Box Populi

How can this be different? How can this be better?

by Brian Howard

The next week is about reinvention. I'm not talking about John McCain's nth new strategy in as many weeks. (Please tell me Hockey As A Hot Button Issue is over. But I'm proud of you, Flyers fans.)

I'm talking DesignPhiladelphia, the weeklong festival showcasing people whose lives revolve around trying to make things — houses, products, publications — better. This means that you, dear Philadelphian, have license all this week (and hopefully after) to ask: How can this be different? How can this be better? What else can this be?

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It's a practice that's won cover model Josh Owen accolades across the design world. It's what Nathaniel Popkin, who wrote the piece, brought to his book The Possible City. And it's what DP grand dame Hilary Jay did when amping this year's festival over last year's.

Because we like to ask questions, too, we asked them of a group of University of the Arts students. Our publisher, Paul Curci, asked students in UArts' graphic design and industrial design departments to re-imagine the part of City Paper no one thinks they think about: our honor boxes. Dented up and iconic, our orange boxes are inextricably tied to our identity.

"It wasn't a thing where we were just going to paint a box and put DesignPhiladelphia on it," says Richard Felton, a UArts professor of graphic design. "It could be totally practical or could be very impractical. For us it was important that we be able to introduce this project as 'Let your imagination go.' The interesting thing is always when you ask somebody, 'What can something be, this everyday thing?' And then open the door to rediscovering what it is. Particularly something as common and abused as those paper boxes."

The results are, by and large, stunning.

Many of the graphic design projects sought to communicate messages through the boxes. From "Bring Our Troops Home" to "Free Love Park" to "Don't Eat Fast Food," the boxes become soapboxes.

The industrial design concepts tended to reinvent or further define the boxes. Several play on the idea of honor box as furniture, and one, Cityfurniture, incorporates the Ben Franklin favorite Sack Back Windsor Chair. The Flower Box becomes a planter while the Honor Bowl (pictured) collects rain water and funnels it into a street-level dog bowl.

Two proposals focus on cranking up the perceived value of our product while playing on the First Amendment ideals of a "free" press. The Bling Box (pictured), a squat, bejeweled specimen, features a "semantically redesigned outer appearance to give off the impression of higher opulence, while juxtaposing the free newspaper inside." The Vault declares: "Like all valuables, free press should be kept in a safe. The City Paper Vault is always unlocked allowing access to everyone."

The elephant in the room, the idea that physical publications will eventually be phased out completely by digital media — one I'm not convinced of, for what it's worth — was addressed in several ways: a box simply adorned with ones and zeros; one that encourages readers to interact with a blog; one that becomes, in essence, a listening station/podcast lounge.

Perhaps most impressive is a curvaceous model called Mycitypaper (pictured), an interactive station that's flush with functionality: "The box has been transformed into a multi-lingual distributional information kiosk," states the specs, "whose central features are the adjustable LCD touch-screen, USB and headphone jacks, Wi-fi/Bluetooth/podcast settings, solar panel, recycling bin, and the option to take either a hard copy of the City Paper, or print out a personalized paper."

The Mycitypaper proposal's way, way on the theoretical side, but it sure does look pretty.

One of the more practical mock-ups, Rate Philly (pictured), would come loaded with orange thumb stickers and then encourage users to judge the design around them by affixing the decals in either a thumbs-up or -down manner.

"I love that it does address design in conjunction with DesignPhiladelphia," says Felton. "It lets somebody interact. We all walk through the city and we don't see anything. This empowers them with a way to leave a comment."

My favorite didn't make the final jury cut, possibly because it's a bit juvenile: The Campaignapult, an election-year concept that uses the honor box's spring-loaded front door as a propellant. The idea is to allow readers, when picking up their paper, to load an egg (provided in the box) into the catapult and, as per the proposal, "vent their frustrations by taking aim at a [photo of a] candidate and hitting him in the face with a satisfying splat."

"I enjoyed it because it's time-specific," says Felton. "I enjoyed the whole thing that someone had opened that door and thought, 'I could play with that idea.'"

I just like the idea of flinging eggs at a photo of John McCain.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)

View all the proposals, in their entirety, at citypaper.net and check Curci's new blog, Publisher's Clearinghouse, citypaper.net/publisher, for his thoughts.