The WonderPhones were a series of interactive payphones that connected people in Downtown Dallas to stories of the city and each other. We gave old technology a new life, reconfiguring the phones to allow people to listen to content and play and record their own stories about Dallas. Three phones were placed in prominent locations downtown and two ‘mobile’ phones popped up at different locations around Dallas throughout October 2017.
Design an installation for the Activating Vacancy Initiative that meets these goals:
Timeframe: 4 months, June – Sept 2017
I was responsible for designing all of the electronics and software required to make the payphones interactive and assisted with the fabrication and final assembly of the phone enclosures.
CAD/3D Modeling & Fabrication
CAE/PCB Design
Payphones are rapidly disappearing from our built environments, having long been replaced by the powerful smartphones we carry in our pockets. Despite this, they are iconic fixtures from a bygone era, and we sought to capitalize on that nostalgia, engaging the community with something new yet also familiar by transforming them into vessels for connecting people with their city.
We partnered with local high school students, architects, historians, designers, urban planners, musicians, and essayists to create and record engaging Dallas-related content for participants to enjoy. In the end, we assembled over 30 minutes of audio content, ranging from personal stories of memories downtown to future imaginings of new possibilities for Downtown as well as both curated and newly created pieces that focus on the history and architecture of downtown Dallas.
People interacting with the installation are also given the opportunity to go further than listening; selecting the “Record a Story” option presents prompts that allow users to contribute and record their own stories of Dallas onto the phone.
This project was created for the Activating Vacancy Downtown Dallas, a National Endowment for the Arts-supported project in partnership with Downtown Dallas, Inc.
We managed to source five AT&T/Western Electric payphones that were never deployed for this project. For our purposes, the coin mechanisms and logic board inside that handled area code programming and time limits were unnecessary. The focus of the retrofit was on just the keypad, handset, and hook switch that the handset hung from. To interface between the phone’s components and the Raspberry Pi control unit, I had to design and fabricate a custom control board. The Raspberry Pi ran custom Python code, which enabled the recording and playback functionality.
Each phone also had its own custom-designed enclosure built out of colorfully painted plywood. The low-poly design had intentional panel gaps, allowing an internal light source to seep through, transforming the look of the phones at nightfall. Three enclosures were life-sized and two were smaller “mobile” phones, allowing us to move them around the city.
This project sought to inform people about their city, suggest ways to experience their city, inspire deeper connections between people, and encourage them to participate in the future of their city by sharing their voices. In the end, we managed to achieve that with over 10,000 individual interactions across the five phones and 76 recorded stories. The most popular options were stories about Dallas’ past, its future, and the live recording function.
Individually, this project was a learning experience in applied electrical engineering concepts, putting my knowledge of code and electronics to the test. The three large-format phones were installed at Pegasus Plaza, Browder Plaza, and Main Street Park. The two mobile phones were installed at City Hall, CityLab High School, and the Jonsson branch of the Dallas Public Library.
Attribution: some photos courtesy of Katie Krummeck, Gray Garmon, and Justin Childress
