you don’t know most of the people you pass on the street or in the grocery store, you really can affect their lives. The person who wrote “You are LOVED” on a Post-it note and stuck it to the door will probably never know that they truly made a difference in someone’s day. And all it took was three words written on a small square of paper.
I wish more of us took the time to consider the feelings of the strangers around us. Before I found the pink Post-it note, I rarely looked at the people surrounding me and thought, “I wonder what’s going on in their lives right now. I wonder if they need support or encouragement.” After all, how many of us could find a Post-it note that reads, “You are LOVED” or “Thank you for existing!” and be angry about it? More than the fact that the Post-it note reminded me I am, indeed, loved, I found it amazing that someone deliberately wrote out these positive messages for random people to find. They didn’t know who would find them or who would read them, and it didn’t matter. It only mattered that someone would read them.
We each have the power to affect the lives of others in a positive way. Imagine if each of us wrote an encouraging message on a Post-it note today and stuck it somewhere random. We would be surrounded by positivity. And it could happen in a matter of seconds.
A month later, I still have the “You are LOVED” Post-it inside my textbook. At the end of the semester when I sell the textbook, I’ll leave it there. You never know how much impact that one little slip of paper can have.
(Source: The Power of a Post-It Note)
Brazilian plastic footwear maker Melissa worked with 3M to create an amazing opening exhibit at their São Paulo flagship store, Galeria Melissa, using 350,000 colored Post-its. 30,000 of them had spontaneous messages of love written on them from local fans. The end result is beautifully captured in this time-lapse video that took 5 months to finish.
