When was the last time you used a phone booth to make a call? Odds are, not for several years at least. So are all of those city phone booths rendered useless, relics of a bygone era? Not necessarily -- they might just need a bit of a makeover.
Late last year, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's office announced a Reinvent Payphones competition to reimagine the city's 11,000+ phone booths, many of which are from a 1999 contract that will expire in 2014. Think about the year 1999 -- there was no Twitter, no Facebook, no smartphones, let alone touchscreens. At the time, Google was a nascent startup focusing solely on search.
With payphone contracts expiring soon, the city wants to reinvent the underutilized sidewalk machinery as a tool for Wi-Fi connectivity (pilot programs have turned several payphones into hotspots). The mayor's office received more than 125 Reinvent Payphone submissions; of those, one stood out both for its design and its utility. The judges awarded architecture firm Sage and Coombe's NYfi (a play on "Wi-Fi") the best connectivity award, and New York citizens deemed it their favorite design.
Sage and Coombe was familiar with the payphone issue. It had been approached a year ago by Titan, one of the New York payphone franchises, with a plea to make the revenue-generating payphones (eye-level ad space!) more connected. The city had expressed an interest in adding Wi-Fi antennae to existing payphones, and franchises like Titan were interested in slapping advertising on said antennae. Sage and Coombe had something else in mind. The firm got a sense of what irks pedestrians and store owners about payphones and analyzed payphone usage. Not surprisingly, payphone usage has gone as down cellphone usage has increased, and aside from the weeks after Hurricane Sandy, there is very little demand for payphones. Why not, then, set out to make the payphone a far more dynamic and useful machine?
"The challenge of the competition was to create a better, healthier, better-informed city, a greener city, and it didn't really seem that we were accomplishing any of that by decorating a Wi-Fi antennae with advertising," says Sage and Coombe founding partner Peter Coombe.
So Sage and Coombe decided to reimagine payphones as wayfinding mechanisms. As we'll explain, the design goes above and beyond presenting an interactive map. And while payphones today are concentrated in Manhattan, Sage and Coombe's design is meant to be spread throughout all five boroughs, in residential and commercial areas alike.
"I can't remember a day where I've gone outside and someone hasn't asked me for directions," says Coombe, with a tone of surprise, since so many urbanites and tourists have smartphones.
While the contest yielded some fantastic ideas, it's up to the city to execute a final design, determine cost and strike contracts with private companies. But most of the Reinvent Payphones submissions turned payphones into information hubs, and several included a wayfinding element. "I was struck by the fact that even though we had different forms, all of us really were suggesting the same thing, and that's probably what the next phone booth thing will do," says Coombe. So let's imagine for a moment what New York City would be like if we had NYfi -- or something similar -- on every corner.
The Importance of Wayfinding
NYfi's wayfinding element was inspired by the Livable London initiative, which aimed to ease the use of transportation infrastructure so the city of London could sustain a growing tourism industry. By getting people off buses and trains and encouraging more walking, London's transport infrastructure could sustain the influx of people and the city could become healthier. Another bonus? Many businesses that had previously been bypassed on the Tube would now be walked by, which could boost sales.
Of course, no two cities are alike, so Sage and Coombe adapted the Livable London plan for New York and made it more interactive.
"The idea was really to bring in a different dimension to way-finding, not just a heads-up map where you know which direction to go, but a map that is interactive that could get to a restaurant or a cultural institution," says Coombe. "Also one that could be a warning beacon, something that could gather information as well as provide information."
On a digital, interactive map, you can isolate bike lanes, see the subway system, see when the next train or bus is going to arrive and see where there are pockets of traffic you'll want to avoid. A machine like NYfi might also let you buy a subway pass or a movie ticket, see what's going on around town at the moment and even tell you about a weather advisory. NYfi reimagines the payphone as an interactive portal for information and services, a Wi-Fi hotspot and a foundation for future apps. What makes NYfi even more useful is the fact that having all of this information digitized means it can easily be translated. Sage and Coombe's research indicated that there are more than 800 languages and dialects spoken in New York City, and yet most signage on subways and busses is in English, Spanish and maybe an Asian language. If the tools were more accessible, they'd be more frequently used.
"There are many people who can't access that information, and we were interested in making the city more transparent," and thus more navigable, livable and enjoyable, says Coombe.
A Future-Proof Design
These dynamic maps and functionalities might sound like the future, but some of these technologies are already in place in other cities. In fact, Coombe says it was important for his firm's design to be "shovel-ready" -- not dependent on not-yet-invented technologies, software that hasn't been written or public-private partnerships that don't yet exist.
"If we're really going to make a change in the coming years, the piece of infrastructure we are suggesting has to be buildable," says Coombe. We know how much has changed in 14 years, so we need to make room for the next 14 years of progress. While touch is the primary interface for devices of today, we know that gesture commands, like those of the Leap Motion, could permeate urban society in the next decade. And the new "payphones" need to be flexible enough to make that happen. NYfi was built not as a solution, but as a platform, on which developers and engineers can build exciting new technologies to adapt to emerging trends.
Conclusion
The contract expiration in New York -- one of the world's most populated cities -- gives us the opportunity to rethink urban architecture, design and mobility. Bloomberg's emphasis on "street furniture" has generated some beautiful bus stops in the city, proving that cities can marry form and function and streamline the urban experience. Our sidewalks shouldn't be crowded with single-function machines (parking meters, MetroCard dispensers, information kiosks, etc.); they should be crowded with people exploring the city. A reimagined piece of "street furniture" would offer a sleek, compact and adaptable alternative with myriad features and a base on which we could apply tomorrow's technology.
"All these things can help us move more freely throughout the city, help us be oriented and help us access things we couldn't access before," says Coombe.