Repurposed Payphones

Following up on our prior post on the New Museum’s innovative use of New York City’s pay phones for their 1993 exhibit, the city is now actually attempting to decide what to do with the relics, rather than send them to the landfills. The mayor’s office has been holding a sustainable design competition for prototypes of ways to transform the booths into a useful and aesthetically appealing part of the city after the phone contracts run out in 2014.

The city has narrowed the field down to six and given awards to designers in various categories, including an audience pick selected via Facebook. Highlights include NYCLoop, which essentially turns the booth into a modern-day smartphone available for public use, and NYFi, which connects passersby to the Internet and displays advertising to offset costs. For a beneficial environmental and community impact, Windchimes uses the booths as a built-in local network to provide real-time information on the pollution, rainfall, and other data on the environment.

The implementation of any of these solutions may depend more on the succession of the Mayor’s office, but it’s a great way to start dreaming of what we can start to do with outdated technologies as we keep building new ones.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 16th, 2013 at 9:11 am. It is filed under Creative Culture, New York City, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.