Tollefson Plaza Conquered: Secrets Revealed
Inspired by the Frost Park take over I rallied team In-Tacoma and we made our way down to the cement deadzone in Downtown Tacoma Called Tollefson Plaza. We decided to hold an experiment to see what would happen if Tollefson Plaza was turned into a real world wiki for a day. (A wiki is website or similar online resource which allows users to add and edit content collectively.)
With a large bucket of chalk in hand we began to draw in the center. I created the message “imagine.” very large in the center to get people to start thinking about this space and with the period its quite actionable. We then created a defined chalk area with the word “free” around it and a simple task of “Have Fun”.
We were interested to see if people would actually participate.
Leaving the park we came back 2 hours later to find that people were indeed participating and I had to add more chalk for people to use. We did this throughout the entire day.
Conclusion:
- People are ready to use this space
- People do some pretty wild things in this space like, take off there pants and jump in the fountain.
- Over 30 people participated and only one chalk penis
- People that wrote inappropriate things were moderated by others
- Security won’t stop you from chalking
- People created waypoints to help people find things in Tacoma, arrows pointing to the cupcake place for example.
