For my project, I was hoping to discourage people from looking at their phones while crossing the street.

Every day in New York, I see lines of people mindlessly strolling in front of oncoming traffic, heads facing downward at their glowing screens, not even realizing they're inches away from a painful/deadly accident — one that could've easily been avoided. 

Rather than using a slogan-driven sign that's easy to ignore (i.e. "It can wait" or "no texting on crosswalk"), I thought I'd try a few pictogram options. 

 

Here are my thumbnail sketches so far:

 

In terms of placement of the sign, I'm not sure it should be painted directly on the ground, as that has already been attempted (and failed). It also encourages people to look at the sign for a few seconds, which perpetuates the problem...

 

 

Instead, I was thinking the sign could be a push notification that pops up on your phone when you approach a street corner or crosswalk. This could use iBeacon technology to force a fullscreen sign onto your phone as soon as you're about to step off the sidewalk — thereby completely interrupting whatever text message or email you were looking at, and leaving you no choice but to look in front of you while you cross the street. 

Only after you're safely on the other side of the street, the push notification would clear away.

 

 

UPDATE

To be fully honest, I had stepped away from this project for several weeks and never got around to doing the vectoring in Illustrator. However, thanks to an awesome fellow student on Skillshare, Luis Rivero aka "River" who kindly contributed his design services, the sketch was recently brought to life in vector form!

Without further ado, here is the beautiful sign that River created:

 

 

 

Thanks again to Luis Rivero for collaborating on this project!