Mischievous Footprints

JAPAN

Mischievous Footprints invites citizens to play and connect with the city in a new way as they travel along a city’s roads.

Before tarmac, roads told stories of the changing of seasons, the passing of time and the story of people who come and go, and those with infrequent traffic soon became overgrown, it’s stories disappearing with them. Now, as an integral part of city infrastructure, roads are expected to remain unchanged over a long period of time, reliability required of them. However, exactly because they are the most public and most used of city infrastructure, is there not value in reanimating roads so they once more tell stories of the people who travel on them?

Mischievous Footprints places playful prompts in city streets, drawing out new behaviours such as taking a meandering path or standing still to look around through playful prompts. Using technology so pavements show the changing behaviour of people, a reflection of the natural evolution of roads, Mischievous Footprints shows that the city landscape is alive with new discoveries.

When the playfulness of pavements make us journey through the city with the eyes of an explorer, we start to cultivate a stronger interest in our cities and our travels through the city become journeys that initiate new connections, person to person, person to city.

8 thoughts on “Mischievous Footprints

  1. Like it! Especially the concept of recalling the role of roads in a modern way. I think implementing this idea into places where old memories are disappearing can impact the area as well as entertain people.

  2. I understood the concept and sounds good. I reminded of some works related to human-computer interaction, such as “Spur of the words(言葉の軌跡)” (available to watch at https://youtu.be/Ln3-4ZTqnAE ), and “at – sight specific series” (available to watch at http://bit.ly/2dp3vvF ). However, these works use projector, thus may not be good for wide city streets because of range of projectable area and cost. So I think maybe natural material which can change color of itself may be suitable for this idea?

  3. This reminded me of Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”! In the novel, Sherlock Holmes reads footprints and figures out what was going on at a criminal scene.

  4. 機能的で用意された道路に対しては、想定された楽しみ方以外の楽しみ方を得ることはできないと思うが、この提案の先には、歩く事の楽しさと道としての本質的なものを目指しているとても素晴らしい提案だと思う。

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