I Wish This Was is a public art project started in New Orleans in November 2010 that invited local residents to tag the many vacant storefronts in their neighborhoods with their ideas & wants for the community.
"What really drew me to Candy Chang's I Wish This Was project is how that really simple little sticker just gets people who don't normally think about how their city is shaped to think about it. To imagine what they would want in that vacant lot, or in that burnt out building. To imagine something different. It's about thinking differently, or being provoked to think differently about the status quo… Just that act is so, so powerful." - Gary Hustwit, director of Urbanized
People who put up stickers are encouraged to email in their photos, and then some of them get put up on the website. But there's currently no way to know about cool ideas that may have been submitted in your city. What would be awesome would a way for people to submit photos of their sticker with geotagged data, so tha they could be displayed on a map, and so people could see what matters most to people in their city, without having to walk past and notice the small stickers.
We started out by working on an android app, but then decided there would be more people with Instagram already on their phones that people willing to download a new app just to upload an "I Wish This Was" photo. So we opted to basically just pull photos from Instagram that had been tagged with the #iwishthiswas hashtag to keep it simple.