INSTRUCTION SETS FOR STRANGERS
Parsons School of Design, 2021, Team of 2
Getting strangers to interact without giving them any verbal instructions
This project was conducted in collaboration with Joy Kim. For the first part of our assignment, we visited Washington Square Park for to understand the area, frequency of people and their behaviors and interactions. Below are our observations.
People: Families, people with dogs, friends, couples, youngsters, artists, promotions
Behaviors: walking (with a dog), sitting, talking, eating (or coffee), painting, dating, promotions
There are a lot of open spaces and seating areas in Washington Square Park, which played a significant role in our decision to mark the spots of our project display.
IDEAS AND BRAINSTORMING
While we had several ideas like puzzles, hand printing, and fortune cookies, we decided to narrow down on the Tangram puzzle idea since it is a very colorful and familiar game for a lot of people.
We then considered multiple implementation possibilities, like having a table of smaller ones or one big tangram puzzle. We decided to lay it out on the floor for people to come an interact with it.
IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS
We executed the installation on four locations around the park. The most common observation was "People attract people" based on the idea "the more the crowd around the installation, the more successful the location was".
Some people passed by it thinking it was just a piece of art.