The Instruction Sets for Strangers is a social experiment conducted on the High Line Park in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Bringing a life-size Jenga onto the High Line, a place for leisure and often display of public art, our team sought to explore the patterns of human interaction with public installations within a specific context. Among the many artwork displayed on the High Line, we hoped to create an installation that stood out as interactive and approachable.

Throughout the experiment, our team used minimum verbal communication. Interaction with the audiences and participants were limited to gestures and eye contact. Using the well-established nature of the game Jenga as an advantage, we were able to engage a large number of passers-by over the course of three days and study the complex behaviors of both the participants and the audiences.

This project was done in collaboration with Andrew Cotter, MFADT '18 and Lauren Donohue MFADT '18.

In our top trails, we had a maximum of over 15 persons participating in a single trial and a large number of audiences. In the diagram above, audiences_max and cameras_max represent the audiences present at the most crowded moment. We have learnt that once people stopped to watch the game, passers-by are more likely to join the standing crowd; if the participants are following the rules and playing a challenging game, people are also more likely to watch. They would often maintain a large distance between themselves and the participants and form a fan shape.

In the two earlier sessions, we noticed that a large number of audiences were taking pictures. In hope of increasing social media exposure, we spray painted social media icons onto the side of the base box. However, the number of related posts on Instagram actually decreased after the third session, given we could only locate the posts that are public. On a brighter note, several staff of the Friends of The High Line took pictures and one participated in the game.