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.

By the entrance of a convenience store in Seoul, stickers indicating the service offerings available in the store are shown – all printed in a standardized size. The potential to make the service availability indication digital, making them searchable and discoverable remotely? Who would be the right organization / institution/corporation to take up the role to issue such a standardized service availability database?


Stickers are:
A brand of newspaper
A mobile phone charging service; Payment options called pre-p
Door-to-door delivery service; Bill payment
Cash receipt for taxation; Loyalty membership scheme
Cigarettes

Listing that, I realize how much I miss these always nearby, always available convenience stores in Korea and Japan…

Korean Cultural Center is hosting an exhibition titled ‘Shine a Light‘ at the moment, till March 2009. The artist, Jeonghwa Choi is an unusual artist who is dedicated to observe and understand all forms of everyday life. The space he creates is memorable and touching, if you are in the resonant mood, without being pretentious; it leaves plenty of room for you to make the meaning and an experience out of it.









It is a bit of late notice, but together with the exhibition curators I will be co-mediating a casual panel discussion with the artist on February 5th, 2009 at KCC near Trafalga square, London. It starts at 3pm.





The exhibition will be on till March 21st, 2009. The exact address of Korean Cultural Center is Grand Buildings, 1-3 Strand, London WC2N 5BW.

About the exhibition at Art Rabbit

Coin-operated automatic shoe shine machine in Tokyo subway. 100 yen for a pair. What-you-see-is-what-you-possibly-get.

Pictured is the sea urchin ice cream that I happily tried in Namja town in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. The ice cream world features more than 300 kinds of ice cream from all over Japan. Although traveling has become cheaper and easier for new experience seekers, it still has the attraction to be able to sample authentic things that you didn’t know about, or common things brought from somewhere that is unfamiliar to you.



The set up may look cheesy, but it is difficult to dismiss the effort of establishing a venue like this. It feels like being in the ultimate training program to become a wise consumer (or whichever type you want to be), dealing with more choices than you would ever imagine or need in everyday life.



Namja town is run by Namco, but there are a lot of food experience events along with the detective games using cat dolls with RFID implants. When I visited, the cheese cake fair was on; it seems the chocolate expo is on till march 2009. Ramen and gyoja streets are run all time around.





If you are interested in a little bit of the urban history, Sunshine city that hosts Namja town itself may be worth visiting with planetarium, acquarium, and observatory on its top floor, reminiscent of its 80’s glory of being one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo and the first generation of all-in-one entertainment facilities for all age groups. The ultimate function of Sunshine city in the context of the mega urban city is not too far from love hotels.

I saw my grandfather only as a hand-painted portrait. Having a portrait painted was the only solution when people wanted to reconstruct a memorabilia of the family ancestor solely from recollection, or a fading photograph.



The street cobbler’s booth advertising the portrait painting service is also selling wooden birds: a sweet marriage of several high-skilled entrepreneurs. It is another example of sharing resources – probably through an informal homegrown transaction deal.

South Korean tourists are known to be impatient, represented by the well-known word ‘ppali-ppali’, meaning ‘fast, fast’. Waiting time does play a big role in making a service business a success or a failure. If you can’t make it shorter, you may as well look for other options to make it at least more enjoyable.



This Call / Bill / Water button set is available on all tables in this cafe in Seoul (Shinsa-dong). Compared to the more typical model of just pressing the button to call the waiter, this eliminates one additional visit to inquire about what the customer wants.



The opposite example is also found at this self-service cafe chain called pascucci. Once you place your order, you are given this little pager. You go and sit at the table of your choice, instead of waiting around the busy counter. When your drinks are ready to be picked up, it will light up.





I would rate these two systems high because of their simplicity for use and implementation, requiring minimal modification in the existing infrastructure and workflow knowledge, hence lowering the barrier to the initial adoption. A contrasting example would be McDonalds’ ‘Touch Order’ trial together with SK Telecom. RFID reader was provided to be plugged into the mobile phone to enable ordering through touching the menu, with the bill to be topped up in the phone bill. When the order is ready, a text message is sent to the phone to alert the customer to pick the food up. One reviewer righteously complained: “Ordering was fast indeed. But no one paid attention to my order behind the counter so I ended up getting the food much later.” Managing the human skills and habits will still be the prevalent issue in deploying a service backed by new technology.

I don’t and can’t drive a car. And I do not wish to change that ever. But the concept of Streetcar: self-service pay-as-you-go-car is still intriguing. I don’t know how successful they are, but it does sound like they found a niche market for city dwellers that need a car just occasionally for those unavoidable ikea trips, or big grocery shopping days – considering most regular car rental companies have their pick-up and drop-off locations for out-of-city travelers or foreign visitors. It is a business model that is made possible because of the substantial percentage of their customers booking their cars through internet and mobile phone calls, micro-managing their rental duration, location, reservation changes, and post-payment with credit cards. Streetcar states that it takes just 60 seconds for the booking information to reach the specific car, and charges are made by the hour.



Having witnessed all the failed examples of free city bikes – where bikes ended up miserably valdalized – I was surprised to see that the condition of the streetcars was really good, without any sign of coercion present in the car itself like cctv, or sensor monitoring any damage to the car.

This business model does have the potential to increase the inherent value of the resource, provided that it is helped by tools for effectively managing and negotiating its utility and the supply-demand is on balance. What other commodities could we expect to adopt this model? Chain saw? People’s excess leisure time and skills? Storage space?

Streetcar membership card is indeed another near field communication device. As people’s wallets are getting populated with more than one of these cards now, I wonder how the industry will cope with the presence of multiple NFC-enabled devices at the point of input.



Better pictures and videos of UK’s streetcar are found on the company’s website: http://www.streetcar.co.uk/

Pictured is a truck covered with LED boards displaying ads on four sides (though one of them was experiencing a technical problem). It is an effective medium especially in cities where traffic jams are expected throughout the day. I can also see that it would be valuable for services that require on-the-spot advertising in context when/where people need it rather than relying on people to take the responsibility of remembering the brand or the phone number.





The service being advertised in the truck is offering a driver for taking you home in your car when you are drunk: You avoid drunk driving, and at the same time your car is back in your garage for your use the next morning. This is, again, a socially relevant service in a culture where involuntary and social drinking is prevalent.
With so much discussion on the ecologically sustainable solutions – flexible display infrastructure catches my attention nowadays.



Pictures taken in Seoul, South Korea, November 2008.