Ping Pong Progress: Economic System Change Through Community Engagement

Changing our current economic system may seem like an insurmountable task, but Ralph Hall, associate professor in Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech, and Steven Licardi, a performance activist and social worker, are striving to make this easier.

    The two came together at a SciArt “collaboration incubator” hosted by the Center for Communicating Science in the spring of 2021, submitted a proposal to develop a community engagement event, and began brainstorming.

    Hall has worked in the field of sustainable development — meaning developing our economy sustainably — for nearly two decades. According to Hall, he has seen no real change since he started. Even when transformative ideas about economic change are heard in a talk or a paper, he explains, it is hard for audiences to take those ideas and implement real change. This question of “How do you plant these ideas [of alternative economic systems] in somebody's understanding of the world in a way that they don't forget?” became the driving force behind Hall and Licardi’s collaboration.

    To answer this question, Hall and Licardi ended up in a not-so-typical place: ping pong.

    While Hall is a faculty member, he is also an avid ping pong player. When he brought up his love of ping pong during their early conversations, Licardi realized that this was the key to their collaboration. By incorporating ping pong into their presentation, he says, they give “the gift.”

    The gift, as explained by Licardi, is the idea that “you, the facilitator, model vulnerability and honesty — and that makes people comfortable to do the same.” They hoped including ping pong in their presentations about community wealth building would allow them to give this gift and create a relationship between the audience and themselves as presenters/facilitators.

    At the beginning of their first event in October 2021, they asked audience members to bounce a ping pong ball using a ping pong bat by themselves and count how many times they could bounce it. They compared this to gross domestic product (GDP), the monetary measure of all the goods and services produced in a country during a certain period of time. This led to the question, “Why are we counting this?”

    They then had the audience switch to hitting the ball back and forth with other audience members while still counting the bounces. While this experience led to a lower count, it also led to more social interaction and fun. The next question generated was, “What should we be measuring, the count or the experience?” The simple act of bouncing a ball, Hall says, was able to reveal “the problem with economics at some level.”

    The next part of the event was led by Licardi. He had the audience play a theatre game called “Image of the Word” in which participants use their bodies to create a shape that, for them, represents a certain word. Guided by Licardi, the audience embodied words associated with current and possible future economic systems.

    This concept was expanded in the next part of the event to collaborative performances among multiple audience members working together to represent the current economic system and then a quick transition to a future economic system. These performances allowed the audience to embody the alternative economic ideas being shared in this event, Licardi said, making them more memorable.

    The final part of the event was developed by a student, Jackson Matukaitis. Hall and Licardi ran a trial run of their community outreach event in one of Hall’s classes, and Matukaitis proposed adding another feature: How hopeful are people that we can change our current system?

    In a discussion of how to incorporate that question into the event, Matukaitis proposed telling people that one minute represents 10 years and asking, “At what point in that timeline will our economic models shift?” During a brainstorming session with the whole class, Matukaitis proposed another idea. What if everyone closed their eyes so that they weren’t influenced in their decision-making by other people? This became the event’s final performance: participants held their ping pong bats in front of them, closed their eyes, and turned their bats to show a different color when they heard the time called at which they thought the economic model would shift. You can watch that performance on YouTube.

    Hall and Licardi were both pleasantly surprised at how well it went, they say, and at how all the elements of that and subsequent events came together. Since the October event, they have engaged community members at the February Science on Tap at Rising Silo Brewery and again during Communicating Science Week with a SciArt Collaborations event March 17th.

    When I spoke to these collaborators, I told them that I went home after their October event and told my roommates about it. “It's great to hear that, because that was the intent, that you remember something meaningful from the event and take it with you,” Hall said. “When you leave Virginia Tech and you look back at your time here, an idealist would say there are moments in your educational pathway that you vividly remember. And I think that's what this event was trying to accomplish, is some vivid memory that then stays with you, which you can use as you see fit and as you go through your life on this planet. That's really what it's about. Life is moments, right?”

By RJ Loyd, Center for Communicating Science student intern