“Face-to-face communication is a fundamental human need. Whilst Faceback aims to empower individuals to create new face-to-face connections and friendships, just as importantly perhaps, the project acts as a catalyst for conversation and fresh thinking around these issues.”
Faceback’s inventor Katie Etheridge tells the story of how and why she created the hit ‘offline’ social networking game
In 2008 I was invited by an organisation called New Work Network to create a piece of work for a Live Art Festival that would encourage meetings between people who wouldn’t normally meet.
New Work Network recognised that even at professional gatherings and “networking” events there are so many barriers to meeting new people. Proximity does not always automatically mean connection as we see in many communities where it is possible to not know your neighbours.
At that time, I noticed that the novelty of online social networking was starting to wear off. People were becoming concerned with what happened to their images once they had put them online. Friends complained that they had never met many of their Facebook “friends”.
So I developed an antidote to online social networking, an art game designed to engineer 100’s of face to face encounters between strangers, and to free people from the pressures that often accompany live social networking, for example, thinking of something to say, or working out who you should be talking to, or plucking up the courage to approach someone you don’t know.
So this is how it works. At a Faceback event, your face is made into a badge. You choose a badge with someone else’s face on, and your mission is to meet that person and give them their face back!
The game creates a chain of random face-to-face meetings that unfolds over several hours, days or weeks. As a temporary community is formed, the badges become the currency for interaction and group belonging, enabling players to talk to people they don’t already know.
To see the game in action click here
I started experimenting with taking Faceback into different contexts. What if it could be played across a whole town? A whole neighbourhood? What kinds of meetings and connections could be made? What could Faceback do for community cohesion and wellbeing?
What had become clear even before the pandemic, is that at a time when we are told that we have never been more connected to each other via social media, online, and mobile technologies, charities are documenting extremely high levels of loneliness and social isolation. Research carried out in 2016 by British Red Cross found that 9 million people reported feeling always or often lonely.
So much of our communication is mediated through screens that we are having to re-learn how to communicate face to face. How to notice each other. How to relate to each other in real life.
Face-to-face communication is a fundamental human need. Whilst Faceback aims to empower individuals to create new face-to-face connections and friendships, just as importantly perhaps, the project acts as a catalyst for conversation and fresh thinking around these issues.
