> All Change Here

> UK

>FINALIST

Team Members:

​
Sam Brooke,

Harry Tindale

Cities can be lonely places. Often, the bigger the city and more people around you, you find yourself feeling more isolated. This feeling is compounded during your daily commute; standing at a station waiting for train with hundreds of fellow commuters, each sharing the same daily ritual- yet cut off from one another, staring down at your phone, plugged into a virtual world.

Levels of interaction can amount to simply an ‘excuse me’ in hours of travel. This is a time when people are pausing for extended lengths, so why not take advantage of these solitary instances. Our idea suggests emphasising the shared annoyance found during the commute. Can shared instances of delays, accidental bumping into and constant stop-start transit be celebrated through design?
In All Change Here, we imagine the local train station as a place where experiences such as ‘excuse me’ or ‘I beg your pardon,’ are exaggerated into almost absurd interactions. We have aimed to do this by re-examining the designs of commonplace elements of the daily commute. Contraptions become catalysts to strike random relationships. Footbridges with multiple crossings and pathways encourage communication of intended movements and face-to-face contact. 

Concaved timetables position commuters to face one another and reinforce discussion and conversation. User-operated rain covers require consensus and cooperation to be deployed. To overcome the draw of the personal phone, tweets, posts and photographs as well as rolling news coverage is projected upon screens within the platform intend to draw commuters’ gaze out of their lap and into their surroundings. We believe there is no one way to eliminate loneliness; it is not something changed in one instance. Here, we simply emphasise conditions where by connections manifest over time- something that can be realistically implemented within the environment of the train station.