The document summarizes a student project to encourage communication between people at a public park. The students initially tried using a homemade string telephone between two locations in the park, but it did not work well due to sound issues. For their final prototype, they hid walkie talkies in cans to disguise them as homemade phones, which allowed people to successfully communicate between the two locations and sparked conversations between strangers. Testing of the final design was successful overall.

1. The HighLine User Iteration Nancy Senem Xuan

2. Preliminary observations: What we observed, and what we wanted to investigate After choosing HighLine as our public space, we investigated the site and decided we wanted to investigate if we could come up with a project to make people communicate with each other on our chosen spot in the park.

3. The Chosen Spot The Theatre

4. The Concept Form a way of communication between theatre people and street walkers using a homemade telephone.

5. Goals: how your project responds to your initial design questions Our project was focused on finding a creative solution about iterating the usage of HighLine park by the public. Our main concern was to find an idea that would work with the park’s characteristics.

6. The Initial Goal Change how people work the theatre!

7. Research / Precedents Nina Katchadourian’s “Office Semaphore” In Office Semaphore; The Artist made people put different objects that would express their daily feelings on their office windows and observed how people were feeling below, using a telescope.

8. First Prototype: The Basic Homemade Telephone : Failure!

9. The string touching the walls stopped the vibration; therefore the sound wasn’t clear. The string is too long, blocking the traffic. It was both hard to hear the voice and was impossible to see the other person.

11. Making sound clear

13. Final User Testing: Walkie Talkies worked!

14. Everything worked fine except for our thunder was stolen at first..

15. Conclusions