disappointing walk

The PSG (Peter Stuyvesant’s Ghost) public-phone walk was a project with so much potential, that I was extremely disappointed with how it turned out to be. What seemed as a highly interesting interaction resulted in a very disjointed experience, with little relation to its spatial context , which seemed to be one of the key elements of this project. Every single component of the project was calling out for the designer’s attention for it to be attached with some kind of meaning. In this, was the project’s biggest flaw; it laid out its element as a sketch but failed to bring them together as a finalized design. As users, we were baffled in between resulting in a very negative experience that lacks among other things the element of surprise. As I walked from one point to another I had to remind myself why was it that I had to move from one place to another. There was nothing directing me there other than the map that had already all the codes laid out for me. I might as well have stayed home and try to communicate with the phone number (which was constantly busy) from my bed and dial in the codes that I already had, than try listening to the very low quality sounds that were overpowered by the sound of the city in an unintentional way.

It is interesting how even a project that not only has a full potential in itself but that as well has the participation of so many interesting people and organizations can fail without the proper guidance and execution (maybe even lack of testing). What was most interesting in the end was the website of the project itself, that included among other things the above sketch-map laid over a GoogleEarth rendering of the path of the tour.