PRESENT - Call Your Rep Phone Booth

01 / Challenge

Everyone has a representative. Almost nobody calls.

Contacting an elected official is, in theory, simple. In practice it means knowing who represents you, finding the right office, finding the number, and getting past the friction of starting the call at all. PRESENT wanted to collapse that entire chain into a single act on a New York sidewalk — something a passer-by could complete in under a minute, without an app, an account, or a cent.

02 / Idea

Pick up the phone. It does the rest.

A classic phone booth, reimagined as civic infrastructure. Lift the handset and a voice greets you, asks for your zip code, works out who represents you, and puts the call through. The familiarity of the object does the persuading: a phone booth asks nothing of you except the thing you already know how to do. The unfamiliar part — the lookup, the routing, the dialling — happens out of sight.

03 / Execution

Zip code in, Capitol Hill on the line.

Pixel Plus Media built the booth end to end. A Raspberry Pi drives the peripherals — the handset, the keypad, the call flow — with a Python and FastAPI service handling the logic and SignalWire carrying the telephony. ElevenLabs supplies the conversational voice that guides each caller through the process. Because a single zip code can straddle more than one congressional district, and because every caller also has two senators, the keypad lets the participant choose exactly which office they want before the line is dialled. Session data flows into Supabase, surfaced through a React dashboard so the client can see engagement as it happens.

04 / Results

Strangers, stopping to speak up.

The booth did what a website never quite manages: it made people stop. Passers-by who had never called an elected official stepped inside, picked up a receiver, and found themselves talking to their own representative's office moments later. The whole interaction took about a minute and cost nothing, and the object did the inviting — a phone booth needs no instructions. What people took away was not a giveaway or a photo, but the experience of having actually been heard.

Results

Numbers that speak volumes.