About the Project

For women, the process of simply getting home at night, alone, can be anxiety-inducing. Reflected in projects like Stanford’s Activity Inequality study, which showed that women move around cities less frequently than men after dark, is the reality that women make certain choices about where to go and when based on the restrictions of their bodies.

 

In response, there’s been a rise of women-centered mobile applications in recent years, like Parachute, which when activated, calls emergency services and records sound and video of your surroundings; Safetipin, which crowdsources information on which streets are safe and which are not; and Safr, a women-only ride sharing service. Still, the onus is always on women to invest in their own safety, sometimes literally.

 

Enter the 247 Hours project, an interactive project designed to highlight a woman’s experience traveling alone in cities, with particular emphasis on the considerations made and costs incurred.

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The project will take place in TWO PHASES: Phase One includes The 'Game,' a downloadable board game meant to start difficult conversations at home, as well as a set of additional resources available on this site. Phase Two will include an immersive Virtual Reality game, allowing participants to enter directly into The 'Game.'

 

The immersive, interactive project takes users through a typical late-night walk home. While walking along a preset path through Brighton, England, where the VR project will eventually be filmed, users can choose how to handle a set of interactions that range from changing your route to reacting to catcalling to deciding whether or not to pass through certain public spaces. Every choice made has an effect on how much you spend or how long it takes to arrive home. 

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The project’s long-term goal is to draw awareness to how different people move through the same space, hopefully sparking both citywide discussions on how to improve our urban planning and a greater general understanding of this issue by all genders.