What's inspiring about a dusty patch of ground in Venice, Calif., populated with a few scraggly weeds and hemmed in by a chain link fence? Plenty, according to the team at 72andSunny's in-house creative residency, 72U.
The six-member group looked at the forlorn piece of property and saw an opportunity for a community gathering spot and open-air workspace. Using crowdsourced info, they spent eight weeks creating a 1,500-square-foot pop-up park with free wi-fi, portable desks, fences that convert to tables and art installations. The space on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, meant to "inspire and connect the community," its designers say, will be open for nine months.
It's the latest project from 72U, which gathers creative thinkers from outside the traditional ad world, tosses them together for three months and challenges them to create art-meets-technology-meets-culture concepts. Other fruits of the program's labor include a Craigslist-style interactive music video and two four-story murals about privacy in the digital age.
