Times Square Cooperative - The New Times Square

By the year 2040, a hybrid future that integrate nature and cutting-edge sustainable technology bestows upon us, starting in Times Square, New York.

This is a design fiction project, where we use information from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to determine the factors and challenges that will shape our group’s imagined future.

We started off with a discovery from humankind that led to the creation of the new Times Square, where people value nature as the way to stop the rising temperatures. Changes to beliefs lead to political changes as well, where we believe parties such as the Green Party will be popularized by the rise of support for living harmoniously with nature.

Our research and speculation brought us to the formation of an information booth to engage with people in the current Times Square. We mapped out our goals for our organization, and designed the future of Times Square based on our story of the changes in cultural, social, political structures. For this experiment, we withheld from mentioning that it is a project, and it is about a possible future. Instead, we place ourselves in the roles of information advisors to observe how tourists react to our advertisement of the New Times Square.

From key chains to brochures, we tried our best to be as convincing as possible. From the people we spoke to, there were a fraction that believed in our New Times Square, with some asking where to go to certain destinations!