A Place At The Table - PLACE Cards

A Place At The Table is a local café with a pay-what-you-can business model, so everyone can eat there regardless of their means. People can pay any amount for food, they can volunteer for a meal, or they can redeem a token for a free meal. Until recently, the token has been an actual wooden coin token. But because Table is so committed to putting all its patrons on equal footing, they have introduced a new pay-it-forward device, the PLACE card. This credit-card-shaped token is not only a way to remove the visual differentiation between paying and non-paying customers, it also is a way to spread the use of the card to lots of different people with different backgrounds.

With that in mind, we wanted to create a piece that showed the card being received in lots of different scenarios (as a tip, as a gift, as a welcome-to-town item, and as a help to a person in need) and also showed the positive effects of paying it forward. We see a café patron choose the PLACE card as a way to pay it forward, the energy of which then goes out into the community, connecting people from all walks of life. We used some particle effects to show the metaphorical energy that binds us all together, spreading from person to person and showing how these cards can be a great choice in lots of scenarios. By the end of the piece, everyone is eating together in the café as one big group, and our energy has spread throughout the city, creating a web that connects us all.