The service contracts for New York City's 11,186 payphones ends in 2014, prompting Mayor Bloomberg to send an emergency call to New York's creative community to help design a better solution through the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge. Today, officials announced the winner of the top category, "Popular Choice," and highlighted the winners of the contest's five individual categories. While the final selection won't be implemented, it will provide the city with information about what elements their community values in the pay phone's replacement structures as they begin the process of selecting official criteria for what they will ask vendors to provide. Finding the perfect replacement is a big challenge, especially with the history and technical issues to consider. The first payphone booth was installed in 1889 in Stamford, Connecticut and by the 1960s there were about a million spread throughout the US, including a lone booth in the Mojave Desert. At the peak of the coin-op era there were millions of phones dotting street corners and airports, but they've disconnected rapidly — fewer than 500,000 remain in the US. At the same time, there are now more active mobile phones (327,577,529) in the US than people (310,866,000) in the US, leaving many to wonder what the role of these iconic structures should be. The Mayor's office kicked off their design challenge in January, with fantastic results. "550 people registered, more than 125 submissions, it really was a nice response," explained Stanley Shor, who as Assistant Commissioner of Franchise Administration and Planning has helped oversee the city's pay phone contract for the past twelve years. "We thought that this is a way to engage people to really start thinking about what they really want on the city streets." "As the City works to determine the overall future of the public pay telephone, we’re facilitating a number of pilot programs – at no taxpayer cost – which use existing payphone infrastructure to gauge public interest and feedback in the services offered," writes Nicholas Sbordone, the Director of Communication & I-Gov for the NYC Dept. of Information Technology & Telecommunications. "Each of these pilot figures as part of City’s strategy to garner broad-based feedback on what the public would like to see the future of the public payphone entail. We’ll take the results all of the ongoing efforts above – plus the best ideas from the recently-named Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge finalists, and then “bake” all of that into the City’s formal solicitation (known as a Request for Proposals, or “RFP”) for the future of the payphone. We’ll look to issue that RFP later this year." The winning concept is called "NYFi" and was designed by Sage and Coombe Architects, a 17 person boutique firm based in Manhattan that has previously designed a variety of projects for clients like Fire Department of New York and the owners of trendy lofts an Greenwich Village. Their creation looks like a ten-foot tall, double-sided iPhone, down to the way the "apps" are arranged on the screen. In this concept, touch screens would allow users to perform simple functions, like calling a cab, with the push of a virtual button. It would also be designed to run popular apps like Yelp by leveraging increasingly powerful smartphones. The technical details of how this would work hasn't been disclosed, but it's easy to imagine an Airplay-esqe experience. Physically, the NYFi attempts to combine multiple pieces of street infrastructure — payphones, Metro card kiosks, and bus ticket dispensers — to help reduce the amount of clutter on the street and reinforce the Apple-inspired minimalist feel. In addition to the NYFi, the five other designs in this gallery brought provocative ideas to the competition and will all be considered as the city attempts to narrow down its design criteria for the final design specifications. And for those who think the community might want to hang on to the classic steel-and-plastic setups? It appears you're in the minority. "Besides the journalists that have a nostalgia with the pay phone, most of the people I encounter are not pleased with having pay phones around," Shor says. "I've been asked by store owners 'can you get rid of that phone that is in front of my store?'" [caption id="attachment_146567" align="alignnone" width="660"] There are two models of the NYFi kiosks — A larger version for highly trafficked areas and a human scale model for residential neighborhoods.[/caption] Images: Sage and Coombe Architects

"It's easy to ask what payphones are good for when everyone has a cell phone," says Jonas Damon one of Frog Design's creative directors who led a team that attempted to answer Mayor Bloomberg's call. "But if you dig deeper, there is so much that can be done on top of the system and infrastructure." Being proud New Yorkers, the members from all the departments in the 90 person studio pitched in on the proposal . "All the different disciplines got involved: UI, ID, Mechanical Engineering, design research." he says. "That doesn't happen often, but everyone made a concerted effort to participate." The goal was to completely rethink the payphone as a platform for communication and a tool that could be used to connect the community and provide direction to visitors. Physically, the Beacon was designed to reference the city's majestic skyline while respecting the space limitations of its constrained sidewalks. "We wanted it to be an icon worthy of the city, it's 12 feet tall and slender like the skyline." says Damon. "Also, there is nothing to touch, we're all mindful of hygiene." Instead users would interact with the monolith by voice by way of directional microphones and speakers. A few dedicated buttons to hail cabs or call police would be provided as well. Beyond phone calls, the Beacon would also serve an important purpose helping visitors and locals better understand what's happening around them. "We also played with the idea of hyper local advertising." says Damon. "A Beacon could show what food trucks were nearby or if a store was having a sale. All those features make technology on the corner quite compelling." The Beacon was also intended to serve a civic purpose as the communication tool of last resort. "Superstorm Sandy impacted everyone, says Damon. "A lot of us in the city didn't know when the power was going to be on or where they could go to help." To help prepare for future disasters the design specifies copper wires, fiber optic, and Wi-Fi connectivity that would have conventional power and solar panels to create a communication tool of last resort. "It's a matter of local pride, we love being in New York City," says Damon. "The topic of payphones has all the elements, physical and digital, that make it juicy to work on. Exercises like this are like fertilizer we bring to client projects." Unfortunately, Frog won't be among the firms bidding for the contract to actually implement the new solution, but they hope the Beacon sets the tone. In addition to Frog's design, five other firms submitted projects that made it to the final round of judging and are included in the gallery. [caption id="attachment_146273" align="alignnone" width="660"] Directional Microphones and speakers keep the towers germ free and relatively private.[/caption] Photos: Frog Design

NYC Loop While most of the entries in this competition developed giant, touch screen monoliths, the NYC Loop concept was the only finalist that created a booth that would facilitate next generation communications while also providing a small respite from rain storms. Technically ambitious, this proposal would be a phone booth, electric car charging station, and public art piece that projects artwork on the booth's outer surface and surrounding sidewalk. Image: FXFowle

NYC I/O: The Responsive City The team behind NYC I/O bills it as an "Urban-scale computing platform" with modular components that could be switched out over time. The exterior of the booth would display advertising or public messages, while the inside would be focused the needs of individual citizen whether calling a cab or looking up information about the area. While cool, the concept requires some substantial breakthroughs in materials — Like curved glass UI's that can withstand the challenges of NYC's streets. Image: Control Group/Titan

Windchimes This project created by students from Parsons, NYU, and the Cooper Union brings a decidedly DIY flavor to the competition. Instead of providing next generation touch screens and high tech wizardry the wind chime system would turn the city's communication infrastructure into distributed environmental sensors. The 11,000+ stations would provide real time information on weather patterns and pollution levels while transforming the biggest city in the country into the biggest science experiment. Image: NYC Digital

Smart Sidewalks Smartphones continue to get smaller, but many of the high tech solutions in this competitions got bigger. A consortium of professional designers and students developed this project that compresses all of the sensor/display/platform/network goodness into a nano-sized six inch strip of steel and touch screen glass. The kinked design allows people in wheelchairs to more easily access the device and built in projectors expand its display capability onto the sidewalk. Image: Rama Chorpash Design/Cheng+Snyder