guardians of the grocery

the concept

Bodega cats are everywhere in New York and nowhere on the record.

PlayfulNYC's brief asked us to reinterpret the city as a space for play — turn a familiar NYC experience into a game mechanic, or translate its physical behaviors into alternative inputs. We took it literally and affectionately. Bodega cats guard 150+ bodegas; 13,500 people signed the petition behind the first NYC legislation of its kind, recognizing them as working animals. Beloved, semi-legal, and completely undocumented. As a team of long-time New Yorkers and immigrants, our answer: make the community around bodegas visible through its most beloved stakeholders — and make documenting them feel like play, not fieldwork.

how it works

Point the sandwich. Press the button. Every cat gets filed.

A camera hidden inside a BLT sandwich — an alternative controller in the most literal sense — captures the cat and opens a new file in the G.O.T.G. registry. Three soft buttons on the sandwich walk through the dossier entry right on its tiny screen, and the record uploads over WiFi to a collective catalogue on the web: every guardian on a map of NYC, filed as a collectible trading card.

the process

Three days from whiteboard to working pipeline.

1. worldbuilding. If the bodega cat is New York's unseen guardian, the field equipment should be equally New York. The camera became a sandwich.
2. the ontology. A full taxonomy treating every cat as a character — lineage, kill level, patrol range, alignment, class, night life career, secret power.
3. the identity. Bodega counter energy: awning palette, retro poster lettering, trading-card framing. One system across the site, the OLED, and the pitch.
4. the split. Kalinda on physical computing, Samvit on the web registry, Yafira on game mechanics, me on communication and visual design.

the controller

A handheld field device disguised as lunch.

An ESP32 with a 2MP camera, an OLED readout, and three soft conductive-fabric buttons, layered into felt lettuce, tomato, and bacon. Point the camera, press the button, and the registry opens a new file with a real timestamp; the photo posts over HTTPS straight into the database. Every cat gets classified. Every cat gets filed.

visual design

Bodega counter energy — loud, layered, lived-in.

I built the identity from the bodega itself: an awning palette of deep navy, red, and mustard gold with worn browns and butcher-paper grays, set in Barber for the loud display type and Pixelette for the data readouts. Part arcade cabinet, part corner-store signage, part trading-card binder — nothing too clean or precious. The same system runs the website, the cards, the controller's OLED screen, and the pitch deck.

ontology of a cat

Every cat is a character. Every capture is a card.

The registry treats each cat as a collectible: stats on the front — years on duty, kill count, patrol range, approachability, class, alignment — and lore on the back, unlocked only after you've captured it. The first hunter to file a cat names its secret alter ego and power; every later hunter adds after-hours sightings. Rarity comes from the hunt itself: first-ever captures are legendary, and a cat everyone has met is common.

the play element

Collective cataloging as collective fan-fiction.

The daily quest sends players hunting one bodega cat, in one neighborhood, in one day. Strangers build a shared mythology of the city's cats — and in doing so, map the community around them. The judges agreed: Guardians of the Grocery took Best of Software at PlayfulNYC 2026, demoed live, sandwich to database to map.

insights

Funny and functional at once.

Speculative design lands hardest when the joke is load-bearing — the sandwich gets the laugh, the working pipeline earns the respect. Designing one identity that had to survive a tiny OLED readout, a trading card, a website, and a pitch deck taught me more about constraint than any single-surface project.