Google today launches its latest community oriented project in Indonesia called Open Spaces. This project was actually revealed by Google in a sneak peek a couple of weeks ago to a limited audience. It is essentially an online art board, kind of like MS Paint really, that people can use to create all sorts of graphical artwork, directly on the browser. Google is tapping into street art enthusiasts to take advantage of this opportunity to express themselves and publish their artwork online and if they’re good enough, offline as well.
With Open Spaces, Google is running a competition that lasts until December of this year and nine of the best online artworks made using Open Spaces will be turned into an actual street art on various locations in Jakarta and Bandung. Participants can preview their artwork on Open Spaces to see how their creations would look like on any of the nine Open Spaces walls located in the two cities.
Open Spaces artworks will be judged by renowned street artist Darbotz, Farah Wardhani from the Indonesian Visual Art Archive, and David Bayu of the band Naif, who will decide which of the submitted artworks will be recreated on the walls of Bandung and Jakarta. Darbotz has actually completed his art to kickstart the project and it can be seen somewhere in the Panglima Polim area in Jakarta.
While it seems rather strange that Google would create such a competition, it’s perhaps a creative way to get people to use Chrome ahead of other browsers and discover the features that are available to Chrome.
In advertising terms, this project can probably be considered as brand activation, a way to get consumers to interact with the product being promoted beyond simply using or consuming the product and at the same time attract the attention of the general public. Of course, Open Spaces is also accessible from other modern browsers such as Firefox and Safari but by having it tied to Chrome, it helps raise the awareness of the browser in a market that’s dominated by Firefox.
Open Spaces is an art initiative which follows a similarly themed idea from a couple of years ago when Google launched the local collection of Chrome browser themes. Back in 2010 a number of Indonesian artists and celebrities were recruited to create or inspire themes for Google Chrome.
