Poems on the Street: Dunedin’s Poetic Parking Machines

By Charlotte Steel | Posted:

In response to Dunedin’s status as a UNESCO City of Literature, lead designer Benjamin Alder and the team at Poetick established the innovative concept of modified parking meters that print poems on the back of parking tickets. These literary machines can be found at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, on Vogel Street, and in the Octagon. Here Alder talks about the genesis of the idea, the current installations, and his plans to expand.

I know that when I look at parking meters I certainly don’t think about poetry – so how did this mix of machinery and poetry come about?

As a Design student at Otago University, I had the initial brief for my Experience Design paper: to enhance an everyday experience, but also to introduce literature into the Dunedin community to promote our UNESCO City of Literature status, and to match the theme of the Vogel Street Party of 2015, which was ‘Literature and Light’. Of course, a lot of ideas were produced – one of them was that people use parking meters all the time, and that parking is pretty dull. If we introduced poetry to that experience, it would be a surprise, and the idea behind experience design is to enhance things that people are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. The concept also makes use of a resource that’s already there – there are hundreds, if not thousands, of tickets printed every day, and there’s nothing on them and no interaction apart from putting the ticket on your dashboard.

Initially we were looking at the logistics of how we could get poems printing out of the machines, so I went down and asked the DCC if they had any spare parking meters. They came back with a printer and software and everything I needed to print poetry on the ticket. All of the machine bodies were supplied. A cool aspect of this project was the recycling aspect – the DCC really showed itself to be a forward-thinking, sustainable council.

So who else was involved in the project?

I came up with the initial idea and others in the class had different ideas. We formed groups, and that’s when Connor Harrison and Innes Galloway joined the project. From there it happened kind of quickly – I’m not one to shy away from going all out and just doing something. Liam Bigelow wasn’t in our design class but he is our developer. He and I are working on the ongoing project together.

Was it a long process to produce a working model? Did you outsource or was it more of a homegrown effort?

We do late nights, that’s what we do! Yeah it was all done indoors and it was largely a homegrown effort. We moved our project to the StartUp space on campus and we were there for 6–7 weeks.

So when was the initial debut of the parking meters?

The project was a semester’s worth of work initially and debuted at the 2015 Vogel Street Party on the 10th of October. These machines were all connected via WiFi, with the idea that the public would be able to enter our tent and write their own poems, which could be sent to the machines. Because of all the people at the event there was too much interference on the day, so instead the machines printed poetry from other UNESCO Cities of Literature, like Edinburgh and Prague, and we also had poems from local poets and children. That way we could really showcase the UNESCO initiative and show that Dunedin is now part of a wider creative network.

Around three weeks before the Vogel Street Party, the royal entourage came around the campus. I was in the StartUp space, just doing my own thing, but then someone poked their head around the corner and said ‘What are you up to?’ and I started explaining it to them. More and more heads started popping around the door and then an adviser took a bit of paper off me that explained the concept. From there on in we had to keep it under wraps. Camilla [the Duchess of Cornwall] came along in December to find out more about Dunedin’s new role as UNESCO City of Literature, and she reacted really well to the machines.

What was the public response?

Dunedin is quite open to change and so there has been strong support, especially as Dunedin is building a reputation as a literary centre and for being a little bit quirky.

The national response was really positive, and for us as designers the best part about this project was seeing people’s reactions to the ticket. My key driver in this whole project was that all that effort, all those weeks of not sleeping, resulted in seeing people walking away with a ticket, reading the poem, smiling and talking to friends about it.

Does the poetry centre on Dunedin, or can it be on any subject?

The initiative is about more than just Dunedin or the Cities of Literature – it’s a way of expressing yourself through a means that was incredibly dull in the first place. And it’s not just restricted to Dunedin, because you’re trying to connect to other cities around the world. At the moment the poems are preprinted on the back of the ticket rolls, but the idea was initially to create that instant connection so that if I write a poem about a lovely day in Dunedin and it’s an awful day in Scotland, and the poem comes out in Edinburgh, [the reader] can go ‘Oh! Dunedin’s having a nice day’ – it was meant to be instantaneous.

Where can we see the machines now?

There is a machine installed in the Creative Dunedin section of Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. You can go visit the museum and get free poetry – it is currently printing out poems from around the world.

EDIT: As of August 2016, a machine opposite the Dunedin Public Art Gallery provides the tickets, and more machines will start to print poetry as the plain rolls of paper used for tickets run out. These tickets carry the work of eight local poets: Ruth Arnison, Diane Brown, Jonathan Cweorth, James Dignan, Lynley Edmeades, David Eggleton, Ian Loughran and Carolyn McCurdie.

After the success of the poetic parking meters, are there any more literary initiatives in the pipeline?

In the future, we’re planning on providing an online platform that would allow anybody around the world to submit poetry and which other UNESCO cities could access.

Our machine has been at the museum a while and we have built a system with the museum where a class of kids write their own poetry and submit their poems online, so that when they next visit the museum they can have their poems printing out of the machine. This is currently in use and local schools will be starting visits in Term 1. The plan is to test the community response and then if it's positive, and we get enough support from the other cities, we will look to expand it so that other people from around the world would be able to contribute to the project.

The parking meter opposite the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in the Octagon is the first to have poetry installed, and poems will be rolled out across the city as machines run out of plain paper. If you would like to find out more about Poetick, you can go to their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/poetickpoems.