What do you think?
Strangers Need Strange Moments Together: Designing Interaction for Public Spaces
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 21, 2026
Our cities are designed for accelerating productivity and efficiency, not for empathetic gathering, not for delight and joy, not for reciprocal relationships between human beings and between the human and the more-than-human. Connectivity serves little more than economic gains. Around us, there are too many people “for our brains to compute,” and we are forced to cede the opportunity of connection to being lonely strangers that the insatiable capitalist economy conquers. But it doesn’t always have to be like this.
“We’re trained with this idea of fight or flight,” said the American environmentalist Barry Lopez in an interview with the Alpine Review. But, she adds, there’s a third alternative: gather. On this principle, Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, two artists based in Montreal, have devised publicly engaged art spaces to transform urban landscapes and infrastructure in over 60 cities worldwide, enduring freezing temperature, pouring rain, and the scorching sun, with all their will against the mandate of disconnection by tech corporations. Ours is a time that both incentivizes separate, individualistic survival and undoes the survival of humanity and of the planet as a whole with precisely this kind of lone and mutually diminishing endeavor. The odds of sustainability as a species is to recognize and emphatically practice interdependence, “ONE delightful, STRANGE MOMENT AT A TIME.”
Written from the horror of the pandemic and against the painfully wrong assertions of urban life’s end by tech pundits, Andraos and Mongiat stress that the immediacy and profundity of “the current fragile state of the world” is precisely the reason to commit our imagination and talent to “creating scenarios that explore the dynamics of collaboration” regardless of “the medium or our means of expression.” Everyone should feel the urgency and do something with it, together. But urgency doesn’t need to exclude pleasure. Quite on the contrary, it only works when collective joy matters, when participation among strangers is inspired by and reinvigorates the lost need for co-living and commons.
Many of Andraos and Mongiat’s public art projects — the closest and most inclusive category of their uncategorizable creativity — involve the transmission of physical proximity, such as sitting on adjacent swings, dancing on electronically connected floor panels, or singing to nearby mics, to musical notes, and eventually (for the persistent and devoted players) orchestrated music, only unlocked when strangers synchronize their movements. Such moments are deemed “strange” because the economic impulse is to eliminate slow time, the necessary condition for us to recognize the existence of others (humans, animals, plants, insects) and to have the chance to realize there’s a relationality, there’s an “us,” that makes the world livable. Yet, those “strange” moments are also moments of strangers who will overcome whatever awkwardness in the beginning and depend on one another to get a piece of art accomplished. Their art. Humanity’s art. Not an institution’s.
Over the years, the main challenge for Andraos and Mongiat has been locating their transdisciplinary work in disciplinary boxes for recognition and for funding. Sometimes this challenge plays in their favor, leading them to collaboration beyond their expertise. Sometimes it thwarts their effort, causing a loss of a coalition not only on the artists’ side, but an entire community that could benefit from what would have been an innovative initiative. To turn spectators into participants and co-creators, choreographers need to become poets of bodily movements across urban space, video game designers become placemakers in physical dimensions. But academic institutions don’t teach students to see their growth that way.
Despite (and also because of) the uncritical popularity of terms like inter- and trans-disciplinarity, the persistent hegemony of siloed, departmental knowledge-production towards which funding is oriented gets overlooked. This negligence of this existing tyranny of the discipline, which arbitrates a false necessity of definition and compartmentalization, remains dangerous to independent artists and non-profit art organizations whose primary mission is to serve everyday people, rather than abstract, albeit powerful, orders of knowledge specialization. The perception of art as specialized mastery of beauty is a narrow one that, as the historian Arijit Sen emphasizes (in Douglas Haynes’ Teaching toward Slow Hope), “is about inequality,” losing its ground for putting together our sensate bodies to build relations with one another.
What has been heartwarming through these challenges of funding and recognition is the reality that many installations that were meant to be temporary earned a long-term presence under the care of communities. Design can gently and poetically turn momentary strangers into friends and partners, just as it has quietly and stealthily alienated most of us, making us strangers to the human spirit. Andraos and Mongiat encourage us to realize that there’s always a little space to say, “Hello trees, how are you?” And more space will open from there.
“We’re trained with this idea of fight or flight,” said the American environmentalist Barry Lopez in an interview with the Alpine Review. But, she adds, there’s a third alternative: gather. On this principle, Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, two artists based in Montreal, have devised publicly engaged art spaces to transform urban landscapes and infrastructure in over 60 cities worldwide, enduring freezing temperature, pouring rain, and the scorching sun, with all their will against the mandate of disconnection by tech corporations. Ours is a time that both incentivizes separate, individualistic survival and undoes the survival of humanity and of the planet as a whole with precisely this kind of lone and mutually diminishing endeavor. The odds of sustainability as a species is to recognize and emphatically practice interdependence, “ONE delightful, STRANGE MOMENT AT A TIME.”
Written from the horror of the pandemic and against the painfully wrong assertions of urban life’s end by tech pundits, Andraos and Mongiat stress that the immediacy and profundity of “the current fragile state of the world” is precisely the reason to commit our imagination and talent to “creating scenarios that explore the dynamics of collaboration” regardless of “the medium or our means of expression.” Everyone should feel the urgency and do something with it, together. But urgency doesn’t need to exclude pleasure. Quite on the contrary, it only works when collective joy matters, when participation among strangers is inspired by and reinvigorates the lost need for co-living and commons.
Many of Andraos and Mongiat’s public art projects — the closest and most inclusive category of their uncategorizable creativity — involve the transmission of physical proximity, such as sitting on adjacent swings, dancing on electronically connected floor panels, or singing to nearby mics, to musical notes, and eventually (for the persistent and devoted players) orchestrated music, only unlocked when strangers synchronize their movements. Such moments are deemed “strange” because the economic impulse is to eliminate slow time, the necessary condition for us to recognize the existence of others (humans, animals, plants, insects) and to have the chance to realize there’s a relationality, there’s an “us,” that makes the world livable. Yet, those “strange” moments are also moments of strangers who will overcome whatever awkwardness in the beginning and depend on one another to get a piece of art accomplished. Their art. Humanity’s art. Not an institution’s.
Over the years, the main challenge for Andraos and Mongiat has been locating their transdisciplinary work in disciplinary boxes for recognition and for funding. Sometimes this challenge plays in their favor, leading them to collaboration beyond their expertise. Sometimes it thwarts their effort, causing a loss of a coalition not only on the artists’ side, but an entire community that could benefit from what would have been an innovative initiative. To turn spectators into participants and co-creators, choreographers need to become poets of bodily movements across urban space, video game designers become placemakers in physical dimensions. But academic institutions don’t teach students to see their growth that way.
Despite (and also because of) the uncritical popularity of terms like inter- and trans-disciplinarity, the persistent hegemony of siloed, departmental knowledge-production towards which funding is oriented gets overlooked. This negligence of this existing tyranny of the discipline, which arbitrates a false necessity of definition and compartmentalization, remains dangerous to independent artists and non-profit art organizations whose primary mission is to serve everyday people, rather than abstract, albeit powerful, orders of knowledge specialization. The perception of art as specialized mastery of beauty is a narrow one that, as the historian Arijit Sen emphasizes (in Douglas Haynes’ Teaching toward Slow Hope), “is about inequality,” losing its ground for putting together our sensate bodies to build relations with one another.
What has been heartwarming through these challenges of funding and recognition is the reality that many installations that were meant to be temporary earned a long-term presence under the care of communities. Design can gently and poetically turn momentary strangers into friends and partners, just as it has quietly and stealthily alienated most of us, making us strangers to the human spirit. Andraos and Mongiat encourage us to realize that there’s always a little space to say, “Hello trees, how are you?” And more space will open from there.
May 30, 2025
A beautiful object, with great content. But I might be biased :)
Read
August 18, 2025👍🏻
January 17, 2026
for the love of public art, making strangers fall in love and inviting play into everyday life
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews