TALK the talk: Payphone Booth in Malaysia (part 2)

The Stand of Public Phone Booth

Common found public phone booth on this project often made up by a payphone surrounded by a shelter and supported upright by an aluminium (possible aluminium alloy) or concrete stand. An aluminium stand is often designed in a simple form while concrete stand may be engraved with pattern.

i. Aluminium

Aluminium is a metal with corrosion resistant, shiny silver surface, soft and ductile. It can be alloyed to improve its strength. Pure aluminium is often extracted from bauxite. Aluminium is lightweight and easy to form shape, which sometimes a better material than steel. It is corrosion free, which is suitable to use at outdoor. The weakness of aluminium is its physical strength. However it can be improved when fusing with alloying agent.

ii. Concrete

Concrete is a composite material composed of coarse granular material (the aggregate or filler) embedded in a hard matrix of material (the cement or binder) that fills the space among the aggregate particles and glues them together. It is very strong to withstand heavy impact, weather resistant and less costly. The main weakness of concrete is its weight, low tensile strength and it can crack if shrinkage occurred.

Left figure shows a payphone booth with aluminium stand, right figure is a concrete stand phone booth.

Public Phone Booth & Environment Effect


Environmental factor that affect the material and status of public phone booth is mainly based on weather, especially light and air. Most of the public phone booths happened to have discoloration of plastic pigment and dust or stain that traps on the surface of plastic. See figure8.0 to understand the effect of environment on phone booth. It clearly show the faded color and stain attached on plastic surface.

1. Light

Sunlight is the main reason that the plastic of phone booth lose its original color and degrade. If the phone booth is using PP(polypropylene), the reaction is happened faster. Most plastic product will degraded under sunlight overtime.

2. Rain

Stain is often forming on the surface of plastic which spoiled the aesthetic and originality of that plastic appearance. Dust particles from rain will usually retained on plastic surface after a long period of time causing some part of plastic surface to have different color. Furthermore, due to pollution, rain nowadays often contain acidic medium that can harm the surface of plastic, degrading the color pigment of plastic.

3. Air

Like rain, dust particles in air will accumulate on the plastic surface overtime if cleaning is applied. Such dust particles mainly produced from vehicles that passed by the area of public phone booth.

Consumer Respond to Public phone Booth

Public phone booth status is not affected by the environment, but also from consumer. Public phone booth usually becomes the subject of vandalism. Payphone contained in the phone booth is also exposed to the risk of being stolen by irresponsible citizen.

1. Vandalism

Vandalism stands for the meaning of willful or malicious destruction of public or private property (Thefreedictionary, 2014). Common example of vandalism included damaging of material by hitting or breaking using foreign object or besmirch with graffiti. Majority of public phone booths found for this project are targeted with vandalism. The panel of phone booth is either being destroy or pasted by loan shark unwanted notice. Besides that, irresponsible people often leave their unwanted item around phone booth, causing phone booth become a place for leaving garbage. Vandalism of phone booth not only spoiled the landscape of city but also gave a bad image to citizen or foreigner.


2. Stealing of Payphone

Payphone installed inside a phone booth is usually stolen by people. Mainly because of coins kept inside the payphone. This make the phone booth become function less, and when emergency occurred, people cannot make phone call from this phone booth.

Refer image on below to see the phone booth being vandalized.

*This research is a part of assignment of my HND study in university.More information will continue at part 3..