• Museum of the Phantom City: OtherFutures allows users to browse visionary designs for New York City on their phones. It is a public art project designed by Cheng+Snyder with support from the Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship.

 

words “velour” and “crochet.” The
former, meaning velvet, refers
to the soft tape, while the latter
refers to the hooks—the original
inspiration for de Mestral. By the
late 1950s, 60 million yards were
being produced. [ 3]
Had de Mestral set out to take
the walk in search of a “fastener
solution,” he would have been
looking for something differ-
ent. He hadn’t known what he
was looking for and therefore
left himself open to chance. As
designers, we have potential
for these moments every day.
“Serendipity doesn’t simply
mean surprise,” says Adam
Greenfield, who curated a show-
case of urbanist iPhone apps at
the inaugural FutureEverything
festival in May of this year.
“Strictly speaking, the word
means accidentally discover-
ing something wonderful in the
course of a search for something
unrelated. The genuine occur-
rence of serendipity necessarily
implies a very powerful order
of richness and texture in the
world and, to my mind any-
way, when you experience it
in cities it’s a clear indicator of
a healthily functioning urban
ecosystem.” He selected 11 apps
from EveryBlock to Foursquare
to Museum of the Phantom City
that best represented serendipity
in their intended use [ 4].

Designing for Chance

If serendipity is useful, can we plan for it? Hitotoki.org (from “sketches” of everyday moments) is a website and application founded by Paul Baron, Craig Mod, and Chris Palmieri that allows its users to look for those moments of strange, serendipitous beauty throughout the day—it sharpens their eyes. It becomes not just a habit, but also a meditation in which countless otherwise overlooked events start to resonate deeply. Users become more sensitive. “Put simply: it makes you more aware,” explained Mod in our email exchange.

And its use spans time.
Because hitotokis are tied
to geography, awareness of
moments as connected with
space reaches back in time.
Hitotoki has caused Mod to walk
the neighborhoods of his child-
hood, for example. Using the
software, he’s recoded sewer
drains and houses and woods;
on returning to those spots, he’s
realized he was carrying rows
and rows of mental filing cabi-
nets of experiences. Behaviorally,
it’s changed the way he’s moved
though life on that basic level
of awareness: “It’s pushed me
to think deeply about the layers
of experience we create living
in a city for an extended period
of time—how those layers fade;
how they overwrite one another.”

On time

Every place has a story to tell, every neighborhood a history. Locals know not just what is there, but also what used to be there. But what of the buildings and neighborhoods that never were? Can we create a serendipitous relationship with forms that weren’t there in the first place?

Cheng+Snyder, a multidisciplinary design studio in New York City, has worked to merge the hidden stories in architectural forms, the ubiquity of mobile devices, and current place to bring together something that is perhaps both familiar and strange. With iPhones and other mobile devices transforming the way we navigate city spaces, it seems somehow only logical [ 5].

Its iPhone application, Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures, shows terrain using a vision from “another future” mapped against the reality of what is. Using architectural visions—from

[ 3] Petroski, H. Invention by Design: How Engineers Get From Thought to Thing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

[ 4] FutureEverything
Festival 2010; http://
www.futureeverything.
org/
[ 5] Cheng, I. and
Snyder, B. “Museum
of the Phantom City.”
http://urbanomnibus.
net/2009/10/museum-
of-the-phantom-city-2/
September + October 2010