Urban furniture in digital placemaking: Adapting a storytelling payphone across Los Angeles

Abstract

A growing number of urban practitioners and scholars are interested in using digital storytelling to strengthen neighborhood connections to shared culture and build a coherent sense of place. This article contributes to this discussion by investigating how ‘urban furniture’ can sustain social capacity for digital placemaking. While traditional ‘urban furniture’ in public space is purely physical, digital-physical hybrids are emerging, from benches that tell stories to bus stops that play videos. This extended case follows the travels of an Afrofuturist piece of urban furniture: a community-hacked payphone called Sankofa Red. Our analysis triangulates findings across three installations to show how placemaking can be sustained as a social process: as part of a successful makeover of a community plaza, featured in a neighborhood history game, and in an art exhibition on race and ethnicity. We identify promising practices to adapt urban furniture and retain design collectives beyond a single placemaking installation. As a way for cities to build capacity, we propose that rotating one kind urban furniture (e.g., payphones) across neighborhoods can build the social capacity for placemaking around a shared technical foundation, while still prioritizing local needs and culture.

Keywords

Appropriation collective community-based games local mobile participation participatory design placemaking play social capacity urban design urban furniture

Sustaining placemaking in a part-digital world

Placemaking has emerged as a growing movement to amplify the shared connection of residents and organizations to a sense of place, and the many benefits that follow. We start with a sense that placemaking is ‘a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value’ ( Project for Public Spaces, n.d.). Increasingly, the experience of place has become a hybrid of physical presence and digital flows mediated through mobile and social media (Castells, 2010; Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011). Our collective understandings of space and place have thus become dependent on digital media and communication technologies (Adams, 2009). Digital placemaking can feel temporary, yet the goal is to create ‘a sense of permanence, pause, or investment in fixity within the forces and scapes that shape spatiality’ (Halegoua, 2020: 5), and, as the editors explain in the introduction to this special issue, it involves digital practices to create 'emotional connections to place' (Halegoua and Polson, 2021). Forms of digital placemaking include large screens embedded in public space (Tomitsch et al., 2015), scavenger hunts with cellphones, and place-based storytelling.

However, without care, predominantly digital interventions may disrupt and fragment our shared sense of place. Isolated digital stories risk displacing shared experiences and meanings with individualized experiences that reverberate in siloed media platforms. In neighborhoods facing gentrification, cultural displacement remains a real threat (Hyra, 2015), often made worse by digital divides that reinforce cultural separation and generational divides. Compared to traditional visual arts (e.g., painting a mural), bottom-up approaches with digital media may require skill training for broad participation. The results of such efforts may also be harder for everyone to experience and appreciate in public space. Installations that require technical skill are especially vulnerable to being one-off projects for privileged neighborhoods that may undermine trust in the equity of placemaking.

In this article, we push back on the idea that digital placemaking efforts are inherently one-off creations for consumer devices. We specifically argue there is considerable value in ‘urban furniture’ to anchor digital placemaking in public space and build a shared sense of place. Places are meaningful in this sense precisely because they are invested with persistent social meaning, including through digital means (Dourish, 2006). To make digital placemaking more enduring and equitable, we argue that it is necessary to prioritize and reflect on the design process. In particular, we argue that equity is not only a function of the design object – equity depends on the capacity of local groups to persist in design, stakeholder accountability, and the ability to repeatedly adapt technologies to neighborhood needs.

Urban furniture

Urban furniture is one of the most promising frontiers for digital placemaking, with growing opportunities for digital design. Urban furniture is partly sculptural, reflecting its historical contribution to physical space. Yet, furniture like park benches and water fountains can also feature digital elements to balance basic purpose and durability with more expansive communicative possibilities (e.g., Rubegni et al., 2008). For example, neighborhood bus stops with digital displays are becoming ordinary. Digital affordances may invite experimentation but they also carry new risks. Mobile phones, for example, are celebrated in digital placemaking for how they locate users in space and mediate stories of place. However, the presence of personal screens often undermines eye contact with neighbors and contributes to the perception that the digital layer fragments public space (Crawford, 2008). Worse, locative experiences in isolation can suppress real-world contexts that residents might otherwise experience (Flanagan, 2009) and lead to unethical interactions with nonparticipants (Farman, 2012: 75–78).

Urban furniture presents an alternative entry point for digital placemaking that begins in the shared domain of public space and is at least partly visible to those without the latest smart phone. In this article, we analyze how one piece of urban furniture sustained creativity as a group process across sites, while renewing community ties to each place.

This case study follows ‘Sankofa Red’ – a community-rebuilt payphone and adaptable piece of urban furniture (see Figure 1). Powered by a Raspberry Pi computer, tablet, and speaker, Sankofa Red anchored design and placemaking for several groups of residents, community artists, and university students in South Los Angeles for over 2 years. The authors of this article include members from several of these groups, reflecting the participatory design process. Sankofa Red’s bold colors and lighting evoked the Afrofuturist art movement (Womack, 2013) as a form of local innovation. Yet, the object only became a part of placemaking campaigns through the efforts of the design collective to iterate on the object and adapt it for each site. This adaptive approach, we argue, is a model for more sustainable digital placemaking involving urban furniture.

Figure 1.

The payphone design at three sites: music activation by a neighborhood DJ in the Leimert Park ‘People Plaza’ (left), oral history playing and recording at the SKIN art exhibit (center), and at an outdoor game festival with the Mayor of Culver City (right).

The adaptive challenge: Sustained placemaking

As placemaking becomes more digital, new frameworks are needed to ensure that urban furniture can be adapted to different places. Localization depends on fitting to local culture, community identity, and the needs of each place. Close alignment with local assets and problems is particularly important to address the complex trade-offs of the so-called wicked problems (Buchanan, 1992) like entrenched neighborhood poverty (Sampson, 2012), spatialized racism, and historic neglect. Localization can also cost time and money. It would be unreasonable to ask all neighborhoods to create entirely new urban furniture with distinct software to perfectly express local culture and tap into local assets. Many communities lack access to engineering talent for programming, and physical objects are difficult to sculpt and wire for digital placemaking. A more sustainable and equitable approach might be to repurpose and adapt successful objects. This study investigates how urban furniture can be sustainably adapted by asking:

RQ1: Adaptable objects: To what extent can urban furniture be reconfigured and adapted to different placemaking projects?

Adaptation as a local process may require the participation of local stakeholders. Especially for community empowerment, participatory approaches writ large continue to gain traction in both urban planning and technology design (Gurstein, 2007; Horelli, 2013; Simonsen and Robertson, 2012). Local stakeholders also bring local definitions of the problem and priorities for moving forward (DiSalvo et al., 2014; Le Dantec and DiSalvo, 2013). Yet, it is often hard to sustain local participation in design, especially when facing technical barriers. A promising line of research investigates how umbrella groups, sometimes called design publics (Le Dantec and DiSalvo, 2013), can retain sociotechnical expertise around a shared sense of the problem. Similarly, research on sociotechnical ‘innovation networks’ (e.g. Jarrahi and Sawyer, 2019) has shown that innovation depends not only on the technological artifact but also on persistent visions and organized networks. This leads us to ask:

RQ2: Adaptive groups: How might design groups and collectives be crafted to persist beyond a single placemaking installation?

Case approach: Travels of a storytelling payphone

To investigate adaptability, this study traces the travels of Sankofa Red across several neighborhood placemaking installations. In its first incarnation, Sankofa Red helped a predominantly Black neighborhood convert a car-centered street into a pedestrian plaza. A second time, Sankofa Red was installed in an art gallery to record personal stories about race from across a large city. In a third version, Sankofa Red anchored an urban history game in a predominantly White neighborhood. Across its travels, our two research questions on adaptation guided our search for generalizable lessons for placemaking with urban furniture.

The authors of this article were involved throughout the participatory design process, from the initial inspiration to the framing of a collaborative practice and the successive re-envisioning of deployment. As a method, participatory design seeks greater insights through mutual learning and co-realization (Bratteteig et al., 2013), with deliberate effort to embed reflection to counterbalance the diminished independence of observations. Separate observations and interviews were conducted for each installation. Perhaps most importantly for sharing power and balancing perspectives, this article was co-authored with community members, project artists, graduate students, and university academics.

A neighborhood facing change

Leimert Park is a small Los Angeles neighborhood (1.2 mi²/3.1 km²) with one of the largest concentrations of Black residents (80%) in the city, from many diasporas.¹ The neighborhood stands out as a cultural beacon for Black culture and arts. Black people initially settled there through housing covenants that forced them south of the city’s historic core. It has since been home to Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, and former Mayor Tom Bradley (Exum and Guiza-Leimert, 2012: 9). Youth are a constant presence, attracted to emerging and inexpensive art, music, and open space. However, the cultural core of the neighborhood is threatened over the next decade by projected growth and gentrification (Kaplan, 2013), including the imminent arrival of its first subway stop. Many residents fear redevelopment by outsiders and seek to chart a course forward with local and community benefits.

An aging payphone

The initial design formed in Leimert Park around an aging, broken, and vandalized payphone. The appropriation of old technologies by underserved communities (Eglash, 2004) is a promising strategy for empowerment. In this case, the resurrection of the payphone was increasingly imagined as a ‘cultural sentinel,’ visibly positioned in public space, able to play neighborhood audio stories, and reinforce local identity. Broader movements like tactical urbanism (Lydon et al., 2015) and the ‘right to the city’ (Foth et al., 2015) increasingly embrace local designs through their own (often confrontational) stances toward top-down power centers of urban planning. In some cases, single design ‘Things’ have been the center of these movements – such as the parklet-from-parking spot takeovers that spread across cities through ‘Parking Day’ events (including as part of open-source urbanism by Bradley, 2015). Could a payphone in Leimert Park spur similar change and placemaking in the neighborhood?

Umbrella group: The Leimert phone company

Through a half-dozen workshops, a persistent group began to emerge, testing out various designs on more than 10 discarded payphones they had purchased at auction. This group started calling themselves the Leimert Phone Company (LPC), with a deliberately broad mission to ‘rethink the payphone.’ The group functioned as an umbrella design collective, organizing successive implementations and providing an overarching identity to sustain the associational and networked basis for design across multiple sites. (Most of the LPC founders are included as co-authors of this article; see ‘triangulating’ below.)

The LPC mascot and logo depicts the Sankofa, a mythical Ghanaian bird that flies to the future while looking toward the past (Figure 2). The Sankofa helped to anchor the group’s concern with local Black cultural practices and ideals, respecting history while innovating. The symbolism of the Sankofa also helped the group to design in the tradition of Afrofuturism, a culture-centered approach to speculative futures and new technologies that decolonizes dominant technological narratives and stakes out space for more Afrocentric social dynamics and cosmologies. Black cultural logics also enriched our practice and amplified our design collaborative’s concern with values-driven placemaking. Co-design workshops to adapt the payphone involved a blend of community members and university students and faculty. Multiple artists from Leimert Park were involved, from muralists to videographers, as well as technologists and welders. The primary artifact to emerge from the 6-month development process was Sankofa Red.

Figure 2.

The logo for the Leimert Phone Company, courtesy of the authors.

Triangulating across sites

By analyzing how Sankofa Red moved across three different neighborhoods, in this article, we trace how mobility in the design process built social capacity (i.e. RQ2). The iterative design and travel can be understood as research ‘in the street’ (March and Raijmakers, 2008) to better understand how placemaking might be improved through adaptation.

Adaptation 1: Converting a street into a pedestrian plaza

Sankofa Red anchored a 1-day demonstration of a proposed community square, with ripple effects that included substantial government funding. As a placemaking demonstration, a short block in Leimert Park was closed to cars for a weekend, turning a street into a pedestrian plaza with multiple cultural installations. The block already included iconic architectural elements of Leimert Park, a historic theater, and a large water fountain.

The pretext for this first installation was a citywide competition: the ‘People Street’ program that invited community groups to ‘transform underused areas of L.A.’s largest public asset – our 7,500 miles of city streets – into active, vibrant, and accessible public space’ (City of Los Angeles, California, n.d.). Sankofa Red was featured as the product of community-based design and framed as a new community asset. It served as an evocative object, providing a glimpse of possible Afrofuturist designs for the neighborhood.

For the LPC, the outdoor demonstration was also a chance to encourage parallel experimentation with other forms of urban furniture. Along with Sankofa Red, the collective invited a university class to reinvent a bench, a newspaper box, an advertising display, and a planter, turning them into platforms for community interaction (Baumann et al., 2016). Inspired by tactical urbanism (Lydon et al., 2015) in particular, the group received a permit to close the street to cars and invite pedestrians – from local politicians to community members and city officials – to a street party to imagine a different future for this street.

For longer term placemaking, the goal was to secure a more permanent pedestrian plaza for Leimert Park, creating a safe space to connect the central park to local shops and the community art center. The park already served as the site of art festivals, drum circles, food vendors, and important political gatherings – such as protests during the 1980s South African Apartheid and the 1992 LA Rebellion (Exum and Guiza-Leimert, 2012). Yet this central area was also surrounded by fast-moving boulevards on either side of the park, where drivers often make sharp turns to shortcut through the neighborhood. With a more permanent closure, the pilot streetscape sought to address traffic concerns while maintaining a cultural sense of place.

During the event, Sankofa Red’s internal computer provided listeners with stories of its origins. It also served as a music box and public address system for performances and announcements about the ‘People Street’ proposal. Signatures were collected in support of the more permanent pedestrian plaza. During one day, 93 signatures were collected; soon after, 124 more residents signed online, continuing the dual attention to digital and in-person channels. As part of the subsequent application to the city, the authors participated in an effort to gather letters of support from local businesses (arts/crafts shops, galleries, a martial arts school, and a food co-op) and institutions (Business Improvement District, Stakeholders Organizations, and LA City Council). The letter collecting served to deepen the LPC’s presence in the community and further connect stakeholders in their placemaking.

Ultimately, the signatures and community event helped convince the City of LA to select the plaza proposal for implementation. (Three proposals were selected across the city from a pool of several dozen.) That street section is now permanently closed to car traffic and has become a vibrant community space hosting dozens of activities every week – from outdoor theater and live concerts to weekly markets and dance classes. Community artists were enlisted to decorate its pavement with Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, among which the Sankofa features prominently (Kuwornu-Adjaottor et al., 2016). By positioning Sankofa Red in the larger neighborhood campaign, the LCP helped secure funding to boost local capacity and achieve much-needed infrastructural changes in the neighborhood.

Adaptation 2: Art exhibit

As a second installation, Sankofa Red was invited to be one of the 36 art pieces featured in a prominent Los Angeles art show on race and identity several miles away from Leimert Park (SKIN exhibition, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 2016²). The opening night was an important moment of visibility for the LPC design collective. In this adaptation, Sankofa Red collected oral histories on race and the wider city by asking visitors: ‘When was the first time you realized that your skin had color?’ Participants called in to record salient experiences in their own life that made them aware of the social dynamics of racism. Beyond the physical object, the design provoked a dialogue on race and retained participants’ voices. Dozens of intensely personal stories were gathered (e.g., ‘back then, it was Jim Crow law…and my parents sat me down to tell me about the do’s and the don’ts…’). The messages were archived, with selected stories republished to Sankofa Red and made accessible for future gallery visitors.

Travel raises questions for ethical placemaking, especially when design objects like urban furniture are seen as ‘representing’ the neighborhood’s identity and telling a story about the participants. Yet the opportunity to share a neighborhood identity can also be a positive way to justify travel, especially when marginalized neighborhoods like Leimert Park seek to host a larger conversation across the city.

The art show was broadly structured around issues of race and was intended to spark conversation – in the words of the organizers, to ‘inspire[e] dialogue about race and identity, while challenging the very definitions.’ Since the 1990s, there has been an increasing ‘social turn’ in the arts to create collaborative, contextual, and noncommodity-based art (Bishop, 2012). Mirroring the participatory process that produced Sankofa Red, the installation gathered public input and avoided positioning the designers and artists as sole experts. The audio approach retained the intimacy of listening to others’ voices, while simultaneously asserting a polyvocal network. Moving Sankofa Red from a community space to a traditional gallery also provoked interesting conversations on the value of digital participation.

Despite the increasing trend toward ‘dialogical art’ (Kester, 2004), the institutional frame of art galleries remains largely built around fixed art objects. The gallery’s accompanying wall plaque listed the invited artist (just one of our co-founders) and the two collaborators who initially fabricated the physical elements of Sankofa Red, describing the object as ‘mixed media; 8 × 3 × 3 feet.’ The plaque did not list the collaborators who programmed and recorded the content, nor the larger collective that initially developed the design, nor did it give any indication that gallery visitors were expected to interact with it.

For our design collective, the Gallery’s preference for single-artist works stood as a threat to recognizing Sankofa Red’s social capacity and interactive potential. The plaque in particular sparked debate within the collective, eventually resulting in a demand to reflect the group as a collective. The organizers agreed to replace the plaque with a new one, prominently listing ‘The LPC’ as the piece’s author, above several artist names that the collective chose to highlight, though without changing the description. The back-and-forth revealed some important lessons for maintaining our umbrella collective. In particular, we needed to permit and even encourage diverging views about each design installation – a multiplicity that design scholars have embraced as ‘agonistic pluralism’ (DiSalvo, 2010). As DiSalvo noted, agonistic design embraces many conflicts as potentially productive for revealing power relationships and sustaining participation, rather than smoothing over problematics for the sake of consensus. Digital approaches to placemaking can support such pluralism better than traditional fixed objects by supporting multiple experiences. The process of travel can also build self-awareness of the group’s own network structure and make it easier to sustain the collective across sites.

Adaptation 3: Launching a street game

Several neighborhoods away from Leimert Park, the yearly IndieCade – one of the most prominent festivals for independent games – was taking place in Culver City, California. We adapted Sankofa Red to serve as the starting point for a street game about the history and neighborhood culture of Culver City, called Sankofa Says. The design team wanted to test the game with the festival’s substantial number of visitors. The game was also seen as a way to help city officials with a placemaking problem: because visitors rarely explored beyond the bounds of the festival site, they failed to engage with neighborhood culture and history. The desire to make history salient appealed to the values of the LPC. At the same time, new collaborators were needed and uncovered, such as the Culver City Historical Society.

The game rewarded crowds of players for taking ‘group challenges’ at major landmarks, public art installations, and a series of existing local payphones. The larger the crowd, the more points each person received. Each challenge had an individual and group component involving phones. First, participants dialed a hotline, learned about the site they were visiting, and responded to trivia questions about that place’s history. Second, participants huddled for a group photo, typically referencing some history from that site by reenacting a historic event or film scene that took place there. As an interactive sculpture, Sankofa Red was important for recruiting players to join. Its loudspeaker blared as staff took the mic, rapped, and asked festival attendees to sign up. The oversized presence of Sankofa Red – both physically and auditorily – attracted curious onlookers. When they picked up the handset, they heard an audio recording inviting them to learn more about the design team.

The payphone theme continued throughout the game. Two of the landmarks featured working payphones in Culver City that required quarters to play. One served as the gathering spot for what local news outlets insist is the ‘World’s Smallest Main Street’ (Newton, 2012) next to an antique store. Use of the payphone was built into the game, since the hotline only gave the audio instructions for that landmark if the caller ID was from that payphone. Mixing old payphones with the history of Culver City embodied the idea of living history and extended the symbolic presence of Sankofa Red to its sister-pay phones in the wild.

Interactive games stretch the limits of what urban furniture might do. The young field of game studies may add distinct perspectives to placemaking with urban furniture. Game designs for urban space are proliferating, from games as mobile and pervasive technology (Montola et al., 2009) to games that contribute to the quality of life for increasingly ‘gameful’ cities (Alfrink, 2015). For neighborhood placemaking, play offers a distinct way to lower social barriers while circulating stories of local culture (Stokes, 2020: 6). For the LPC, the insights from adapting Sankofa Red as a game added new capacity to imagine and design around the social fabric; with games, such thinking has been called ‘game design thinking’ (Stokes, 2012). Beyond the formal rules of Sankofa Says, much of the storytelling happened at the edges of the gameplay and across technologies. More than 30 players directly engaged with the game, and several hundred observers and peers were circulated the Culver City stories from the game. The game created a hybrid form of placemaking by combining the accessibility of shared physical public space and the openness of digital social media.

Physically, the game functioned as semi-open theater. Guest speakers could be staged to meet the crowd. At one landmark, a member of the local Historical Society gave a short speech of her own devising. Visitors from the original Leimert Park design team also jumped in, using Sankofa Red for a spontaneous rap performance, featuring the built-in speakers and microphone to excite the Culver City crowd about the game. More radically, the crowd itself invented antics to gather attention. A strange chant emerged at a historic hotel – ‘Two to a bed!’ – reflecting curious local movie history. One player had learned from the game’s trivia hotline that The Wizard of Oz had been filmed nearby, and the ‘munchkins’ had been housed in deplorable conditions inside the hotel. Some were forced to sleep three to a bed ( National Public Radio, 2007). Bemused and slightly shocked, players embraced the spirit of a protest march and chanted a mock protest to demand only two to a bed. This form of play helped spread stories of place in Culver City and could potentially spill over into coverage by journalists and amplification by traditional placemaking groups.

Digital photos of the gameplay circulated in Facebook and Instagram. In addition, the game automatically posted group photographs of game activity to a public blog, organized by Culver City landmarks. These group photos ranged in tone from celebratory to questioning and even ironic and thus provided the group some narrative autonomy even within the automated system.

Sharing stories has a practical effect, empowering communities by actively strengthening social networks, enhancing the sense of belonging and collective efficacy (Kim and Ball-Rokeach, 2006). True to (hierarchical) form, the Mayor of Culver City posted about the game on social media too, sharing a photo and reflection. ‘History comes out to play,’ she wrote, tagging the Historical Society of Culver City’s account and encouraging further circulation. By using ordinary text messaging (SMS) and the player’s choice of social media, the game allowed players to pick the platform that best matched their personal networking goals and audience. While the game allowed visitors to better understand the history of Culver City, the playful nature of the experience simultaneously offered local politicians and residents alike the opportunity to reimagine their city through a kind of collaborative performance in city streets. Sankofa Red in this adaptation was playful, theatrical, and a conduit for social interaction around the hidden history of place.

Findings as design principles to sustain placemaking with urban furniture

Reflecting on the travels of Sankofa Red, urban furniture provides a provocative frontier to think through digital and hybrid placemaking. Rather than asking neighborhoods to create entirely new objects, this study investigated how urban furniture might be adapted for various places and placemaking goals. The findings below are organized using our two research questions.

The first research question explored how urban furniture could be adapted to different placemaking projects. The travels of Sankofa Red demonstrate considerable variation. In particular, the ‘digital’ side of urban furniture was adapted to place by embracing local content and campaigns, amplifying neighborhood identity and history. With digital placemaking, urban furniture was used to gather local voices for digitized listening, as seen in the art show. It also served as host to playful activities that spurred new experiences of place, as with the Sankofa Says game. Urban furniture anchored larger fundraising and policy campaigns, as when Sankofa Red served as a symbolic anchor to muster community support and raise funds for a new pedestrian plaza in Leimert Park; such symbolism is often central to placemaking campaigns. For placemaking as a field, the travels of Sankofa Red show how adding a digital layer to urban furniture can widen tactical horizons and adapt urban furniture to diverse placemaking goals. Urban furniture may help digital placemaking to go beyond stories about a place to insist on stories that are embedded in place. Pairing technology with objects that are already legible to public audiences also provides a canvas for the traditional paint and sculptural work of analog placemaking.

The second research question asked how design groups and collectives might persist beyond a single placemaking installation. In this question, we built on established research that showed how persistent design and innovation is supported through networks of group and associational structures. In this study, the collective LPC formed before the travels of Sankofa Red fully began. In particular, the associational branding of the group as a phone company helped to retain an umbrella design problem around the longer term goal of ‘rethinking the payphone.’ The subsequent travels of Sankofa Red contributed in each instance to immediate placemaking needs and the persistent problem of how to rethink the payphone. Sankofa Red was resituated with each installation, reflecting the social dimensions of design objects in relationship to their contexts (echoing ‘situated design’ and the concept of social material assemblages, Haraway, 1988; Simonsen et al., 2014).

As a social practice, travel was a core tactic for deepening reflection around a coherent (but not static) hybrid object – a specific piece of urban furniture. Travel also helped the group gain technical expertise around the core technologies, from the Raspberry Pi to cloud-based telephony system used in the Sankofa Says game. The LPC was able to foster longer term participation in placemaking by sustaining the production of site-specific ‘provocations’ without losing sight of what Hansson et al. (2018) describe as the problems that bring publics together. Travel demands coherence across space, both for the object and fellow travelers. As such, it offered a promising strategy to sustain consistent design values across installations and sustain placemaking as an adaptive process across sites.

Design principles (sometimes called heuristics) provide a useful format to convey practical findings, including for placemaking. The idea behind such principles is to articulate simple rules-of-thumb to guide future design (Sas et al., 2014), including for games (e.g., Schaffer, 2008), digital interfaces (e.g., Apple, n.d.), and more formally as design patterns (e.g., Alexander, 1977; Borchers, 2008). Below we express our findings in terms of three design principles that help to generalize the model used in this case study, to better sustain the adaptation of urban furniture:

Principle 1: Support digital placemaking as a deliberately ongoing process

Traditional urban furniture can be physically adapted for each site while retaining its structural form. Digital adaptation goes further by supporting varied placemaking without changing the physical object. Persistent placemaking can evolve while continuing at the same site, much as civic renewal is an ongoing process in any democracy. Placemaking’s gains can be amplified by linking projects over time, such as when Sankofa Red was used to gather stories of place, and later to play back those same voices for a different neighborhood. Such linking encourages media adaptation with cultural recognition beyond the cookie-cutter reuse of code. Across sites, the digital can support the accumulation of stories about the history of a design, connection of placemaking efforts, and relationships between neighborhoods.

Principle 2: Invest in collectives to build placemaking capacity

The approach modeled by this case study involved an umbrella ‘design collaborative’ to bundle attribution with a flat list of members, with the freedom to articulate who contributed to the latest incarnation. Naming it a ‘phone company’ (Figure 2) provided a strategically vague umbrella, echoing Eisenberg (1984). Forming the collective around longer term design problems demanded extra work, such as the ‘meta-articulations’ of a design purpose that went beyond immediate neighborhood needs. However, we suggest that this effort will often be rewarded; with Sankofa Red, the semi-fluid leadership strategy of the LPC stewarded a more ambitious and longer term vision for the project.

Principle 3: Invest in ‘travel’ across placemaking sites

Travel is a sequential process that involves rotating perspectives across sites, as opposed to parallel placemaking with copies from a fixed urban furniture template. Rotating a provocative object between neighborhoods offered distinct benefits to building digital capacity for placemaking. At the group level, leadership must adapt with each installation. The participants and publics involved in designing Sankofa Red shifted in transit, and the approach had to be flexible enough to support those shifts. In the case of the SKIN art exhibition, community artists led the project, while a game designer directed Sankofa Says. Rich reflections can emerge as adaptation forces renegotiations and new conversations about group power relations. For digital placemaking in particular, travel can also resist the tendency to centralize content into a flat location-based database; travel separates installations in time and thus leaves more room to encourage placemaking that can adapt in form (and database fields) to better articulate distinctly local assets and relationships.

Reflections and conclusion

This article traced how one piece of ‘urban furniture’ traveled to three placemaking sites. For each site, Sankofa Red was adapted to a very different placemaking initiative by a persistent design group. For digital placemaking, urban furniture offers a useful provocation to balance the design of the built environment with digital possibilities for shared storytelling and playful participation. In this study, a payphone created relatively neutral ground for neighborhood artists, activists, technologists, and academics to collaborate under the banner of the LPC. This collaboration supported ongoing adaptation of the payphone to multiple neighborhoods and placemaking campaigns.

Adaptation has its own limitations and brings additional responsibility. Especially when designs are asked to represent varying neighborhood identities, adaptive designs can struggle to reconcile their responsibility to earlier groups and uses. Digital placemaking efforts may need to embrace persistent design values even as they simultaneously open the door for interative insights and differing neighborhood priorities. In terms of scale, the ethics of adaptation are clearly more capable of supporting neighborhood-level customization and local power structures than citywide implementations with a fixed template (e.g., New York City’s payphone replacement initiative, per Halegoua and Lingel, 2018). A clear limitation is the cost and time required to customize and localize for each place or to selectively adapt only the digital or the physical elements in isolation, rather than a more integrated and holistic approach.

For placemaking as a field, the spread of hybrids like Sankofa Red that combine the physical and digital may come as much through social movements as technology breakthroughs. More research is needed to understand how broader social movements like the aforementioned ‘right to the city’ and ‘tactical urbanism’ might play a greater role in similarly sustaining hybrid placemaking. Collectives like the LPC provide a testing ground for gathering publics around objects that strengthen the sense of place and tell local stories, with wider adoption possible at the movement level.

As neighborhoods consider digital features for public space and urban furniture, questions of equity and sustainability become increasingly complex. Adaptation can serve as a design practice to sustain multiple visions, renegotiate the publics involved, and bridge contexts. Moreover, being strategic with travel can help to deepen reflection and placemaking practices across installations. In the words of Mark Twain (1911), ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness’ (p. 407). We found travel with one piece of urban furniture to be similarly valuable for placemaking, not only to broaden perspectives but to build the social capacity for collective action tied to place.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Benjamin Stokes

Notes

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