A public interaction project inspired by the Strangers Project. After hours reading anonymous thoughts there, I wanted to recreate that sense of shared emotion by asking one simple question: what feels beautiful, and what feels broken.
285+ responses. 15 street interviews. A quiet thread of human thoughts, gathered in parks and on phones across New York City.
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.
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.
Fifteen strangers. One question. Here are four of them.
What stayed with me was how quickly strangers opened up when given a space that felt safe and shared. People weren’t looking for perfect words, they just wanted to be heard. Reading others’ responses seemed to matter as much as writing their own, almost like realizing their thoughts weren’t isolated. The design didn’t need to do much. The simplest structure worked best, and anything more would have gotten in the way.