Located in the heart of city next to the Chénghuángmiào (or City God Temple) and Bund waterfront area, Yuyuan Station is an essential transportation hub for passengers traversing Shanghai’s 2,400-square-mile area. It is especially important for delivering tourists to nearby cultural landmarks. While the busy metro station was once simply a place to wait, XING’s renovations have transformed it into an immersive, entertaining experience.

With the help of a specialized design software, the architects cut, bent, and spliced together thousands of aluminum sheets in wave patterns. They were then suspended in cascading swells, adapting their shapes to fit perfectly between support columns. The resulting undulations are reminiscent of both the waves of the neighboring City God Temple and the ripples of the Huangpu River, which flows above the metro station.

Because Yuyuan is the deepest-underground station on the line, bringing ample light to the space was crucial. The waved ceiling panels were fitted with customized LED lighting that courses through a program of colors, pulsating like the symbolic heartbeat of the city the station has come to represent. The lights ebb and flow from one bright hue to the next, moving in sync with the rhythms of passenger traffic.

The LEDs can be programmed to perform specific color and pattern sequences for special occasions and holidays. Chinese Red throbs overhead for National Day and the Spring Festival, while pinks and other floral colors flash on Valentine’s Day.

XING Design has been creating innovative designs in the realms of architecture, interiors, landscape, and urban planning since it was founded in 2016. The name has a double meaning, being both the moniker of its founder, Xing Xiong, as well as a common abbreviation for “crossing.” The studio’s work has frequently been at the intersection of different disciplines, finding inventive solutions all across the creative spectrum.

Xiong brought extensive training and experience with him to XING Design. After obtaining a bachelors and master’s degree in architecture from Tsinghua Univsersity in Beijing, he went on to earn another master’s degree in architecture from Harvard. Before founding his own firm, he worked for notable companies like Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, BIG in Copenhagen, and UNStudio in Amsterdam.

XING Design has completed numerous noteworthy urban architecture projects, but they are also well-known for their art installations. The Yuyuan metro station beautifully embodies the firm’s name with a design at the crossroads of art and functionality. It went on to be a jury winner in the 2022 Architizer A+ Awards category of Transport Interiors.

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Deutsche Bahn, the German national rail network, will soon try playing atonal music in Berlin’s Hermannstrasse station in hopes of reducing crime and deterring loitering. This music has been proven to agitate some listeners, creating a feeling of anxiety within them by increasing their blood pressure and level of auditory discomfort. DB hopes that the music, which is decidedly unmelodic, will sufficiently deter crime without disturbing all the passengers. Friedemann Kessler, the company’s Eastern Regional Manager, says: “Few people find it beautiful — many people perceive it as something to run away from.”

This strategy is proving to be quite controversial, as while the station has experienced numerous instances of crime, including a man kicking a woman down the stairs and high rates of drug use, it is also commonly used as a refuge by homeless people. Initiative Neue Musik, an organization that celebrates contemporary music, has even launched a counter-initiative in response to the trial. Members of INM have explicitly spoken out against the trial, believing that “art should not be weaponized” and staging several atonal music concerts to make a mockery of the proposal. The group successfully organized a peaceful recital outside the station, bringing food with them to encourage homeless people to come and feel included.

The group reported that Friedemann Kessler was also in attendance at the protest. By the time the concert finished, he apparently wanted to rescind his plans to play atonal music at the station, having been educated on its true origins by the performance.

While this particular plan is considered by many to be a hostile form of discouragement, it is not uncommon for transport hubs to employ music as a tool to calm or soothe passengers. Stations in Montreal and London have experimented with playing classical music, for instance, as it has been proven to quell antisocial behaviors. Other initiatives have involved changing the lighting in subway stations or experimenting with perfumes thought to engender feelings of positivity. It’s undoubtedly a more empathetic strategy to try and create positive feelings instead of negative ones, so it’s perhaps no wonder that the atonal music strategy was a non-starter, especially in a city as progressive as Berlin.

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How our transit systems are designed either encourages or discourages their use. A subway station does not have to look like a concrete bunker with a conspicuous means of egress, but its design must take into account the experience of the people who use it every day. Jeff Risom, the U.S. Managing Director for Gehl, believes that “idealistic pragmatism” is what’s needed to create a broader focus on not only what makes transit safe, but also on what makes it enjoyable. “It’s not about over-designing every single ramp (and) handrail. There needs to be a sense of planning for the everyday.” During the panel, Risom gave the example of Denmark, where transit is first designed for the well-being of all its users, and then solutions for worst-case scenarios are put in place (for example, emergency exits in case of fire). “The U.S. kind of goes at it the opposite way. They design everything around the extreme, around the worst-case fire code, the most accessible ramp, and then the everyday stuff falls between the cracks.”

Sometimes, simple gestures like the inclusion of artwork in stations and vehicles can help people feel better when using public transportation. In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) commissions visual and performance artists to display their work throughout the subway system. Some of the artwork is permanent, like mosaics on station walls, while some is temporary, like visually stimulating posters. The MTA sees this as giving daily transit users the experience of “a first-rate art museum.” Sean Rhodes, Executive Creative Director of Frog Design, said that including art in transit systems is a great way to make people feel good during their daily commutes. “It’s curated, it’s thoughtful, there is someone in the New York MTA who is bringing that into the world through partnerships.”
Not only can transit be designed to make you feel better (and even happier), but it can also make you healthier. According to Rhodes, poorly designed and connected transit is negatively impacting the lives of millions of Americans. “We’re spending an enormous amount of our GDP on healthcare. The FDA did a study a few years ago that found that 3.6 million people in America miss medical appointments because they don’t have access to transportation.” It’s pretty concerning to see how many people may have experienced a decline in their health — or even death — just because they were not able to get to an appointment to test for things like prostate cancer, breast cancer, or an abscessed tooth.
Transit is part of the texture of any city, and access to good transit improves the well-being of its residents by seamlessly connecting them to the places that they need and want to visit. Transit that is well-designed can not only make you happier, but can also help keep you alive.

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Imagine waiting for the train while picking out your groceries from a display case filled with products identical in size, scale and color to really grocery store shelves. If the first round of the digital revolution was about making the real virtual, this time it is about making the virtual real again.

South Korean grocery chain Tesco was looking for a way to one-up their major competitor – impossible to do in terms of physical shops due to a lack of actual stores; hence, they turned toward the world wide web with a combination of mobile phone and QR code technologies.

Using smartphones, shoppers can browse the isles during time normally spent idle anyway on their way to or from work. Their purchased products are then delivered by the store, waiting for them when they get home and ready to be put right into the kitchen cabinets, refrigerator or freezer.

Needless to say, the pilot program was wildly successful, and their sales now rival those or the largest physical grocery chain in the country. More than that, though, this concept redefines space, and opens up whole new possibilities for doing away with cumbersome big-box stores.

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Looking for ideas on how to tile a bathroom? No problem: start on the green line then home to the red right where the blue, yellow and purple intersect. Pictures, sketches, drawings and maps – taking these together you can start to see how this artist changed an abstract subway map into a concrete (or rather: glass and ceramic) tiling project covering three walls and the floor of this otherwise unremarkable bathroom.

Rarely do we see bathrooms that engage a design idea with such uncanny three-dimensionality. The grout becomes a grid that shapes the patterns that travel up, down and all around the room, while the pattern is carefully constructed at just the right scale to work with the dimensions of the interior space.

Christoph Niemann started, of course, with a generic map of the New York City subway route system and abstracted it until arriving at a configuration that could be applied in straightforward square tile installation (art). Somewhere between pop art and abstract decor, this tile pattern is custom and unique to the place – but there is nothing to suggest that the savvy do-it-yourself type could not replicate the process in some form to crate a likewise personalized mosaic tile pattern for their own home bathroom interior (for that matter, would these not look neat in, say, the bathroom of the subway stations of NYC?).

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Anyone who is ridden a subway in a major urban area – New York City perhaps most of all – knows that it is difficult to phase your fellow underground-goer. Drum circles, pan handlers, most folks have seen it all – but a rapidly deployed rope swing or secret backpack swing?

The first example is from a recent excursion on the BART trains of San Francisco, where three rope swings were installed and bystanders (or sitters as the case may be) were encouraged to join in the fun.

The simple rope swing designs were patterned after traditional back-yard tree swings with a single colored wooden seat suspended between a rope on either side. The artist below, however, took things a step further with her swing art installations. When it’s all packed up, Caroline Woolard’s swing looks like an ordinary bag.

This stealthy swing bag has gone through ten iterations over the years, has been repeatedly used by its creator on the way to work and is even available for custom creation and purchase. It’s a pretty cool way to bring some levity to a public place, not to mention fun.

In the words of the artist: “Here is my swing for the subway, disguised as a bag. With 1000 mesh L-train grey cordura, webbing, sliders, hooks, velcro, and snaps, I constructed a bag using industrial sewing machines (with help from an industrial sewing company). The bag transforms from a backpack, handbag, or book bag of with adjustable straps that hook around the handrail of the subway.”

More information about artist Caroline Woolard:

“Caroline Woolard (b.1984) is an American artist who, in making her art, becomes an economic critic, social justice facilitator, media maker, and sculptor. Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, Woolard has catalyzed barter communities, minted local currencies, founded an arts-policy think tank, and created sculptural interventions in office spaces. Woolard has inspired a generation of artists who wish to create self-organized, collaborative, online platforms alongside sculptural objects and installations. “

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