Giant Double-Sided Touchscreen Wins Contest to Redesign NYC Pay Phones

The vendor contracts for New York's pay phones expire next year, so the city put together a Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge to get some free labor out of an already overworked design community. Oh, and to keep its pay phones relevant, I guess. Still, I like the idea of keeping these phones from total obsolescence. Sage & Coombe Architects won the public vote with its really cool "NYFi" design, reimagining pay phones as multipurpose kiosks comprising free WiFi hubs, bus-ticket machines, MetroCard dispensers and bicycle share stations.