Would you be more likely to take the stairs if they were fun? Say, they acted like the keys of a giant piano? Some folks decided to find out:
It seems to work, though I feel bad for anyone who has to spend any amount of time in the immediate vicinity listening to people on those stairs.
Found over at Gizmodo.
Fucking cool! I bet that would work here in the states too.
Sign me up!
I reckon people will get tired of it over time and then they’ll start using the escalator just to avoid hearing the notes on each step. Maybe if they’d change the sound every now and then.
Harry Partch, the iconoclastic Oakland, CA, composer, once suggested building stairs as a giant xylophone. This would be the acoustic version of these Swedish stairs, except that Partch would have tuned them to his own idiosyncratic scale of forty-three notes to the octave, and to get a good sound, you would have to hop from step to step, so as not to damp the vibrations.
In the modern apartment house I now live in, the concrete staircase just above the ground floor spans a long enough distance to be excited by jumping on it, which produces a satisfyingly loud, very low tone. I’m afraid I jump on the steps every time I go downstairs…
All it takes for me, is a skirt also on the stairs.
hey, I like legs.
Whatever works for you, James. I definitely need to find something that gets me to use the stairs more often myself.