DESIGN BRIEF: INSTRUCTION SETS FOR STRANGERS

HEIGHTEN THE WALKING/RUNNING EXPERIENCE ON THE WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE

Target audience: 

Primary: Walkers (about 60%).
Secondary: Runners (about 40%).

Walkers and runners share this path, and most of them walk to and from work or run there on a regular basis. They are used to the busy sounds and life, and see the bridge as an opportunity to zone out and get away from it. 

Challenge: 

For most people, walking on the bridge is part of their daily routine. How can we enhance their experience? There is a lot of art, and there have been quite a few art/design interventions on the bridge, but few of them have been interactive. 

Objective/big idea: 

Making their routine less mundane by uniting them and connect their experiences by inviting people to map out where they are coming from and where they are going to. 

The goal of this project was to get get strangers to interact with each other somehow, through an instruction set. As this is a sociological design project, an urban node was chosen, demographic and psychographic research was performed, and several prototypes were drafted to gain more insight about our users and how they might interact in our site. 

This project done in collaboration with Yun Zhou and Chris Henrick.