Materialtone first emerged in Times Square, in the middle of my doctoral fieldwork on urban infrastructures and media. I was spending long days observing how people moved through this dense intersection of billboards, ticket booths, police barriers, delivery trucks, tour buses, and street vendors. At some point, the overwhelming spectacle of screens and crowds gave way to a different question: what if I tried to exhaust Times Square chromatically? Instead of starting from stories or interviews, I began from tiny surfaces—steps, stains, barriers, painted lines—and treated them as the basic units of analysis.
Armed with a camera and a notebook, I started collecting fragments: the deep red of the TKTS glass stairs, the beige of numbered bollards, the turquoise of temporary activity-zone lines, the brown-grey of floor mosaics worn down by millions of shoes. Each fragment became a card: a photograph on one side, a sampled color swatch and minimal metadata on the other. Times Square turned into a palette, and the cards formed a small cabinet of chromatic specimens through which I could revisit the field site differently, focusing on standards, textures, and wear.
This Times Square experiment, drafted initially as a speculative appendix to my dissertation, became the prototype for Materialtone as an urban STS and multimodal method. It showed me that colors and surfaces could serve as infrastructural clues: ways to trace how circulation is organized, how safety is signaled, and how maintenance and neglect accumulate on the ground. Everything that followed—in Barcelona, Magdeburg, and Bogotá—began with these first red steps and numbered bollards in Times Square.
Cards’ selection →
