As a stable and reproducible environment, the escalators can be described as a point of vertical ascent/descent. They hold multiple users who may stand or walk from the point of entry to the point of departure. A handrail moves concurrently with the stairs, to provide stability to those who require the assistance of added stability during their ride. At the lower and upper portions of the escalator, the grade of elevation plateaus to provide users a safe and gradual pathway through which to enter and exit the mechanism of vertical change. Each step is wide enough to accommodate two persons, or one person with additional baggage, and the surface of each is textured to prevent pooling liquids or dirt that could cause users to loose their footing and endanger those nearby. Within a context of transportation hubs, the activity which occurs on escalators is the simultaneous and looping transmission of multiple persons from one elevation to another.

 

 

If we abandon the notion that context is stable and delinable, and instead accept that context is actively produced by activities on location at any point in time, we see that much more is produced than a looping transmission of users from one floor to another. Specifically, depending on the placement of users on the stairs and their level of awareness, users’ activity may actually be hampered by the dynamism of unpredictable human behavior in the enclosed space. If users maintain and comply with a mutual understanding of their proper placement on the stairs, the system runs smoothly. Specifically, this placement describes a situation whereby users who wish to remain stationary stand on the right to clear a pathway for hurried users who wish to pass on the left. Without this mutual acknowledgement of actively produced context that dictates the use of escalators at transportation hubs, users may miss connections or appointments. In short, problems arise.

 

When the hubs are congested at rush hour, stationary left-standing infractors impede the flow of traffic and insert themselves as unwanted impediments to hurried users who could otherwise cast stationary people from awareness if they were standing on the right.

 

The problem is compounded when the left-standing infractor is inaccessible to the person wishing to pass, or otherwise unable to be made aware of his violation due to cognitive or sensory distractions (Commonly manifested as taking on the phone or listening to headphones). When this is the case, the context produced cannot easily be changed because the violator cannot be alerted to change “the occasioned property of action” (Dourish 25) that he or she has created. All must suffer the frustration of occasioned oblivion for the duration of the ride.

 

 

Adam Greenfield, in his book Everyware, states that “whether consciously or not, values are encoded into a technology, in preference to others that might have been, and then enacted whenever the technology is employed.” This intervention to counter the violating act of left-standing is—without question—a value-laden system that seeks to change the context of escalator etiquette and increase efficiency of human transportation. In order to create a system that can respond to dynamic surroundings, we create stairs that can sense the position of a person standing on them, warn violators gently, and ultimately humiliate them into compliance.

 

A commonly witnessed, though static effort to construct context, is signage that instructs people to “stand right, pass left.” However, by drawing attention to the infraction only when it has been violated, publicly and with more than an ounce of shame, context becomes a product of interaction between person and machine, rather than a pre-established environmental characteristic.

 

When a person has stood on the left for more than 3 seconds, the stair will light up as will the corresponding portion of the handrail. This alerts the violator to his or her infraction and seeks to propel change through the occasioned property of impasse. If the violator has still not moved after an interval of 10 seconds from the first warning, the system will sonically notify all passengers of the violator’s weight. The assumption here is that if one’s sense of self-importance is the driving force that triggers an interaction between man and machine (the user has refused to move after a first warning), then the system must issue a stimulus that will offend that offender on a personal level in order to effect a change in context.