For one month, the Market Street Prototyping Festival will showcase a selection of prototypes that inspired connection and served their communities during the prototyping festival last April.

All projects will be installed on Market Street between 6th and 7th streets in the Central Market district. The Central Market Showcase is a collaboration between YBCA and the San Francisco Planning Department.

Market Street Prototyping Festival: Central Market Showcase
Sun, Sep 27 – Sun, Oct 25
Market Street between 6th & 7th
FREE

Featured Prototypes:

Bench Go Round

Designer: George Zisiadis and Rachel McConnell

The Bench-Go-Round is interactive public seating that encourages connection and play between pedestrians. It promotes a spirit of cooperation and collaboration amongst groups that may not normally interact. It consists of two opposite facing benches, placed side by side across a central balancing point. The benches freely rotate 360 degrees around the central point in either direction. In short, it’s a bench meets merry-go-round. One can use the bench alone for seating. But when someone sits on the opposite bench, a surprising and delightful physical relationship between the two people is formed.

The People’s Table

Designers: Galen Maloney, Noah Marjani, Dominic Fontana, Joaquin Sorro, and Brianna Smith

Public ping pong inserts play and fun into the daily life of our community. Whether you play against a friend or engage a stranger in some friendly competition, taking ping pong from the privacy of basements, offices and rec centers into the street can enliven our public places. With the current transformation of mid market in full swing, our public ping pong project will serve as canvases for local artists as well as provide a fun and interactive setting for all residents of mid market.

Common Ground

Designers: Derek Ouyang, Sinan Mihelčič, Tina Vilfan, Rebecca Díaz-Atienza, Victoria Flores, Nicholas Petitmaire, and Cloud Arch Studio

As a group of UX designers and architects based all around the world, our team at Cloud Arch Studio sought to define a more universal way to understand the gap in pedestrian interaction and came up with a simple binary condition: people who are moving, and people who are still.

We have devised a game that requires interaction between people moving by and people staying put and rewards greater participation and coordination between all types of people. Through three simple networked surfaces – seating, landscape, and pavement built on identical grids – we can map user inputs from corresponding cells of seating and pavement to an unexpected water feature within the landscape, and program the reactions to occur sequentially as more cells are activated in sync along the path. No water feature is activated unless both the seat and the pavement are activated, and if the whole path is activated then the installation will offer a grand finale feature. The overall result is a sometimes surprising, sometimes contagious, but always magical experience powered by connections between strangers and the common ground beneath our feet.

Tenderloin ExerTrail

Designer: Cheyenne Purrington

The Tenderloin ExerTrail is an accessible, scalable, outdoor urban exercise path along Market Street in San Francisco. A painted sidewalk route will lead participants from one activity station to another, encouraging physical fitness and social connection while offering an artful sense of place.

The Tenderloin district in San Francisco is home to more than 25,000 people, making it one of the densest neighborhoods in the United States. Many Tenderloin residents live in Single Resident Occupancy (SRO) hotels, sharing common kitchens and bathroom facilities. Typical SRO rooms are tiny, often measuring less than 6×8 feet, which is smaller than most jail cells. These dense, urban living conditions limit access to public spaces for exercising, socializing, and getting fresh air and sunshine. Tenderloin residents share just .007 square miles of public parks, which averages to about 0.00000028 per person, or less than 8 square feet.
It’s time to think outside the box.

The Tenderloin can reclaim urban space along Market Street’s wide sidewalks to create a public, outdoor, urban exercise path. The Tenderloin ExerTrail will feature simple, scalable physical activity stations, just like traditional exercise trails, and encourage collaboration and participation. The activities will work equally well for one or several participants.