The third place game

Last thursday in Caloundra, Queensland, I helped facilitate a game about third places with storyteller Gail Robinson and city librarian Louise Bauer, as a prelude to their third place forum. We're preparing a write-up: meanwhile here's my short account.

The Third Place Forum was established as a libraries initiative, but we wanted to explore the characteristics of third places generally in order to bring out some tensions we anticipated around 'community'/public, public/commercial, inclusive/cliquey, and so on.

I worked online with Louise and Gail for a week or two before I went out, sharing ideas for what could be done, and we came up with a five-part exercise. About a dozen good folk, enough for three groups, were recruited into the Caloundra art gallery early on thursday evening.

The game started with a plenary flipchart exercise to warm people up and get a set of attributes of 'community life'  -  features like 'inclusive,' 'green,' 'supportive' - which they believed to be important.

Each group was then given a set of cards representing suggested third places, and asked to discuss each one and record some notes about the features of community which it relates to, is there a cost at point of use, what are the key attributes of the third place, who uses it, and who's excluded?

Groups then took the cards to a large-scale aerial map of the city to locate examples of the third places they'd worked on. Anticipating that the cards would be clustered, we'd grandly invested in some toilet roll stands and clothes pegs, only the best will do, in order to show where the places occurred on the map. This classy high-tech solution had the advantage of adding a physical third dimension to the map as it developed.

The third stage of the game required each group to spend a few minutes developing an imaginary character and inventing a set of problems that the character faced. (With this technique in particular we acknowledge the ever-present influence of Drew Mackie and David Wilcox, (see their Useful Games site). One of the 'characters' was in fact a small family, the others were an old man living alone and a young professional woman who is wheelchair-bound.

The character was then 'introduced' to the next group who had to spend time developing 'a week in the life' of their character and recording this on the sheet. Whenever the group made reference to a third place, they noted it on a small colour-coded post-it, which was afterwards removed to the map.

The final phase was to discuss, in plenary the narratives constructed by the groups about their characters, and what lessons might be learned from the card-clustered map.

There are follow-up phases too: first, some insights may be gained from an analysis of the notes made on the cards (when I get round to it) and these can be explored with participants online. Secondly, participants suggested that it might be interesting to explore third place use during a week in their own life, so we're thinking about how best to follow this up: it won't be a representative survey but we could test some methodology.

On the whole it worked very well for a first run, especially the links from one phase of the game to another. We haven't cracked the uncertainties you get when you mix fictional characters or venues with real, mapped places. And we may have needed to be less selective and more comprehensive in our list of third places (which would be a challenge). A final point is that it was noticeable how these Aussie participants, with their unfailingly positive outlook, managed to sort most of the characters' problems and left them living pretty much happily ever after. I'll be surprised if we can get a similar effect running the game in the UK.

Once we've done the write-up and clarified next steps, I'll post again about this.