How would you feel robots walking casually on the street? What would be your first implant / code / tag on your body for? What if a pat on the shoulder is much more than a mere physical gesture? Get your opinion ready now to recall it in the future when you will be such a natural part of it that you won’t even notice.



Tokyo anime fair, 2008. I loved the astro boy who walked by.

One of the sweetest moments in staying at hotels is to find the adapter in the room that accepts plugs of all shapes. This hotel added on a whole extension unit to accommodate all possible gadgets a traveler may carry.



Managing to get the Internet connection in the room first time is a moment of relief. Many hotels, or the ISP prepare customized start page for that first moment. Regardless of how wisely the start page is chosen, or how jet lagged you are – this first page adds to your notion of where you are. On a side note, I understand that Internet connection cost varies a lot depending on the country and hence there are many reasons why some hotels still cannot afford to provide it for free for guests. But I loathe at hotels in the Internet-developed world, especially large corporate hotel chains that still offer internet connection at the ridiculous cost of almost 10% of daily room rate. It will be increasingly comparable to the concept of charging for the use of toilet separately from the room rate for guests.





At a hotel I stayed in Chengdu, China in November 2008.

Have you used a public phone booth with a door for purposes other than using the public phone? It is used as a shelter from a sudden rain, using mobile phones inside, changing clothes, rearranging the bag, or even crying for a while if you must, though being inside a phone booth proper is becoming a faded memory for many. With mobile phones, choosing the physical environment in which we make a call is often up to us. In the early phase of adoption of public phones, phone booths were advertised as essential tool for privacy, making the caller feel more comfortable. Now, some places force mobile phone users to use the phone booth for the comfort of others around the caller.



In any case, I reckon that designing a phone booth is a challenging task, satisfying the need for privacy as a comfort zone for a voice call (regardless of whose comfort that is) while minimizing the opportunity for exploitation and valdalism by making it too private and comfortable at the same time. With the vast diversity of the telecommunication culture, I always feel that the design of the surviving phone booths still communicates the attitude of the space that they reside in.







This booth, in front of Meguro station in Tokyo, has semi-ransparent brown walls. It is complete with emergency numbers and a printed phonebook. On the door is a sticker that bears a warning to those attempting to place pinkupira*, issued by the police.
* pinkupira: the kind of advertisements you would find in London’s landmark phonebooths, like this – though it seems to have become significantly less as sexual advertisement became illegal in 2001 in UK.



This is from London’s old street tube station. With space constraints and the heavy traffic of people, these public phones do not resonate with the concept of comfort or privacy, but serve the necessity of anyone who needs to reach out to someone quickly and efficiently (especially tourists, nowadays).



This phone booth design in Paris seemed fairly new, very spacious inside and totally transparent.





These pictures were taken in New Molden, Surrey – London’s suburbia. I never saw anyone using the email / text function in public phone. Booths for silent communication – through keyboards, gestures, screens, would probably require a whole new set of design brief.



The classic London phone booths, in Smithfield market.