WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
Design: Pablo Medina and Yomar Augusto Lettering samples: Pablo Medina, Yomar Augusto and Cindy Rodriguez

What would you change? was the question that we asked fifty New Yorkers one Wednesday in March of 2013. The wide variety of answers came from bankers on Wall Street to first generation immigrants in the Bronx. Our goal was to develop a project that blurs the lines between journalism and art, so we recorded these responses with our phone and later used key words and phrases from the interviews as content for the lettering that you see on this wall.

Aesthetically, our decisions were based on the desire to convey the individual and distinct quality of the voices on these interviews. We used a hand-crafted lettering style with a deliberately spontaneous quality, reminiscent of hand-made activist signs and posters.

Since its inception in 1919, The New School has been an institution committed to social change. The original call for submission for this project asked us to convey this ethics in the work. Like The New School, New York City is energetic, colorful, raw and continuously both constructed and de-constructed. Like all cities, New York is never finished, always in process, always in flux – changing with the energetic demands of its inhabitants.

These are the some of the characteristics that inspired us to synthesize what we heard in the streets on that spring day into this eclectic composition.