PARK PEOPLE
Client: SPECULATIVE
Location: San Francisco
Design: Soft Verb
Year: 2025
Category: Placemaking
Team: Paulina McFarland
Walk through most cities, and you'll pass a hundred pieces of infrastructure without a second glance — a bench, a bollard, a bike rack. Functional but sadly forgettable and we think that's a missed opportunity.
PARK PEOPLE are a series of human-sized bike racks, cast in an array of colorful metals, standing exactly where you'd expect a bike rack to be, except they're smiling back at you.
Infrastructure That Looks Up
Each figure in the PARK PEOPLE series shares the same friendly silhouette: a gently smiling head atop an open, geometric body built for one simple purpose — holding your bike steady while you enjoy the park. But no two are alike. One wears a brushed gold-and-blue finish. Another glows in polished emerald green. A third carries the soft patina of aged copper and blush pink, like it's been standing watch in the plaza for decades.
Function First, Joy Included
Lock a bike to a PARK PEOPLE rack and it works exactly like any other rack should: sturdy, simple, obvious. But set a row of them along a path, and something shifts. People slow down. They look twice. Kids reach out and touch the smiling heads. A jogger passing by can't help but grin back.
That's the whole idea. Public infrastructure doesn't have to disappear into the background to do its job well. It can do its job and make someone's afternoon a little brighter with a quiet moment of delight tucked into the everyday choreography of a city.
Designed to Be Noticed, Built to Be Used
We think about city spaces as places people move through. PARK PEOPLE are a small argument for spaces people want to move toward the objects that invite a pause, a photo, a smile, before you carry on with your day.
Because if a bike rack can make you smile, imagine what the rest of the city could do.
PARK PEOPLE is an ongoing series exploring where public function meets public joy.
Selected Works
HUGGIESPlacemaking
FFTT: Design Truck on WheelsProject with Studio O+A
SMILEYS PARK TOTEMSPLACEMAKING
PARK PEOPLEPLACEMAKING + Bike Parking