Calling all my friends who get amazingly bored at work! I have a great new time killer for you!
Go and grab those dust-accumulating post-it pads (the physical ones we mean) along with your imagination and start creating! Build patterns & bring your favorite characters to life on your office windows… while concealing the dullness of your ordinary day. Crazy idea? Not necessarily… go and ask French multinational employees @ Ubisoft, BNP Paribas or Orange based in Montreuil.
These, who silently suffered from big boredom disorders at their Parisian workplaces, had one summery day the idea to start sticking these colorful tiny pieces on their windows attempting to reproduce all sorts of famous retro-gaming & Disney characters (to start with). Some say it was Ubisoft people who took the lead with their Space Invader aliens not knowing they were about to enter a fierceful war with their BNP Paribas neighbors located just across the street. These responded by reproducing the same late 70ss game gun aimed at destroying the famous aliens, then Societe Generale and France24 joined the war….
Subsequently we’ve seen lovely Pikachus, Kirbys and also many other characters from Nintendo’s Mario saga blooming on their windows and those of many other large corporations. And like any other street-memes, a real battle flourished across the Parisinian business districts which gained a lot of press coverage by local & international cultural media.
The usage of Post-it (or any other sticky notes) in art is certainly not new. Contemporary artists such as R. B. Kitaj, Rebecca Murtaught or Jésica López have given these notes a meaningful (and economically viable) usage transforming it into a widely recognized artistic practice.
There’s been such level of fascination for this practice that companies such as 3M (owner of Post-it brand) have understood the importance of exploiting spontaneous trends like this one. Specially now that office stationery is generally regarded as something from the past: they’re now kindly & freely supplying Parisian office soldiers for their creative wars.
And the main question over the Internet is: who will win the post-it war, and how? There are so many websites who’ve taken such dilemma seriously… Facebook or the branded website Postitwar (with already over 40K facebook followers) try to answer these questions with the visitor’s participation of course.
So even if it seems stupid… why not importing this “team-building” activity into your daily routine? If you don’t have it in your office already then you should seriously consider organizing some internal post-it wars and try creating colorful compositions wherever there’s a window (so passersby can see it too).
Even people at large multinationals can be artists nowadays!
(Photos via defense-92.fr via Postitwar.com)
