Last year, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), the San Francisco Planning Department, and the Knight Foundation invited San Franciscans to dream up innovative ideas to turn Market Street, from Van Ness to Embarcadero, into a better place for us denizens to connect. Enter the Market Street Prototyping Festival.

Around 50 diverse creators, artists, community leaders will feature prototypes of their ideas from Thursday, April 9 through Saturday, April 11, 2015, 11am-7pm, with some installations available for nighttime viewing.

"A community collaboration of this scale and nature has never been done before and is being studied by the Knight Foundation as a model for cross-city learning and neighborhood redevelopment," says Deborah Cullinan, chief executive officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

A few prototypes that will be on display are the Show Box ("a variable set of cardboard tubes strapped together to form a playful terrain for seating and performance"), Daily Boost ("a series of platforms for learning affirming poses and postures, a kind of gym for the soul"), Mycelium Theater (a small theater/fabulous runway), the Meet Wall ("a sensing wall that flexes open to become more transparent when people approach, encouraging interaction and performance"), and the glorious Data Lanterns (data from transit systems will turn into animated light via light posts and signaling poles).

Look through the entire list of the winning prototypes here. 

Based on social media input (use the #mspf tag, please), some of the prototypes could be permenant installations. Now if only we could get city dwellers to stop trashing public installations...