Love night at the Guggenheim

How can we reconfigure an urban space in order to nudge participants to feel and behave with more trust for total strangers?

During Love Night, Charles Montgomery invited an interdisciplinary team of collaborators to reconfigure an urban space in order to nudge participants to feel and behave with more trust for total strangers. Partners included Project for Public Spaces, Psychologist Emanuele Castano, Neuroeconomist Paul Zak, artist Ryan Brennan, and students from the Fashionable Technology Lab at Parsons The New School for Design.

The collaborators induced hundreds of New Yorkers to engage in acts of friendly intimacy with strangers. We also used a game-like social survey to record a remarkable shift in their attitudes and values over the course of the experience.