The first official on-street placement of the long-awaited digital Wayfinder Kiosk program will take place next week, according to the City of Santa Monica, nearly a year after a fully functioning prototype was made available for local residents to inspect, examine and evaluate last June.
Officially known as the Digital Wayfinding and Out-of-Home Advertising Kiosk Program, the initiative was first introduced in early 2020, but the proposal was shelved until November 2022, when Council selected a company to install and maintain the network of kiosks. A company called BIG Outdoor beat the competition and was awarded the franchise in December 2022. However, one of the companies spurned by the selection process, IKE Smart City, threatened legal action, accusing BIG of exaggerating their qualifications and copying other company’s intellectual property as it related to the kiosks.
However, in a warm and fluffy ending to this epic tale, both IKE and Big settled their differences in February 2023 and announced a partnership to meet the terms of the contract that would roll out “up to 50 kiosks” and potentially raise in the region of $5 million per year for the city.
Credit: BIG Outdoor
“The city of Santa Monica and BIG Outdoor have made significant progress on the digital wayfinding kiosk project. Construction to install the first kiosk will begin tomorrow April 22 and we expect that kiosk, located at the southeast corner of Wilshire Blvd and 4th Street to go live by the end of the week,” a City spokesperson told the Daily Press this week, adding a day or so later that, “there was an unforeseen issue with construction and we’re looking at next week for the test install.”
However, a visit to that particular corner of the Wilshire and 4th Street intersection does show early indications of breaking ground.
Last year, the Daily Press jumped at the opportunity to play with this gigantic, new gadget and before long concern was expressed as to how well this monolith-sized message board would stand up to the inevitable vandalism that any nice, shiny new toy placed on the streets of Santa Monica will be vulnerable to.
“First and foremost was making sure we had protocols in place if something does happen,” Bill Tagliaferri, President of BIG Outdoor, said in June 2023. “We’re hiring full time maintenance workers and their job is solely to check these kiosks and clean them. And this is in tandem with the city’s maintenance program. So they’re going to be in charge of fixing whatever issues that are sorted within 48 hours,” Tagliaferri said.
In response to multiple requests to the City to confirm if this was still the case and to inquire how the user interface had been fine-tuned following the results of last year’s extensive open testing, a City spokesperson said, “This first kiosk is considered the ‘test’ kiosk and will be used to perfect lighting levels, refine software and content, troubleshoot any connectivity issues and introduce the community to the kiosks’ presence in our commercial districts.”
The June 2023 prototype stood in a Kubrick-esque manner at approximately 8ft tall, with a 55-inch display. Despite the exterior casing not being exactly like the proposed final design — that first round of testing was more about the user interface than anything else — an emergency panic button had been incorporated as the plan was to include something similar on the mass production model.
That button sat about 3ft up on one edge in an attempt to make it easily accessible to someone in a wheelchair for example and to be ADA compliant. However, the prototype also had no safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the system.
Credit: Matthew Hall
No information is currently available regarding if, or how, this potential problem has been addressed.
The original proposal for the kiosk design also incorporates its own Wi-Fi hotspot, with a range of about 30ft or so, plus a built-in camera that enables you to take selfies. Those two features raised questions 10 months ago, the first being whether or not a free Wi-Fi network will simply result in “camps” of people huddled around the kiosks using the internet all day and the second was about the issue of privacy if cameras are incorporated.
Again, no details on whether these features are still being incorporated has been released. However, fragments of information are available on the City’s website, including under Community Benefits, the sentence “Public Safety: Kiosks include emergency blue phones, emergency alerts, and optional surveillance during emergency situations” together with “Public Wi-Fi: It is estimated that 80% of international tourists travel without an international data plan.”
The website does illustrate the five-stage rollout plan and shows the location of each of the 29 proposed sites. Initial estimates said the signs would be installed by late 2023 or early 2024, but no information is provided to indicate exactly when the full slate of machines will come online.