Overview

Create an ‘Intervention’ in the streets of New York City.

Problem

Newspaper boxes often function as obstacles to pedestrians instead of being helpful.

A newspaper box’s form also has little reference to the time-sensitive event listings that are inside.

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The weather observatory in Central Park has operated in its current location at Belvedere Castle since 1920. Since then, weather instruments on its roof have been measuring and relaying weather data to a government agency charged with collecting weather information throughout the country. Because of its location in a world-famous park, this castle is undoubtedly the most visited of thousands of such data collection points around the country. Unfortunately, the symbolic importance of this site as a landmark in modern weather observation has been sadly overlooked.

The Existing Kiosk in 2004

Standardized data on weather conditions at this location is archived going back 80 years. Making this dense mass of data available could emphasize to visitors of this site the importance of weather observation as not a prosaic and distant phenomenon, but as both a hyper-local occurrence (this one point, right now) and a continuously evolving store of knowledge (this one point, at any or all periods between 1920 and today.)

My approach to redesigning the weather kiosk at Belvedere Castle is to highlight and celebrate the castle’s historical significance by allowing visitors to casually browse over temperature data collected at that location since January 1, 1920, when the station became operational. Temperature is the most basic measure of weather conditions, and as such is a natural choice when presenting only one dimension of weather data. Temperature also has as an advantage that it is cyclical over long periods of time, but the historical archive also records a rich variety of extreme highs and lows, as well as exceptional patterns, in a measurement that is easy to relate to.

The Existing UI in 2004

Visitors will be able to manipulate their view of dynamic temperature data graphs over the castle’s 80-year historical record. Navigating these graphs, visitors will be able to compare historical conditions to current ones, search for extremes, or view broad patterns by week, month, year or decade. The presentation of this data should be in a simple visual manner with an intuitive interface, so that visitors can spend anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes browsing. The display will also present current weather conditions to the viewer at all times, regardless of what point or period they are browsing over. This is in order to emphasize the important idea that it (and the visitor themself) is part of a living system, a reminder that history is a continuing story.

The scope of this design exploration was to produce a concept statement followed by three iterative designs that were revised and refined in order to best realize the goals stated in the concept statement (above.) Below are screenshots of the three versions that were developed:

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The first version was heavily influenced by the New York Times temperature graph. I chose a simple bar graph, with each bar representing a day, since the full historical data features only highs and lows.

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The second version split the historical data and daily recordings into two seperate charts, but it seemed too complicated and cluttered for a kiosk screen that would only be browsed casually.

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The third version simplifies the statement more, and integrates the current day’s high and low temperature into the same axis as the historical data. A pair of knobs on the kiosk face would allow users alternately scrub forward and backward in time and zoom in and out to show more or fewer days. The gray column represents the current day and remains static, while the historical data at left can be browsed. Thus the visitor can always be comparing the current day’s temperature data to any sequence of the historical record.

Challenge

Develop a solution that could quickly capture large quantities of high-resolution digital images of print and direct mail creative and import the captured media into an existing image management system.

Design Constraints

The solution would have to meet the following criteria:

It must:

1. be able to capture high-resolution images up to full-page newspaper size.
2. integrate with existing image management system.
3. be easy to use by part-time staff.

Solution

We developed a system that would use a modified document photography stand to capture digital stills of print creative. In addition to specifying hardware, a software interface was built to control the camera and import captured images into a database built in Filemaker Pro, where further editing operations (cropping, rotating and exporting) could be easily executed by employees.

A six-week development effort was followed up by two rounds of iterative testing and streamlining. Built in 2004, this system is still the client’s primary method of capturing and cataloging creative, having captured over 20,000 images of creative in approximately 1/12 the time it would take with a flatbed scanner.

We used some hardware from existing document photography stands. The gooseneck arms, pipe clamp and wiring shown here were adapted for our stand.

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The custom-built lamp base shown here holds two T10 fluorescent fixtures. The lamp bases were fabricated by a local acrylic shop.

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The assembled light fixture attached to our stand, which is built of aluminum pipe and speedrail fittings.

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The camera is mounted at the top of the stand on a three-axis pipe clamp. In order to capture images without lens distortion, a 50mm macro lens was used to produce the flattest field. This in turn required the camera to stand approximately 5 feet from the imaging surface in order to be able to photograph a full newspaper page.

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The nearly-completed digital document photography stand.