A walk-in phone booth structure with a built-in bench, a vintage handset wired into a live cellular hotline, a custom iOS app driving an ambient iPad experience inside the booth, and all the electronics and integration work to make two distinct interactive experiences run seamlessly inside one object. From woodshop to wiring to on-site install at Reclamation Day: A Reunion of Hope in Lenapehoking (NYC).
BLIS stands for Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty. Their work braids movements across Black and Indigenous communities to shift culture and win policy. Reclamation Day was their flagship event, organized across three zones: Reclaim, Repair, Reimagine. The phone booth, which they named The Braided Line, sat at the center of it. The name came from them, and so did the concept.
The booth housed two separate interactive experiences running in parallel.
The first: a vintage handset on the wall connected to a live 1-800 number. Pick it up, dial, and you reach an ancestor hotline where you can listen to recorded stories or leave one of your own.
The handset took real sourcing work. Finding a vintage phone that could pair reliably with a live SIM, connect to an IVR hotline, and hold up through a full day of public use narrowed the field fast. Once we had the right unit, integration testing across the cellular connection, the handset, and the hotline flow took several rounds to get right. We locked the phone to a single number so the experience stayed intact no matter who picked it up, and fabricated custom 3D printed components to conceal the hardware underneath the table
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The second: an iPad mounted inside the booth running a custom ambient audio app. The screen offered a short film preview of First America, the new podcast from Rebecca Nagle, a Cherokee Nation journalist whose work covers Indigenous land rights and sovereignty in the United States. Soft sound played in the booth while you watched.
Inside, due to the phone booth being a constrained space, we fabricated a custom bench and side table in natural red oak, chosen to contrast with the BLIS red. Custom LEDs lined the interior with draped cloth diffusing the light into something warm and contained. The two experiences were designed to sit beside each other without competing, and the space itself was designed to make you want to stay.
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We painted the booth and built out the interior: fabricated and mounted the bench, ran all the wiring, integrated the handset, and installed the iPad. Getting everything to sit right inside a compact enclosure with two separate tech systems running took careful planning. On install day at the venue we tightened the bench, adjusted the handset volume, and handed the team a full operations guide before the event.
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