Antenna Design Workshop: Intervention
At the end of our winter break, I opted to participate in a workshop guided by the heads of the award winning interactive design agency Antenna, Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger. The workshop took place over several cold days in January and involved the creation of an “intervention.”
Interventions, to quote Antenna, “facilitate odd actions and temporary relations amongst. strangers. The presence of these objects in the particular context invites (inter)action and shifts the perception and experience of the various places.”
After a brief introduction into Antenna’s own fieldwork in the area, which includes some hilarious interventions viewable on their website, we broke up into teams. I formed a group with Ania Wagner, Hana Newman, and Michael Lewis. Since our intervention was site-specific user-focused, we thought to investigate our familiar terrain. By folding a coffee run into this, we happened upon this hub of commuter traffic:
This is the site of the Tony Rosenthal kinetic sculpture, The Alamo, occupying a central, quadrilateral space at the intersection of Astor Place and 4th Avenue. We thought to encroach upon this iconic space and create a center for more community involvement and interaction. Now, on to conceptualizing an intervention that fits the space and jibes with our own ideas of what an intervention should produce. Luckily, Hana thought about the workshop over winter break and came to the table with a myriad of ideas. One that caught our attention was a battery powering station that enlisted good, old-fashioned manpower to charge waning batteries. The site would include various alternatives to charging batteries, be them on the phone or on a laptop: stationary bikes, hand cranks, a buoyant floor that produces electricity from users’ jumps, and integrating electricity producing mechanisms into the Alamo, a sculpture that can rotate on its axis. Our preliminary sketches produced this:
Our initial thoughts on the chosen intervention were formulated primarily on its location. Astor place is heavily trafficked by students and young commuters alike. We identified a common problem in today’s wireless environment: battery power. We identified a solution: a charging station. We identified the means, which will undoubtedly detract some people but will empower many others: manpower. The benefits are threefold: health, community, and energy conservation. We envisioned these stations, placed prominently, as areas for casual users to just come by and cycle, crank, or jump for health. This being dense New York City, a place for community gathering, with children and pets alike, is always welcome. The byproduct of engagement at this intervention is the production of electricity, something we use a lot of and conventionally produce through non-renewable methods.
In hindsight, the grandiosity our project assumed should have been a red flag. It’s difficult to produce an effective and thorough presentation on something like this in a matter of a few days. Through some progress meetings with Masa and Sigi, we trimmed our idea to include only stationary bicycles.
At this point, we had some final designs on the bike. We chose an earth friendly green as our color of choice, and conceptualized the location on a battery theme accented in our designs. The design emphasized the produced benefits: the spinning wheel was translucent to display the mechanism that produces the electricity, the display is large enough for non-users to see user information clearly.
The bikes would form a grid, with a large kiosk on view for public display as a location in this grid. The information on the individual bikes would correspond with the display. Both would show individual and collective energy/electricity produced, time spent producing electricity, and other pertinent information on energy consumption and energy rates.
Reactions were generally positive from the peanut gallery. We opened ourselves up to a lot of criticism due to the scale of the project. Some comments highlighted the worrisome infringement on this iconic space; others mentioned general usability issues and perhaps the quixotic provenance of the project.
In some sense I agree, but I have never stifled my inventions with the fluency of the practical. The experience of producing work under the auspices of Sigi and Masa was quite an educational one. It is no wonder they have won so many awards and major accounts. They are both quite intelligent and weird, two characteristics that make for designing curiously effective interactions.
