In most mythology, the underworld is a serious and not necessarily pleasant place. It’s a place you want to get out of. Hell, for example. An analogy might be drawn to the New York subway, whose riders–let’s face it–want out.
Even today, when a vast capital improvement program has made the subway system significantly cleaner, safer, more efficient, more comfortable and more attractive than it has been in decades, life underground resists cheeriness. So, when a bright, playful design element blossoms in the municipal nether world, it deserves notice.
Over the last year, MetroCard vending machines have begun to appear underground. Usually tucked into station corners near the token booths, they sit like electronic trolls, splashed with cartoon colors, their screens and message boards blinking and flashing.
Children sometimes stand in front of these machines and play. The touch screens, as they come up, are colorful and wonderfully legible, so that even a 6-year-old can read them. The colors change from screen to screen, and text boxes advance or recede, enlarging or diminishing in size. Usually, it’s a good enough show to elicit smiles–and sometimes laughter.
Adults tend to approach with wary determination, intently regarding the screen and carefully pressing it after reading all options several times. As the transaction progresses, the muscles around mouth and eyes relax, the pace picks up and after the MetroCard is successfully plucked from the dispenser, users often leave with something like jauntiness in their step.
All this–the engaging appearance and ease of use–is a textbook case of how small design improvements have a kind of leverage that allows them to slightly alter, gently nudge, the urban spirit up a notch. Leverage is involved in another way, too, because the ideas in question came froma tiny design studio in a single office room on West 23rd Street in Manhattan.
Masamichi Udagawa, who was born in Tokyo, and Sigi Moeslinger, who was born in Ried, a small town in Austria, are the principal–and only–employees of Antenna Design. Young and rather elegant, both cut their teeth in the San Francisco office of Ideo, among the best-known international design studios.
For several years, Udagawa was Ideo’s East Coast representative. In that capacity he submitted the winning bid for the job of redesigning the exterior and the software interface of the MetroCard vending machine in 1996, and he continued the work after he struck out on his own.
The machine, made by the Cubic Automated Revenue Collection Group of San Diego, is built like a tank, and its high-tech innards include the Holy Grail of vending machines, a precision Swiss-made bill acceptor that takes ones, tens, twenties and fifties, and will do so many thousands of times before jamming.
The only problem, said Nuri Hamidi, the Metropolitan Transit Authority manager for the project, was that the machine that Cubic delivered looked like a refrigerator. The authority tried it out on eight focus groups of riders from different income, ethnic and language groups and those with disabilities, and the response was uniformly negative.
“All the groups said the box was intimidating,” Udagawa said. “The layout of the front was incomprehensible to them, scary looking, and nobody wanted to touch it. Even after telling people to hit a certain button, they wouldn’t proceed.”
Udagawa, then working with Ideo, began his redesign project with two computer screens. “There are two ways to create a transaction,” he said. “There is the soda machine. You stick in some money and choose a product. And there is the store. You choose an article or service, then you pay for it.”
“We found that people unanimously liked the store experience,” he said. “They didn’t like paying first, because then they felt they were risking something.”
Focus-group participants also were confused by the machine’s layout; the Antenna solution was to group the machine’s functions by affixing colored ceramic medallions, or bezels. With the encouragement of Sandra Bloodworth, director of the Arts for Transit program, which supervises the installation of art in the subways and oversees the use of color in the stations, the bezels were made bright blue, yellow, red and green.
“We used bright colors to make it a little more Coney Islandish,” Udagawa said. “It’s pretty dark down there, and subway riders need something to cheer them up, like kindergarten colors.”
Reflecting mirrors also were installed, so people could see behind them and feel more secure.
The symbols and words people read on the machine’s screen were made simple enough for a child to use. An animated hand, index finger extended, repeatedly pushes a fake button on the touch screen, which says “Touch Start.” (Moeslinger’s first contribution to the project was to make the finger really big.) Only one choice on how to proceed may be made on each screen, but the previous choice sits at the top of the screen, so you can go back to it if you think you made a mistake.
The screens themselves use colors coded to the area on the machine where you have to go next. Green on the screen means cash, which means go to the green bezel area to insert your money. Yellow means put in or take out your yellow MetroCard at the yellow bezel, credit cards are blue and receipts get a rather jazzy flamingo red. In addition, all of this can be done in eight languages and Braille. Riders with personal stereo headphones can plug them into a jack for audio instructions.
More than 400 machines are in service, with around 1,200 full-size and 600 smaller ones to come. They have proved so successful that Metro-North and the Long Island Railroad are installing similar ones. Ultimately, it is expected that these vending machines will allow the subway to dispense with token clerks, who will be transferred to other jobs.
Based on the success of this project, the New York City Transit Authority retained Antenna Design to create the interior and exterior of its next two subway car models, which are now being tested. Some 1,080 have been ordered, for just less than $1.5 billion; riders will begin seeing them this spring.
Once again, the designers have brought along their sense of color, space and humor to an environment short on all three.
“For the exterior, mainly we gave the train a nose,” Moeslinger said. “We tried to make it more like a face, a bit more anthropomorphic.” The front and back of the new cars bear a resemblance to stylized jack-o-lanterns.
On the inside, Antenna removed the floor-to-ceiling pole in the middle of each car, which leaves more room to maneuver a wheelchair and opens the space. Computerized “strip” maps running along each side near the roof line indicate the train’s progress with a small light.
“We tried to make the car as light as possible,” Udagawa said. “We chose a much lighter color than usual for the walls–red dots on a very light background made of melamine (a highly scratch-resistant synthetic).” Seats are purplish gray; the floor, black with burgundy speckles. The seat is mounted on the wall and cantilevered out, with nothing underneath but is surrounded by continuous stainless-steel tubing, the bars and handles for the riders. If you enter this train, it feels more spacious and less industrial than the old ones, though the envelope has not changed.
To Antenna Design, this fastidiousness has significance and intention beyond a craftsman’s attention to detail. Design has a lot to do with behavior, Moeslinger said. “It’s a way to guide them, by creating positive motivation.”
Udagawa agreed, saying, “Instead of making a law and enforcing it, which is a brutal way to direct people, design can help achieve similar effect, not by force of prohibition, but by encouraging certain behaviors.”
The ultimate goal, Moeslinger said, was to create environments in which people feel happier and less hostile.
