How do you get the attention of pedestrians in the busiest area of the busiest city in the world? That’s the challenge Edwin Schlossberg faced when designing the billboard for the new Reuters building in Times Square. The sign’s unveiling is scheduled for December. Only a week after the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the founder of Edwin Schlossberg Incorporated—a design firm that specializes in interactive projects—found time to chat with us about communication design, media overload, and delivering a message to the 1.5 million people who pass through Times Square each day.

Artbyte: Your firm works with both commercial and non-profit clients. How is that mix reflected in the Reuters billboard?

Edwin Schlossberg: This isn’t a project that says ”Reuters is great.“ The idea was to create a tool which enables Reuters to communicate with its public in a way that it never was able to before. Reuters is a company that exists sort of in the shadows. It collects news from around the world and feeds it to print, broadcast, and other sources. What we basically said was, “Here, you’ve moved into a new building, we’d love to create a software environment that will transmit news from all over the world and communicate the nature of news gathering.” People will know that Reuters did it, but it’s not about just advertising for Reuters.

AB: How do you create an ‘environment’ that reflects how Reuters gathers information?

ES: Reuters is owned by its staff and stockholders. It’s a collaborative vehicle. It employs around 1,600 international news photographers who are creating pictures. We thought, wouldn’t it be fantastic if we broadcast the time it took from the moment someone took a picture in Afghanistan, to its being launched on a satellite and fed through the sign, and you could see that that was a minute and thirty seconds? So we did that. It’s a flipbook of images coming into the world. Then we designed the physical sign so that it feels as if the information is flowing from the top of the building into the building. The sign is made up of discrete objects. We couldn’t make a continuous sign, it was too big. But it goes up 22 stories; it’s going to be the largest LCD in the world. It will feel as if that picture taken in Afghanistan will slide down.

AB: How do you expect to compete with other Times Square billboards?

ES: First of all, 17,000 square feet of sign is being treated as one object. This entire surface is treated as one palette that everything is moving on. That will make a huge difference. It’s also timed to work both with pedestrian traffic and car traffic. So some of the sign moves down as you drive, while some of the information along the street is timed to people walking.

AB: In your book, Interactive Excellence, you comment on media saturation in our society. But now you’re adding this new billboard that distributes even more information to Times Square…what’s the limit?

ES: If you walk one block off Seventh Avenue, it's empty. It's dark. Supposedly there's around 800 to 1,000 different media images that anyone sees in their daily life, but if you think about walking in the woods, and the number of images you see walking in the woods, it’s just about as dense. When I create something, I ask, “Do you make something that enables someone to participate in its composition, or do you make something that’s basically coming at you?” It’s the difference between a lecture and a conversation. The model that we always work with here is this idea of being conversational. Earlier media theorists like Marshall McLuhan proposed that the degree to which you participate in the composition of things is the degree to which you’re in a sense empowered to deal with the message. If something is just framed and broadcast, it’s a very different thing from something that’s composed—there’s a sense of thought in how things are being delivered to you.

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