The WGBH mural on the Mass Pike has changed my experience of commuting to Boston. It features an image which changes every day, presented in an interesting format - one large square that spreads out on both sides in narrow vertical bars broken up by stretches of building. The images are bright and appealing, and make me feel happy and inspired to see something beautiful in an otherwise heavily industrial landscape.
When I build intranets for clients, they often request a picture-of-the-day on the home page. When I'm driving, the WGBH mural is like that web part on the home page to my work day. Traveling by car I also get announcements, traffic alerts, and advertisements from the signs along the way. Maybe the time and temperature, or a stock ticker if I'm downtown. And I know there's an emergency team out there somewhere that I can call on if I get into a jam.
When I take the train, there are more advertisements than art and system status alerts are poor, but there are means for giving feedback that you don't get on the highway, plus much more opportunity for collaboration and social networking.
How does your commute/home page affect the experience of your day? Is your route well-designed, attractive to look at, and able to get you quickly to your destination? Or is it cluttered and ugly, moving at a crawl? How is the experience for a first-time user - is the navigation intuitive? What about for someone who has been hitting the same "page" every day for years - is there anything (like a new picture or a wisecracking train conductor) that makes the experience fresh and enjoyable?
Occasional outages and downtime are unavoidable, but so many systems are slow and convoluted just by their nature, because they've grown up organically from something smaller or because they're being run the way it's always been done. Where could improvement come in? If you were making a wishlist for your commute, what would be the must-haves and the nice-to-haves? Could these be applied to everyone, or are there features that should be targeted to particular users at particular times? (In the case of the WGBH mural, what might be good for the commuters isn't so good for the neighbors.) Most important, do you feel you could suggest or enact anything on your wishlist? Or do you feel you have no control over this system at all?
Some facts about the mural:
- Go-live date: September 17, 2007
- Cost: $1.4 million (1.6% of the entire cost of the new building)
- Size: approximately 30-foot-by-45-foot
- Designer: Polshek Partnership, of New York
- Image display schedule: 6:30am–7pm; "At night, the mural displays a tranquil image of the evening sky over Boston as seen from the west."
- Image source/content: "drawn largely from that day's TV or radio programming on WGBH or from other sources of content that reflect WGBH's mission."
- Address: 1 Guest St., Boston, MA 02135 (at the corner of Market St. in Brighton)
Sources and other information:
WGBH Picture of the Day (WGBH)
Experiencing architecture with seven senses, not one (Architectural Record)
Bright in Brighton: WGBH opens its new factory (Current.org)
A bridge to the future in Brighton (Boston Globe)
$1.4 Million Dollars : The cost of the WGBH mural on the Mass Pike (Boston Billboards blog)