New York – Architect John Locke has created miniature public libraries out of phone booths in the city as part of a social design initiative to improve public spaces, called the Department of Urban Betterment.
The architect has installed bookshelves into the seldom-used phone boxes, and allows people to drop or swap copies of books.
‘They (phone booths) are dead technology perched on the edge of obsolescence, but they can also be a place of opportunity, something to reprogramme and somewhere to come together and share a good book with your neighbours,’ says Locke.
This way of re purposing a feature of the city is similar to the Fabrique Hacktion project, which sought to improve on collective spaces in Paris. For more on how people are repurposing products and spaces to better suit themselves, read our Hacktivism microtrend.