Enabling Berlin

Enable Berlin WorkshopOn the 27th of February I participated in a workshop held by the Enable Berlin group, part of the Cognitive Cities
conference. In this workshop we formed groups and were given ready scenarios to work with. In my group I had the
pleasure to meet and work with very interesting people and develop a fun concept we called Every Intersection
is a decision for a scenario where we should promote social interactions at traffic lights. Here is how it goes:

At the pedestrian crossing, some people move across the street while other people wait to cross. There are 
implicit decisions in this process: which direction to go? Follow straight or turn?
Wait or walk?

All this flow is organized by the traffic lights and signals.

The traffic signal across the street commands the participants: “walk” or “don’t walk.” What if this signal could give
additional instructions?  Instructions to inspire a person to talk to their neighbour, walk to a new desitination, or play
a game with the city.

We propose an intersection game that could be installed in any given urban neighborhood. An extra set of traffic signals
would be installed to display the new instructions. One set of instructions for moving and one for waiting. Some variations
could include:

1. Choreographed pathways or dispersions by using intersections as hubs that direct people in specific directions. This would
be based on a plan for the neighborhood that could boost activity on certain streets.

2. Directions to disrupt people's regular routines. Random instructions would include “blue shirts turn around” or
“follow the dog”, turning the city into a board game. Accepting the invitation to play could reveal new areas of the city,
just a couple of steps away from the regular beaten paths. 

3. The set of random instructions could be enriched by locals via a website. These could reveal to other citizens news such
as “new soccer field in two blocks” or neighborhood favorites as “turn left (for Danny’s diner).”

4. Most important is that by adding this unexpected element in the urban scene, we hope to wake people from the
programmed state of moving between A and B to the beauties of journeys through the city they live in or that they're
currently visiting. 

And some pictures of the prototype we built:

Every Intersection is a Decision - prototype

Text by Anna Kostreva and Vitorio Benedetti. Images by Vitorio Benedetti.