Broken and Beautiful
Project details
Built and ran a public interaction piece in New York that gathered 285+ anonymous answers to one question: what feels beautiful, and what feels broken.
Project highlights
285+
public responses
2 days
interface build
NYC
public interaction
285+ responses. 15 street interviews. A quiet thread of human thoughts, gathered in parks and on phones across New York City.
The Stand
A Reddit thread titled "places to cry in NYC." People looking for somewhere to feel something without being seen.
What I wanted the space to feel like: quiet enough to think, open enough not to feel alone.
A stop sign already means something. Redeployed not as a warning, but as an invitation.
Moment of truth. Union Square Park.
The Site
I had an idea to create an online, Reddit-like site to store stories.
Made different versions of the poster, each one a small bet on which stranger might stop long enough to scan.
Responses coming in through the site. People writing what felt broken and what felt beautiful about the world.
Union Square subway.
Words people kept using, given visual shape. Not illustrating, just looking.
An image of what we carry without knowing others carry it too.
Street Interviews
Fifteen strangers. One question. Here are four of them.
I built the interface in two days and spent the rest of the project reading what people submitted. The responses were more specific than I expected. Not “my grandmother” but “my grandmother at 3am.” That specificity kept appearing across hundreds of entries: people writing for themselves but somehow writing for each other. Running public research taught me that the artifact matters less than the opening you create. The prompt did most of the work.
