I recently finished work for design competition for Tablet, the high-design-minded hotel booking site. I’m not really one for competitions and I don’t think this one changed my mind too much as it used crowd-sourcing rather than a jury and seemed like a popularity contest, but I love hotels so I thought I’d submit just to get my juices flowing. The premise was that there haven’t really been any new and interesting concepts in hotels for a long time. Everyone has been focusing on “cool” but that can be achieved by throwing a lot of money at the project. Tablet wanted us, the submitters, to think about how to make a hotel that attracted a genuinely interesting cross-section of people and actually have them mingle and socialize. The setting was Downtown New York (south of 23rd St). It would have to serve business travelers but also appeal to locals.
This was my take:
