Morning
Today we decided to have another go with the Shanghai South Station. Dan and I met at 9.00 a.m. in the little Italian café on the departures level. We keep noticing foreigners on their laptops in here. It turns out this is a wireless café. A bit later, a contact from Oriental Television, Cui Yi, arrived. Oriental are going to interview me on Sunday. So, using the need to know more about what I’m doing as a kind of excuse, Cui Yi got someone from the station to show us around the areas we otherwise could not access without a ticket or some sort of official pass. That’s progress already! So, what did we figure out through walking around and talking to the station employee?
First, there are three levels to the station. The second level is where the platforms are. For most trains you enter on the third level. Anyone can go through the security bag check into the first circle, where the shops and cafes are. But to go to the waiting rooms, you need a ticket. Then, it seems there are additional barriers and inspections before you get shepherded down onto the train. The “dongche” (high speed trains) seem to have their own inspection gates and entry points. For some trains, you go directly to waiting rooms on the second level. We were taken into one of these. There were 2 pairs of LCD screens with TV on top and ads below on one wall, and 4 other LCD screens playing TV elsewhere. These were programmed by Mega Info Media (兆丰传播全国火车站联网), and we were told this was done somewhere beyond the station, and was probably a stream for all Shanghai or even East China rail stations (the Railway Bureau Cultural Broadcaster, 铁路局文广). The station people really didn’t care about those screens, she told us. They only cared about the LEDs, because those were what told people which train was where and so on. They had no control over the colour of the writing etc. There was one LED in the waiting room, and also a TV screen as part of the x-raying of bags as you walked in.
We were taken through onto the platforms. Each platform has 3 LEDs, which have info about the number and destination of departing trains.
On the arrivals level, our attention was drawn to the big LEDs with details of arriving trains. You can go from the platform to exit at any gate, so if someone is meeting you, you need to let them know ahead of time which exit you plan to use.
Cui Yi told us that had heard that originally the LCDs were leased to an independent advertising company, but that later the Railway Bureau took them back and leased them to their own sub-company.
The woman accompanying us told us that originally people found the round station very confusing, including the employees themselves, and people kept getting lost. The complaints department got a lot of messages from disoriented passengers! Then they put the numbers on the pillars, and this overcame that problem. Instead of telling people to go to the Northwest entrance, for example, they tell them to go to pillar such-and-such. There are about 100,000 passenger movements through the station every day, we were told, so getting it right is important!
In the waiting room on the second level, we noticed a dead touch screen. We were told that was just put there out of the way, so to speak, but that there should be such touch screens with information in the public areas on all levels. We were taken to another one outside the waiting room. I photographed as many of its screens as I could. It provides basic information about the station, its layout, its history, and so on. If you can get the screens to cooperate. These screens seemed well-hidden to us and we did not see anyone using them. We were told that if too many people used them, they would break. They also did not seem very cooperative — we kept pressing “buttons”, but nothing happened a lot of the time. Of course, as we know from the less than cooperative touch screens in our teaching spaces at Goldsmiths, this kind of problem with touch-screen technology is endemic.
OK, so now we’ve seen the place. The next thing to do is to try and figure out if we can find some designers to interview. And then we need to figure out what we want to do about photography.
Midday
On the subway over to the Museum, Dan and I notice that there are no screens on Line no.1, the oldest of the subway lines. In the massive People’s Square interchange station, we notice some interesting phenomena, no doubt the beginnings of Expo preparations. First, there are two different types of touch screens promising information in both English and Chinese about what is in the neighbourhood and route information. Not many people have noticed them yet or are using them. Partly, this is because they are tucked away, partly it’s because they don’t have things like screens displaying what users are doing, which might attract more people.
The screens themselves are not very responsive (the usual touch screen problem). They promise to print out maps of your destination routes, but we are unable to make them do that. The neighbourhood guides have little information about restaurants listed, etc, and no pics. They seem to be more useful if you just want to check where the place you are trying to get to is on a map.
We also picked up a station information guide — but it was for South Huangpi Road, which is one stop away on Line no. 1.
Dan said she noticed everyone on line no.2 in the morning was reading newspapers and ignoring the screens that operate on that line, even though they show morning and evening news in commute times. Nonetheless, if we are interested in everyday screens, the public transport system is where more Shanghainese are exposed to public screens on an everyday basis than anywhere else.
Afternoon
Yu Wenhao and I meet at the Museum to photograph. Despite all assurance that no passes and form filling would be needed, in the end Wenhao had to do a bit of that. But the museum was totally cooperative and gave us no grief.
It was immediately apparent that the weekday visitors are different from the weekends. Weekends are dominated by families, whereas it seems weekdays are dominated by school groups, especially in the middle of the day when we were there. For example, while the IBM “Try Science” exhibits seemed very popular with parents eager to get free computer lessons from their kids on the weekend, they were less popular today.
We also noticed that the schoolkids were not so eager to use the “Virtual Studio” in the AV Paradise or even the “Interview with a TV Host,” perhaps because both exhibits require them to speak on camera. On the weekends, of course, parents were very keen to have their tots perform in the “Virtual Studio.”
The pairs of information screens in the AV Paradise continued to be largely overlooked or used quickly and then abandoned. Teachers were very eager to get the kids to line up. The kids were eager to run around. I particularly liked the way they turned the finished and turned off “Chinese Morgan — Tan Jiazhen” (who he?) exhibit in level one into a playground.
