Imagination Town: a city you run
by signing.

A small city of everyday places — an elevator, an ATM, a drive-thru — that a kid steps inside and runs by signing, with nothing but the hand in front of the camera.

What Imagination Town is

Imagination Town is a small city of everyday places, redrawn so the way you operate them is a sign instead of a button. There are eleven scenes today — an elevator, an ATM, a drive-thru, a pharmacy counter, an ice-cream stand, a keypad, a movie marquee, a smart home, a sound booth, and more. Each one is an ordinary task a kid finishes by signing: sign a floor and the elevator rides; spell an order and the board reads it back; sign a PIN and the cash comes out. No touchscreen, no app, no asking an adult for help.

The thing it runs on is the thing already in the room. The recognizer reads the hand off the camera in front of you — the laptop camera, or the camera on a wall kiosk — and the work happens on that device. No video leaves. No faces are stored. Nothing is recorded. Captions are on by default for any sound, and every scene has a keyboard fallback, so a camera that can't see a hand never locks anyone out of finishing the task. You can open the whole town in a browser tab right now; it is the working prototype, not a trailer for one.

And it is built to come off the screen. The browser version is the first build; the second one goes on a wall. A children's museum gets an exhibit kids line up for. A library lobby gets a signing service window. The studio specs the hardware, builds the install into the space, and keeps it running — scoped to that room and the people who use it, in the language that community signs. That part is the real product. The demo is how you see it first.

What we built

The split that makes it work: the town is a set of small scenes over one shared recognizer. A scene declares what it expects from a hand — a number, a spelled word, a single handshape — and what it does with the answer. The camera, the on-device reading, the captions, the keyboard fallback: all shared, none of it scene-specific. Add a place to the town and you describe the task, not the plumbing.

• Eleven scenes Elevator, ATM, drive-thru, pharmacy, ice-cream stand, keypad, movie marquee, smart home, sound booth, free spell, and a Mac-control scene. Each is a real everyday task with a sign for an input — a signed floor, a fingerspelled order, a signed PIN — and an answer that lands the way the real machine would.
• On-device reading The recognizer runs on the kiosk or the laptop itself. No video goes anywhere, no faces are stored, nothing about a visit is recorded. The hand is read where it is signed and then it's gone. Privacy isn't a setting here; it's where the work physically happens.
• Trained on Deaf hands The recognizer is trained on Deaf-signed handshapes, so a fingerspelled order or a signed PIN reads naturally — not a hearing approximation of a sign, but the sign as it is actually made. Fingerspelled A–Z, numbers, and a handful of everyday gestures, depending on the scene.
• Captions and a keyboard, by contract Every scene captions any sound by default, and every scene has a keyboard fallback. A camera that can't see a hand — bad light, a wheelchair angle, a kid too short for the mount — is a thing the scene plans for, not a wall a person hits.
• A scene is a folder The load-bearing part. Each place declares what handshape it expects and what to do with the answer; the camera, the reading, the captions, the fallback are shared underneath. The drive-thru and the pharmacy don't reimplement the camera. Adding a twelfth scene is writing one, not rebuilding the town.
• Browser prototype to wall install Same logic, two homes. The browser build is the prototype anyone can open. The studio builds the second one into a space — a real elevator panel, a lobby kiosk, a service window — specs and sources the screen, camera, and mount, hangs signage, walks the staff through it, and keeps it running.

* Projected. Four venue types are the install target — children's museums, libraries and civic buildings, airports, and family attractions. The browser town is live today; permanent on-wall installations are scoped per space and built by the studio.

Where the idea came from

There is a kind of public space that never considered the body actually standing in front of it. A kid learns this early. There is an elevator she is a little afraid of — not the height, the panel: a wall of buttons that assumes a certain reach, a certain way of asking, a certain person. The drive-thru speaker that wants a voice. The service window that slides open and waits for you to talk. None of these places did anything wrong on purpose. They just got designed for an imagined average and the kid in front of them isn't it.

Imagination Town starts from the opposite assumption: that the machine should learn the language of the person who walked up, not the other way around. So the elevator answers a signed floor. The ATM answers a signed PIN. The window answers a spelled word. A Deaf kid runs a public machine in her own language and it isn't a workaround or a "press here for help" — it's just how the machine works. Practice the everyday in the museum, then put the everyday within reach for real.

Access you can walk up to isn't a special version. It's the version. — the working principle behind every scene in the town

Step into the elevator.

Below is a small, working slice of the town: the elevator panel, on a screen. Pick a floor — the way a kid signs the number, except here you tap it — and the elevator answers the way it does in the real scene. Switch the toggle to the keypad to see the same panel reused for a door code. Nothing here phones home; it's the scene logic, running in your browser. The real version reads the floor off your hand instead of your tap.

Why this fits 1891

The pitch on madeby1891.com is for things built so an ordinary person can walk up and use them — in Frederick, under one roof. Imagination Town is that pitch pointed at the most ordinary thing there is: a public machine. The elevator, the ATM, the window. The whole town is a rehearsal of the everyday in a language that usually gets left out of the everyday, and then a way to put a real signing machine in a real place families already go.

It isn't only for Deaf kids, and that's the point. Anyone can run a scene by signing — a Deaf child and a hearing child use it exactly the same way, side by side, because it's an ordinary public space that happens to speak sign. There's a longer line behind that, the kind that runs through deaf schools and community halls and the gatherings that have brought signing families together since the nineteenth century: the simple insistence that a public room should work in the language the people in it actually use. Imagination Town is a small, playable version of that insistence, built to be hung on a wall.

What's still unfair about this

A demo in a tab is easy to love and easy to leave. The hard, honest part of this product is the second build — the one on the wall, scoped to a real room, maintained over years. A scene that delights a kid for ninety seconds in a museum has to keep working on a Tuesday in February when the light is bad and the camera is smudged and nobody from the studio is in the building. That's why captions-on and the keyboard fallback are in the contract, not the wishlist. A signing kiosk that only works in perfect conditions is a poster, not an install.

The thing we did not do is send the room's video off somewhere to read it better. The recognizer runs on the device on purpose, even though a heavier model in a data center would read a sloppy handshape more forgivingly, because a kiosk full of kids' faces is not a thing that should leave the building. We'd rather the town be a little humbler and stay in the room. We measure Imagination Town by who walked up and finished the thing themselves, not by how much of the room we captured.

Nobody at the kiosk cares about the recognizer. They care that the elevator went to the floor they signed, and that nobody had to ask for help. — Anthony Mowl, framing the build for Imagination Town

That sentence is the spec. The town is good when the machine just answers.