Bus Stop Project

I have been asked to design a bus stop, or an interpretation of a bus stop, in any genre or time period. To start, I decided to look into what a bus stop is actually used for and how well it serves that purpose; from what I’ve found it seems that a bus stop is mainly just a shelter (at best) where people gather and wait for the bus.

To help with this project I was advised to read A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, more specifically Chapter 92 named “Bus Stop”, in which he explains the use of the bus stop, the problems with them and advises how to make them better. Alexander explains that to better experience a bus stop it needs to be in a comfortable area with the option to do something else nearby whilst waiting for the bus.

When thinking up ideas for a bus stop I thought about Gamification and how I could incorporate it into my designs. I then had the thought of adding a machine that acted as a billboard but was also interactive, featuring web browsing abilities, games, bus route information and is also a change/cash machine (which from personal experience I would argue is very necessary).

Here are some designs I was playing with:

After deciding what I thought would be useful at a bus stop, I thought about area/time period I wanted to set my design in. I knew from the offset that I wanted to base my design in the near future, and over the time used to design the images above I decided that I wanted my bus stop to be more of a train/monorail station. Here is the final image I produced:

If I were to do this brief again, I would spend more time coming up with more interesting ideas; I feel like my effort during this brief wasn’t 100% and if I were to put more effort in I could have produced much better work.

Side-note: the background in my final image was sourced from Nether83 on DeviantArt.