Payphone
booths, the upcoming generation doesn't even know where there for. If
you told them that if you were out on the streets and you really
needed to call someone, you could walk to a payphone booth to make a
phone call. They probably would laugh and say “Why
would you do that if you have a phone in your pocket, called a mobile
phone?”.
Exactly! In the age of mobile phones and smartphones, a payphone
booth doesn't make sense.
'The Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge'
challenged students, urban planners, designers, technologists,
architects, creators and legal and policy experts to redesign the
11.412 payphones booths spread all over New York City. Control Group
and Titan partnered up and developed NYC I/O, redesigning payphones
booths into a network of digital information booths that are all
connected. You can do everything in it: order a taxi, make restaurant
reservations, paying a parking ticket and if you have low battery
even making a phone call. Because they will be all connected, it will
create his own NYC digital web. They will be like the eyes and ears
of the city. You can stand in a booth and watch if there's a line
outside your favorite store before getting on the subway.
You
may think, “Why
do we need this? There's an app for these kind of things.”.
But there's another more important layer above these functions,
that's to collect data of the NYC citizens. To measure what moves
them, what the wants and needs are. A problem with data collection is
consistency. We don't really have even distributions points that
collects data all the time. But NYC I/O can provide measurements on a
regular basis, because they are spread and connected in the specific
area of NYC. The sensors measures the behavior that happens in and
around the booth and turns that into data. By analyzing this data we
know how to improve the quality of life of the specific group of NYC
citizens. This way concepts can be created specifically on the wants
and needs of the NYC citizens.
Like Facebook and
Twitter analysis out of online behavior, NYC I/O analysis out of
physical behavior but specifically on a certain area. That's what's
makes it interesting. It doesn't collects data out of consciously
filtered online behavior (posts, tweets, website visits) but it
collects data out of the
unconscious behavior of the people, what makes it more valuble.
