Random Lift Button
Who else finds the idea of a random lift button intriguing? ” The Random Lift Button project was conceived as an opportunity to exemplify further the role of space at the mercy of time. Certainly in large commercial buildings lifts are implemented to squash space and enable people to move more quickly from one work activity to the next. Lifts become a temporal slippage in the experience of a building as a whole, we skip space and avoid people, places and the opportunity to see the ‘whole’. Indeed corridors and stairwells are recognised as the most important social spaces within businesses and many more negotiations and affairs occur between office spaces than within them. Just like in hypertext our choice of destination is provided to us with the minimum of ‘journeying’. [...] The random lift button would place us directly in the centre of a non-linear moment, its outcomes uncertain and unpredictable. A sensation that would be both rewarding and entropic. Random Lift Buttons are currently installed in two lifts in Portland Square at the University of Plymouth, UK.” [via]