Off The Hook
Design. No quarters RequiredEach year IDSwest challenges the design community with a unique design project. From 2006’s Doghouse Vancouver to 2008’s REST benches this feature always proves to be an exciting and innovative feature, and one that the media have come to love!
This year IDSwest challenged 6 designers, artists, firms or collaborative teams, to take a typical used telephone booth, something we are using less and less of these days, and transform it into something different. Keeping it out of our landfills and showcasing new products from something everyone knows (or remembers) and has likely used. Now, we are not looking for another take on a clean and pretty phone booth, we are looking for designers to utilize the physical parts of the booth and create completely new designs; combining elements of recycling and design to reuse something that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
Off The Hook 2009: Shannon Mendes Photography
Introducing our 'Off The Hook' artists:
3G1B Design Group
Reinvention of existing materials and products is an essential part of our evolving world. Telephone booths on every street corner have become an idea of the past with the invention of the cellular phone. The recycling and recreation of these once used objects becomes priority so that they do not find themselves cluttering our landfills.
The RE-flex wall system provides the mobility and flexibility of reworking your space through it’s various positions and easily changeable panels. A range of coloured and functional panels allow for a complete customization of your space. The endless possibilities of this system allow it to be used in residential, office, retail, and hospitality applications. Lockable casters make the RE-flex wall lightweight, easy to maneuver and provide the ability to fold up and store. Re-define and Re-vitalize with the Re-flex wall and challenge the use and definition of your space.
Our response to the Off the Hook challenge is an exploration of shelter and the concept of home, particularly as it relates to homelessness. For many homeless people without the benefit of a cell phone, the public phone booth is an important amenity to connect beyond local neighborhoods. We see the loss of the phone booth as a loss of public infrastructure in our cities. Our design reshapes that public facility by creating a stylish, small home - a "Home Phone". We're not suggesting that the Home Phone is a realistic solution to the homelessness problems in Vancouver, instead an opportunity for discussion. 
While stripping the old phone booth to it’s core parts, Imperium’s owner and designer, Gerald Lauzé, let the bare aluminum extrusions guide the size and shape of this island-style bar. Once the piece’s function revealed itself, other Off the Hook 2009: Shannon Mendes Photography
Dialosauros Boothus is the brainchild of siblings Lorraine Kwan and Kathryn Macdonald. The sisters have exhibited together in the past and are not new to collaborative work. Their newest project, Unhinged, a social commentary, is nearing completion and will be available in 2010.
Off The Hook exhibition illustrates this interplay of different scales and the ambition to improve existing environments well. We strongly felt that a used and discarded phone booth should be given back to the public realm in a new form. A bench in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, on the corner of Hornby and Robson, has long served as an impromptu site for public chess games. We saw this design exhibition as an opportunity to provide a public chess board, akin to those that exist in similar public places elsewhere - notably, New York's Washington Square. While our design may not end up at Robson Square, it allows us to at least imagine Vancouver having the same kind of public amenity as other major cities.
Off the Hook - Phone booths are becoming obsolete as more and more people use their cell phones. While this old technology is disappearing, something else in our society also seems to be dying as well. Have you ever had dinner with someone and wished they would stop texting, talking on their cell phones and turn them off? The lure of the cell phone is so great that some of us are forgetting our table manners. Table manner Table by Synthesis Studio is made from a decommissioned phone booth, electronics that will detect cell phone signals and LEDs that will light up to remind the dinner guests of their table manners.
Off The Hook 2009: John Benjamin Photography
