Valentine’s Day was pretty intense in Duffy Square this year as tens of thousands of visitors passed through to renew vows, canoodle and visit the “heart” of New York City.

Photo by Keith Sirchio

Couples and families filed in to heartwalk throughout the evening. It really began to function like a photo booth.

In a very unexpected surprise Heartwalk  also became the stage for at least four engagements that evening.

Photo by Keith Sirchio

It was our hope that this heart would be a net that could ensnare the incredible diversity that is Times Square. Witnessing the range of visitors that stopped to have their picture taken that evening was pretty remarkable.

Approximately 500,000 people pass through Times Square each day. Inevitably, many of those people are going to take photographs of their experience and as part of the planning around the Heartwalk project we began to think about how we could crowd-source imagery from photos taken by the general public. We worked with a terrific office called HD MADE to build a Heartwalk photo aggregator that harvests Instagram images at regular intervals throughout the day. HD MADE created a platform that harvests images by predetermined hashtags (#heartwalktsq, #heartwalk) and feeds them to a gallery.

If you visit Heartwalk, Instagram a few pics and hashtag them #heartwalktsq. Check out your photos (and everyone else’s) here: www.heartwalktsq.com

Hopefully over the coming weeks this gallery will grow as the public visits the installation. We’re looking forward to seeing the results of this experiment in social media – somewhere between a photo-booth and a photo-album.

One component of the Design Lab at the New York Hall of Science – the “Dollhouse” – will be used for hand-scale projects, such as making models of buildings and cities. The perimeter of the space is composed of shelving for both display and materials storage. A continuous horizontal surface called the “aggregator” will provide space for kids to display what they have made and to build on the ideas of other participants. In response to the program’s emphasis on craft and making by hand, the structure of the dollhouse will be based on traditional timber construction. For both the walls and ceiling, wood framing will be laid out in a triangulated tessellation pattern and joined with connectors that are integral to the plywood cladding. To allow passers-by to see in, some parts of the perimeter are left open, and some parts of the cladding are perforated. The perforations echo the tessellated geometry of the framing.

The Aggregator

Front View of the Dollhouse

Plan of the Dollhouse

We’re in the throes of assembling the components for the Heartwalk. After removing all the hardware and planing the planks, we’ve been cutting them to size for assembly into the array that will form the inner and outer walls. The structure will be pre-assembled into sections that we will transport and install in Times Square over approximately 12 hours.

A view of the south-side being mocked up.

A view from between the interior and exterior walls.

Note all the holes from where original boardwalk screws were removed.