Urban furniture in digital placemaking: Adapting a storytelling payphone across Los Angeles

Abstract

A growing number of urban practitioners and scholars are interested in using digital storytelling to strengthen neighborhood connections to shared culture and build a coherent sense of place. This article contributes to this discussion by investigating how ‘urban furniture’ can sustain social capacity for digital placemaking. While traditional ‘urban furniture’ in public space is purely physical, digital-physical hybrids are emerging, from benches that tell stories to bus stops that play videos. This extended case follows the travels of an Afrofuturist piece of urban furniture: a community-hacked payphone called Sankofa Red. Our analysis triangulates findings across three installations to show how placemaking can be sustained as a social process: as part of a successful makeover of a community plaza, featured in a neighborhood history game, and in an art exhibition on race and ethnicity. We identify promising practices to adapt urban furniture and retain design collectives beyond a single placemaking installation. As a way for cities to build capacity, we propose that rotating one kind urban furniture (e.g., payphones) across neighborhoods can build the social capacity for placemaking around a shared technical foundation, while still prioritizing local needs and culture.

Possible Uses of Interaction Design to Support Participatory Processes in Public Space and Pre-Tests Based on Visual Attention

“…Relatedly, in this research, we consider interaction design as an approach to establish or support community engagement practices in situ-related places, at the intersection of the second and third categories. To conduct interactive practices with these aims, physical systems in urban spaces such as responsive facades, urban displays, media façades, digital walls, spatial augmented reality/video mapping, laser holograms, interactive facades (Behrens et al, 2015; or integrated technologies on urban objects/furniture (Salim & Haque, 2015;Stokes et al, 2021;Suurenbroek et al, n.d.) in public spaces come fore as creation tools & devices that can be used for these experiences.…”

“…Accordingly, in urban space, new necessities have emerged to cover these contemporary lifestyles and respond to them accurately (Volpi & Opromolla, 2017). Refl ection of this situation in the public space from "design" perspective shows itself in some practices such as media architecture (Behrens et al, 2015), digital placemaking (Stokes et al, 2021), urban interaction design . Related to these concepts, "digital interventions" are implemented in public space through "digital walls, public displays, media facades, installations" as mentioned in the study of .…”

Digital placemaking, health & wellbeing and nature-based solutions: A systematic review and practice model

“…The final key theme identified through our thematic analysis is inclusion. Digital placemaking brings inclusivity to individuals with movement restrictions (Clarke, 2021;Karge, 2018;Szaszák and Kecskés, 2020), marginalized communities whose narratives have been ignored (Foth, 2017b;Gonsalves et al, 2021;Stokes et al, 2021), and facilitates general information accessibility (Her, 2021;Sugangga et al, 2021). It allows citizens to connect with the same level of opportunities as the rest of the community.…”

To Play and To Be Played: Exploring the Design of Urban Machines for Playful Placemaking

“…As a concept-driven design, I Have Feelings Too explored the possibilities of humanised urban machines in the playable city through the redesign of public benches for playful interactions. It was inspired by the developing discourse of AI for smart cities (Allam and Dhunny, 2019;Kirwan and Zhiyong, 2020;Ullah et al, 2020;Cugurullo, 2021) and expanded on the growing potential of street furniture for digital placemaking (Tomitsch et al, 2015;Stokes et al, 2021). The concept is built on 1) the anthropomorphic approach extensively applied in human-robot interaction (HRI), 2) the personification of voice assistant with speech interfaces, and 3) an understanding of playful learning as part of machine behaviour development.…”