Common Ground
The Market Street Prototyping Festival challenges teams to design urban prototypes that can encourage new forms of social interaction, in an effort to weave together the character of the different sections in San Francisco’s Market Street. As a group of designers and architects based all around the world, we studied the street conditions and discussed how we could achieve social engagement in a street filled with such diversity. We designed a game with a water feature that rewards interaction and coordination between users. The prototype was built for the festival in April 2015, was chosen for a second round that took place in October 2015 and made its third iteration for October 2016. We are still working with the city and considering the project’s possibilities.
As a group of UX designers and architects based all around the world, our team at Cloud Arch Studio sought to define a more universal way to understand the gap in pedestrian interaction and came up with a simple binary condition: people who are moving, and people who are still. We have devised a game that requires interaction between people moving by and people staying put and rewards greater participation and coordination between all types of people. Through three simple networked surfaces - seating, landscape, and pavement built on identical grids - we can map user inputs from corresponding cells of seating and pavement to an unexpected water feature within the landscape, and program the reactions to occur sequentially as more cells are activated in sync along the path. No water feature is activated unless both the seat and the pavement are activated, making social interaction a necessity rather than just a result.
