Tic-Tac-Toe

Explore human behaviors and design solutions in urban area.

How do you use fragmented time in an urban area? What would you do while you are waiting for red traffic lights. Nowadays, with floods of information from social media and easy access to mobile devices, most of the people would be on their phone checking news, instagram, facebook, etc.
Our goal of the project is to increase social interaction in real time and create fun experience utilizing fragmented time. Thus the "Hacking Urbanism 30 Seconds Challenge" began!

Collaborators: Nutchanun Boontassaro, Jiangyue Han, Ross Brady

00. Site

We chose our site as intersection between 110th street and Broadway. 110 & Broadway is a very populated street, and the duration of the red light is longer than other smaller blocks.
This conjunction is also populated by students from Columbia University. There are several pharmacies and grocery stores close by, and 1 train stops right at the location. All these urban factors make the intersection great for our "hacking" urban environment.

01. Design

After several rounds of brainstorming, we decided to "hack" with a Tic-tac-toe game. The game is easy enough so that everyone could take part to play; while it is short enough so that people could be engaged while waiting for the traffic lights. After agreeing on he content, we started to design detail factors in order to make it adapt to the environment.

• 1.
  

  Size of the Panel
  

  • We want the size of the panel to resemble board game size, so it could be easy recognized by passengers.

• 2.
  

  Height of the Panel
  

  • The height of the panel is crucial, since it has to be within reach by a standing person without too much efforts. Setting the panel too high or too low will discourage passengers' engagement. After testing different height, we decided that the height of the panel should be set at around 4'-6".
  

• 3.
  

  Material of the Panel
  

  • The material of the panel was designed to be transparent PVC, so that one can easily see through the panel to check the traffic light. However, the edge of the panel should be obvious, so that it wouldn't be missed easily.

  4.
  

  Design Features
  

  • As part of the design intent, we wanted to attribute the panel its own identity. We designed to cut the street view on the transparent PVC board to be overlapped with street view in reality. We used laser cut to complete the process.

02. Hacking Urbanism

We installed the panel at 110&Broadway, and kept it there for 2 hours. We observed through faraway. During the period, I observed passengers showing strong interests to the game. Some played for awhile and even forgot to cross the street! This small installation created a fun urban encounter for the people.