What if Columbus, 2019

What if Columbus brought an invitation to imagine the city’s future onto a downtown sidewalk. Commissioned for Exhibit Columbus in 2019, the installation stood at the corner of Washington and Second Streets, across from City Hall. Its position placed a public exercise in speculation beside the institutions involved in shaping the city.

Using a digital interface housed in a concrete kiosk, residents and visitors could combine prompts and images to propose future infrastructure for Columbus. Each vision took the form of a short sentence and image. This compact format gave an imagined possibility a form that could be recorded and shared, with members of the public credited as the authors of the future visions.

The project was designed to collect these submissions and share them digitally with the mayor’s office, offering decision-makers insight into the futures people wanted to see. That intended connection between public imagination and civic institutions was central to the work.

What if Columbus approached infrastructure as a subject for collective imagination. Encountered in the course of everyday movement through the city, the kiosk invited people to consider what they might change, what they valued and how those expectations could enter a wider conversation about the city’s future.

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