Photo Booth Stories

When I first started this project I defined empathy as trying to understand people by understanding how they feel and putting yourself in their shoes.  I wanted my project to be able to connect people that would normally never meet.  I found storytelling to be a powerful method to connect people so I focused my project on how to get people to listen to other people's life stories.

Precedents: While brainstorming for this project I looked at several projects such as A Mile in my Shoes by The Health Foundation and Inside Out New York City by JR.  These projects both connect people and tell a story.  In addition, these projects use technology to create a spatial experience.

The final concept was a series of phone booths that people interact with.  A person would enter the phone booth and tell a story about something that they love.  Then they would dial a random number and hear a related story about something that somebody loves.  Behind the keypad would be a smartphone that records the story and has records of all the stories to play back to the person in the phone booth.  The booth will have cameras and use voice recognition to detect emotions and key words in order to find a story that you could connect to and relate with.

This project will take place on Carnegie Mellon University's campus and the booths will be stationed at high traffic areas on Campus, such as in front of the University Center, on the Cut and in front of the College of Fine Arts.  The renders are of the cut area by Doherty Hall and in front of the College of Fine Arts, respectively.

The app will be available on the App Store for free and will allow you to tell your own story from your mobile device or listen to other people's stories.  This is supposed to be a supplementary or secondary feature to actually going to the phone booths, in case you can't go to the phone booths but still want to experience the connection.