Two UC Davis faculty members are finalists in a New York City competition to make the pay phone new again — and they did it with a slim, sustainable, digital installation that features billboard-like messages on an innovative LED display embedded in the sidewalk.

Smart Sidewalks, already judged the best in functionality, is up against five other designs for the Popular Choice Award — with votes due by midnight Thursday (March 14), via Facebook. See how you can vote, below.

Brett Snyder, assistant professor of design, and N. Claire Napawan, assistant professor of landscape architecture and environmental design, are among the designers, urban planners, architects and others who answered New York City’s call to reinvent the pay phone “to make our city more accessible, safer, healthier, greener and better informed.”

The prize? “The public’s imagination,” Snyder told Dateline UC Davis — and perhaps a leg up when New York City’s pay phone vendor agreements expire next year.

If you’re thinking pay phones are a thing of the past, consider that the New York City government, across its five boroughs, manages a network of 11,412 pay phones. And while their use has declined, due to the growing popularity of cell phones, city officials say “pay phones still serve the communications needs of thousands of New Yorkers every day, especially in times of emergency.”

For the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge, the city called for physical and-or virtual prototypes “imagining a new public utility through pay phone infrastructure.”

The challenge drew 120 entries; the finalists emerged from preliminary judging for creativity, connectivity, functionality and visual design (one winner in each category) and community impact (two winners).

The functionality champion, by Snyder and Napawan and their teammates from across the country (including Parsons The New School for Design and Syracuse University), is officially called Smart Sidewalks: Thinfrastructure for the 21st Century.

Each installation features two components: a solar-powered digital platform on a vertical structure, taking up a minimal amount of sidewalk space. The other component capitalizes on sidewalk space, for the message display.

“Smart Sidewalks is driven by two competing aims: to pack as much function into a single device as possible and to reduce the phone booth’s footprint,” Snyder wrote in a news release.

“Everything,” he said, communication, sustainability and way finding, is squeezed into “nothing” — only six inches of sidewalk space for the stand. The message display covers a storm water feature — a place that gathers runoff, which can then seep into the ground.

The communication stand functions as a Wi-Fi hub and includes a charging station, credit card swipe and other features. The user interface is concentrated on the front panel and includes touch screen, camera and sound inputs. The screen display is on a vertical scroll, to accommodate a range of user heights. Not only that, but the stand is curved, to allow people in wheelchairs to get close to the interface.

Oh, and you can use Smart Sidewalks to access the Internet, make calls, and send texts and emails, too. “In short, it’s a location-tethered smartphone,” Snyder said.

The designers also boast of Smart Sidewalks as self-sustaining — it can go off the grid when infrastructure fails. “As a publicly accessible database, information gathered from street sides of NYC will stand to fundamentally reshape the city,” Snyder said.

“With a single curb cut and a thin strip of technology, NYC prepares for a changing climate, gives maximum functionality to the technological savvy, and lowers the digital divide.”

How to vote

Voting in the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge is being carried out on the New York City Facebook page. Click on “Vote!” (It’s in a blue box with a telephone receiver, near the top of the page, under the cover photo), then, if you have not done so already, you must “like” the NYC Facebook page. Only then can you see the six finalists and the vote buttons.

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