Hasta La Ideas

Trying to find some sort of beauty in the noisy traffic of a busy city street probably isn’t your first thought as you’re walking down an overstimulating sidewalk. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you’ll do anything you can to mentally take yourself away from the bustling environment—starting with plugging in to your headphones and creating some high-decibel eardrum damage. Urban Matter, Inc. is taking a different approach that present itself as such a blow to your hearing.

You can find your own personal moment of tranquility underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) in the most populous borough thanks to the Brooklyn-based design studio. Like many places in New York City, the traffic noise never stops and it gets quite dark, so the team took on the challenge of turning the noise into an interactive light exhibit. Enter “Silent Lights,” a series of gates housing 1,400 LEDs located in a Brooklyn hotspot.

At the intersection of Park Avenue and Navy St., you’ll find a series of square arches that slowly transition through a rainbow of colors according to the level of traffic noise in the area. Check out this behind-the-scenes video on what it took to create the installation:

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Photos by Sarah Rottenberg, Yilin Lu, Yoshi Araki and Anna Couturier

By Mathieu Turpault, Director of Design, Bresslergroup

Last summer, we got to live vicariously through a group of Integrated Product Design students at the University of Pennsylvania who traveled to Ghana.

They were conducting ethnographic research at the Yonso Project, a Ghanaian rural organization that provides educational and economic resources to help people in the region break the cycle of poverty. In 2009, Yonso added a bamboo bicycle workshop to their roster of empowerment programs. The workshop builds skills by training locals to make beautiful bamboo bike frames that are sold internationally. It creates jobs, leverages local production from the bamboo plantation, and helps fund Yonso’s educational initiatives.

Strategy and Research

While the folks at Yonso are incredibly knowledgeable about their core initiatives, they’re not as experienced in product development. They approached UPenn for help in 2012 when they wanted to expand their bamboo product line. In turn, Sarah Rottenberg, Associate Director at the Integrated Product Design program, asked Bresslergroup to help mentor the students who were going.

Sarah and the team of IPD students, Yoshi Araki, Yilin Lu and Anna Couturier, visited our offices last spring for a couple of strategy and ideation sessions with our designers and engineers. We guided them through brainstorming and ideation exercises, talked about how we prepare for conducting ethnographic research and brand language development, and suggested strategies for narrowing and choosing product categories that could be pursued most successfully. We’ve gone through this process many times before, for many different types of products, so we’ve run into walls and we know how to avoid pitfalls.

Read more in our blog post about brainstorming about how we structure this phase of the design process.

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The phrase goes that one oughtn’t reinvent the wheel, yet we’ve seen countless examples of people trying, from square to hubless to powered. The latest wheel reinvention to make the, er, rounds comes from Ackeem Ngwenya, a student of Innovation Design Engineering at London’s RCA. Ngwenya’s designed something that looks simultaneously nutty and completely feasible: A shape-shifting wheel he’s calling “Roadless.”

The “Why” of it is pretty simple. Ngwenya grew up in rural Africa, where “head-loading” remains the most practical way to transport goods, as arduous and inefficient as it is. He reckons that a shape-shifting wheel could adapt to different terrains, thus providing a one-size-fits-all solution for load-carrying carts, bikes or vehicles in areas with no infrastructure.

The “How” of it is both simple and fascinating. By using the principle of a scissor jack, and arraying a series of them around a circle, the wheel would either grow shorter and wider, or taller and more narrow, as the mechanism is manipulated.

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Overnight delivery is amazing. The thought that I can finish a drawing here in New York, drop it off at a FedEx office at 5pm and have it show up first thing tomorrow in L.A. is pretty neat.

A far superior delivery system is the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It takes about five minutes to boost itself into suborbital flight, where it then cruises for less than a half-hour, and then spends just two minutes plummeting down to its target more than 7,000 miles away. And even small ICBMs can carry half a ton of cargo. Of course, since that cargo is usually a nuclear device, we think of ICBMs as deliverers of death.

Huai-Chien “Bill” Chang, a doctoral candidate in Space Architecture at the University of Tokyo, however, has a different idea for what ICBMs could be used for: Long-range disaster relief. Should a natural calamity strike in a region of the globe that’s difficult to access, Chang posits, an ICBM somehow modified for a soft landing could be loaded up with supplies, and quickly delivered where it is needed. And with the dearmaments following the end of the Cold War, there’s no shortage of mothballed missiles.

“These rocket engines are still functioning. If we could use these engines, the cost would be very much reduced,” Chang told science and astronomy enthusiast website SPACE.com, following a recent presentation of his idea at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Space 2013 conference. “I’d like to see something like this happen before the next big disaster hits.”

Here’s Chang himself explaining the concept at a TEDxTokyo “audition:”

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In some way or another, we all pay taxes to the cities we live in, and we benefit regularly from city services. But few of us are aware of how exactly our money is spent on municipal projects. Also, while the structures of democracy ensure town halls and the ability to petition our representatives, even fewer of us feel a sense of agency in guiding the decision-making process.

I recently learned about Citizinvestor, a site that attempts to bring crowdfunding to city projects in the United States. Unlike most crowdfunding sites, not just anyone can join: they have to be city officials, and the project has to be approved for moving forward. Citizinvestor steps in with the funding side—city officials can go directly to their constituencies to seek funding. The city gets the funds it needs, and citizens know exactly how their dollars are being spent. As with Kickstarter, projects are only funded if they meet 100% of their goal.

In a recent TEDx talk, co-founder Jordan Raymor introduced the notion of the government as a vending machine, where citizens can choose what projects they want to pay for and engage with. This has dangers, of course—a project like this could detract from the sort of systemic change that many cities require to provide more equitable services for all citizens, not just those who have access to credit cards and the time to check a crowdfunding campaign. But Citizinvestor isn’t mean to replace regular government functions. It does, however, provide a platform for accountability.

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