I saw poop at the 23rd Street station platform early April 2008. I'm no scatologist, but the fecal fiesta looked distinctly human. I couldn't say I was surprised, and why should I have been? After all, it's nearly a right of passage to innocently run your hand across a handrail, later to realize it was target practice for sick pigeons.


Why is the subway a communal cesspit for our collective sense of responsibility? More alarmingly, no one seemed to care. 'We get it: it's poop,' they would say, 'stand somewhere else then.' Perhaps the origin of such widespread apathy towards the subway runs deeper than excreta.


Talking about the New York City Subway isn’t easy. Should we begin with how it functions from an engineer’s point of view? Or perhaps we should talk about user experience from a service design point of view. We might even contextualize today’s system by first understanding its history.

I conducted research in the New York City Subway, Paris Métropolitan and London Underground. I paid particular attention to methods of crowd control, signage systems and online ticketing infrastructure. As I considered the body of my research, it became quickly apparent that the scope of the project was too complicated and too large for one person to fully understand and propose an actionable solution list in a single semester. It was not only impossible, but also intellectually reckless. Instead I needed to look at how the system is consumed intellectually.

In Image of the City, author Kevin Lynch argues that imageability is influenced by the clarity of structure and the quality of identity.


This project adapts Lynch’s idea of imageability to the New York City Subway. It brings to question oppressive and inflexible systems masterminded in hermetically-sealed design studios.