I did a little bit of research on this information kiosk and based off this press release article from cisco, these information kiosks were installed in other stations other than Grand Central. I also found out that MTA collaborated with two different companies, which is why the kiosks in other subway stations and Grand Central are different from each other.
A lot of the comments that I am about to make about the information kiosk is similar to what has been said already during our field trip.
The information kiosk at Grand Central is located in a corner of Grand Central station and I would strongly say that it is under-utilized. The location of this kiosk is “hidden”, in the sense that it is located beside unsightly pay phones, and not in the open area of Grand Central. I would assume that the purpose of this kiosk is to provide people (more-so tourists) with information about their travels, but because of its location in the station, no one knows that it exists and no one can find it. If it was placed in the open area of Grand Central, people would be more inclined to use it. Another comment I wanted to make was the physical design of the kiosk. It looks like they didn’t even try to install it seamlessly into the wall. It just looks like it’s jammed into the wall in whichever space they could find. Even if it was installed about 4 years ago, they could have at least worked on the aesthetics side of it, unless they predicted that no one would use it because of the location in Grand Central? When we went, it was also broken, and based on the date that it froze on, it was over 3 weeks, and no one has come to fix it yet. I feel like the company pretty much gave up on it and they are just waiting it out until they replace it with something else that’s worthwhile.
Overall, I feel like the information kiosk has a lot of potential, and it could have been successful but based on its current location and condition, it is actually very unsuccessful.
