BARTERING IN PUBLIC SPACES
A social experiment.
We conducted a social experiment where we displayed hand crafted miniatures (made by us) and in order to take our sculpture one needs to leave something to its value according to them.
We held this session on two different days to understand the human flow and also to get this idea up and running.
EXPERIMENT 1
Not trying to be cheesy here ...
Set-up within the campus
One can notice how people were interested in understanding what is going on and how a few exchanges have already been made.
Work stations were provided if you wanted to hand craft something for the exchange
Items exchanged for the pizza slices
EXPERIMENT 2
Wish you were beer
Items arranged and up and running for the exchange
Items in return for the beer pints
CONCLUSION
What I noticed was that the arrangement of the space, the announcement of the event and the content on the table all mattered a lot. In the very first experiment I used white clay instead of something colorful which got people's attention and they were pretty excited about it but not everyone picked it up which makes me assume that people don't enjoy plain objects , especially when it's a replica of something colorful and something most of us love. Since many of them were unprepared and no one wanted to sacrifice something personal they started placing random objects just to increase their collection.
Hence with this semi success-failure scenario we held another round where people were well informed and this time the objects were colorful. That equation spelled success! And the fact that we kept a work station got them more engaged in this activity and various people who were strangers at one point were conversing about how to make something to get that lilac cupcake or that shark.
All in all, it was a knowledgeable exchange.
