What It Means for Consumers and Brands That New York Is Becoming a ‘Smart City’

Free Wi-Fi Kiosks Were to Aid New Yorkers. An Unsavory Side Has Spurred a Retreat.

LinkNYC kiosks not a hit with everyone

NYC nixes kiosk browsers after homeless commandeer their use

With little fanfare or prior warning, they began bolting the LinkNYC kiosks to the sidewalks in early 2016. Greeted with little more than a New York shrug, these were blatant pedestrian-scale digital billboards. An upgrade from the static posters on bus stops and phone booths. The trade-off for tolerating these new advertising intrusions was the promise of new “world-class” free wifi (of which an email address was initially required) and an internet-enabled, built-in tablet. Instantly, certainly apocryphal stories of rampant homeless porn-watching quickly spread, though a quick look through the offending media images showed that the concern seemed more to do with less desirable folks congregating and watching youtube videos or making voip calls instead of “moving along”. It should also be noted that these kiosks are not evenly distributed throughout the city, but rather more heavily located uptown – either through the result of human decision-making or a black box ROI algorithm is unclear. Seven months after the initial roll-out, access to internet for all passersby was either completely shut off or severely curtailed, though the digital signs remained.

Our course at Columbia, Hacking the Urban Experience, is invested in architectural street interventions at a neighborhood scale. As it appears that the design and implementation of these is driven by public-private advertising concerns (LinkNYC’s parent company is Alphabet’s Google), rather than architects or city planners, the first assignment of the course looked at ways to both acknowledge that these things now exist on NYC streets and to non-invasively study ways that they can be adapted. In the same manner that steetlight poles can act as support posts for help wanted or missing person signs, how can the Link NYC kiosks adapt and provide actual value to the street?

Below are samples of prototypes that were constructed in one week, with the expressed goal of adapting and testing how simple acts and gestures can impact our relation to these structures and public space around us. These kiosks inadvertently provide a number of opportunities – the bright screen can illuminate objects, the usb ports are charged and can power a desk fan, and the invisible wifi signals can define an actual physical space. These interventions became the foundation of a framework to discuss who is public space for, and who can stop and enjoy listening to a song by Slipknot on the sidewalk without a resulting pearl-clutching article by the Times.

Images from the three-day event in Queens, sponsored by the great team at the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning and with Joaquin Reyes.

The Inflato Dumpster is a radical new conception of what constitutes public space in New York City. This site-specific work creates an open, engaging street-level structure that acts as a mobile learning laboratory through creative programming events that reflects the diversity of its location. The project takes advantage of digital design and new lightweight fabrication techniques to create a framework for small group discussion and engagement.

The project includes 165 square feet of enclosed space with maximum dimensions at 17’ height by 12’-6” wide and 24’ long. The main element is an inflatable membrane containing 2000 cubic feet of volume, weighing less than 20 lbs. Made from a combination of lightweight inflatable materials and a modular city dumpster, the Inflato presents a subdued silver, semi-reflective surface from the outside, while the interior creates a gold, brightly gilded interior.

A few quick shots of the Inflato Dumpster project installed in the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning gallery in Queens as part of the 2016 Jamaica Flux show.

The Flux 2016 exhibition invited 19 artists to study the effects of art in public spaces and provokes conversations regarding art’s role in community, participation, commerce, and urban renewal.

This was a preview exhibition of the Inflato project before its full activation (complete with pre-fab metal base) on the 165th Street Pedestrian Mall.

The Inflato Dumpster was back as part of the 6th Annual Bloomingdale Family Days located in my neighborhood, steps from my apartment in fact. Many thanks to the Columbus-Amsterdam BID and Budget Dumpster for the generous support. It was a great turnout and a really successful event.

Please see this link for more about this ongoing project.

A small selection of the amazing work the group produced in class this semester. Click on the images above for more information.

In conjunction with a form-finding exercise in Kangaroo, I was searching for a way to render a single, closed mesh as if it were an inflatable form made of individual, stretchy panels – think soccer ball. Since I was already starting with a mesh, I needed something that could extrude and manipulate individual mesh faces normal to the face centroid with a certain degree of flexibility. I couldn’t find much online, so I put together a super basic, simple grasshopper file. Aside from some of the typical drawbacks with using meshes in Rhino (which have actually become a lot more workable in Rhino 5), I think it’s reasonably clean.
Download here: http://gracefulspoon.com/downloads/EXTRUDE_MESH_FACE-NORMAL_FINAL.gh

While my natural tendency can lead toward convolution, in the interest of concision here is my attempt to sum up the course objectives in one sentence: “to self-initiate and identify a problem statement relating to the urban environment, and then manifest a possible solution through a public, physical object, while confronting the myriad issues associated with that decision.” Problems addressed included the notion that strangers occupying proximate space are too disconnected – how can you encourage interaction? As well as the problem of physical space inducing a heightened sense of agitation during a stressful time (finals on a college campus) – how can a space be created that produces an alternately playful, soothing affect for passersby? So with that, here’s a sampling of self-initiated work from the third iteration of HTUE.

See previous work and extensive course descriptions here:
Hacking the Urban Environment II – Student Work
Hacking the Urban Environment I – Student Work

All images and work by students Amir Afifi, Hanxiao Yang, Marielle Simone Vargas, Wilbur Lee and Will Chen

Assignment 01 – PARASITES

Assignment 02 – LIGHT PROJECTION

Assignment 03 – FINAL

Course Description
The course goals haven’t changed dramatically since the last semester, the course still seeks to assert the relevance of the fabrication tools at our disposal as potentialities for social and environmental relevance. Through the re-appropriation and re-imagining of existing urban conditions, the student will design and fabricate a working prototype that embraces the messy reality of our city and promotes community involvement. The student will begin by identifying a quality of the urban condition that includes the latent capability for improvement and work toward fabricating an adaptive, responsive and environmentally viable solution. Specific emphasis will be placed on testing and exploring through hands on research the possibilities of detailing and fabricating connections using unorthodox materials. At the conclusion of the course the student will produce a full scale urban intervention and observe and document their relevant successes or failures.

Workshops were conducted to introduce the students to the possibilities inherent in new material technologies, through production and detailing techniques, and the proper use of fabrication techniques. Material workshops encouraged students to explore with everything from dynamic, variable surfaces using latex and silicone to parametric agglomerations using quotidian materials.

The first investigation was the creation of the connection detail. It was encouraged that this be a parametric joint that breaches the gap between the existing streetscape and the student’s intervention. Flexibility, safety, durability, adaptability will all be tested while exploring different possibilities for a potential synthesis with existing urban forms, examples of which can include: will the student’s intervention clamp on to a lamppost, hang from a phone booth, project from an existing building or rest in a parking lot?

By attempting to capture a broader audience for architectural interventions, a number of questions presented themselves and the student was challenged to anticipate possible eventualities – how will it be used? Can its use be changed? Is it durable? Is it waterproof? Can it safely stand up? Fabrication was considered less from a formal quality, and more from a use, durability, improvisation and public participation viewpoint.

Ultimately the student should have come out of the course with a healthy respect for two core concepts: Firstly, an increased skill in the use and applicability of the fabrication machines we have at our disposal for solving design issues using unorthodox materials in unconventional settings; and two, that there is an opportunity for architects to regain lost relevance by inserting themselves through unsolicited proposals into the public consciousness as steward’s of urban well being.

Assignment 01 – PARASITES
Part of the Atlas of Urban Connections project (TBD), the first assignment involved designing and fabricating a joint to connect something, anything, to a vertical street extrusion (such as a tree, street sign, light pole, etc…). The members of the Public Works Department in NYC are masters of improvisation, you can see it walking down any street here, and there is a lot to learn from their successful and not-so successful techniques for attaching to existing sidewalk infrastructure. This assignment was prepared to introduce the student to the capacity to breaching the gap between the pedestrian and existing streetscape objects, with the goal to test flexibility, safety, durability, adaptablility while exploring different possibilities for potential synthesis with existing urban forms.

Tom, Aaron, Max, Kevin

ChunChun, Yuri, Shuang, Rubing, Renwick

Assignment 02 – INFLATABLES
Hurricane Sandy played hell with our first few weeks, and necessitated that the initial assignments were bundled together. However, we still had a chance to look at inflatables and the material qualities inherent in cheap polyethylene of different mil thickness. Using an iron, tape and plastic, quick inflatable bladders were constructed and tested. The students were tasked with creating an inflatable, mobile “seating” system that was either self-supporting or used a site’s natural currents to inflate.

ChunChun, Yuri, Shuang, Rubing, Renwick

Ni, Mengna, Darian, Juan, Ying

Assignment 03 – LIGHT PROJECTION
Using Graffiti Research Lab’s projection bombing tutorial at Instructables, the class set up a mobile power station using a 75V marine battery, and set off around the neighborhood near Columbia to experiment and throw up some interactive light projections.
The last year has seen some truly inspiring displays of the potential light can have as an interventionist tool, and the class studied this problem using three main strategies: 1) messaging independent of site, i.e. you only need a blank wall, 2) site dependent projections, like those following the curving, horizontal bands on the Guggenheim, and 3) flexible projections that can adapt and interact to a number of different sites, taking advantage of the unique characteristics of each. Care was given to create projects that both actively and passively engage those passing by the site. Each group’s projects was able to successfully confront one of these strategies.

Ni, Mengna, Darian, Juan, Ying

ChunChun, Yuri, Shuang, Rubing, Renwick

Tom, Aaron, Max, Kevin

Kaz, Greg, Ella

Assignment 04 (FINAL)
Building off the previous assignments, the final assignment sought to synthesize the work and concepts of the class into a larger installation that could still be completed in our very tight time frame, but started to explore the core ideas of the course, in effect becoming a proof-of-concept, working model. By attempting to capture a broader audience for architectural interventions, a number of questions presented themselves and the students were challenged to anticipate a range of possible eventualities – how will it be used? Can its use be changed? Is it durable? Is it waterproof? Can it safely stand up? Fabrication was considered less from a formal quality, and more from a use, durability, improvisation and public participation viewpoint.
Ultimately, A successful project would accomplish three things: 1) display ingenuity in fabrication technique and material 2) re-imagine or re-design a specific urban site/condition to take advantage of its hitherto hidden potential, and 3) have a performative component, in that the intervention has a temporal quality that while engaged promotes public interaction.

ChunChun, Yuri, Shuang, Rubing, Renwick

Kaz, Ella, Greg

Tom, Aaron, Max, Kevin

Ni, Mengna, Darian, Juan, Ying

The course sought to assert the relevance of the fabrication skills at our disposal as potentialities for social and environmental relevance. Through the re-appropriation and re-imagining of existing urban conditions, the students designed and fabricated working prototypes that embraced the messy reality of our city and promoted community involvement. The students began by identifying a quality of the urban condition that included the latent capability for improvement and worked toward fabricating an adaptive, responsive and environmentally viable solution. Specific emphasis was placed on testing and exploring through hands on research the possibilities of detailing and fabricating connections using unorthodox materials. At the conclusion of the course the students produced a full scale urban intervention and observed and documented their relevant successes or failures.

Material workshops were held to encourage the students to explore constructions from inflatables to parametric agglomerations using quotidian materials. Ultimately, the goal was for the students to come out of the course with a healthy respect for two core concepts: firstly, an increased skill in the use and applicability of the fabrication skills we have developed for solving design issues using unorthodox materials in unconventional settings; and secondly, that there is an opportunity for architects to regain lost relevance by inserting themselves through unsolicited proposals into the public consciousness as steward’s of urban well being.

Students:
Jared Dignanci, Farzin Lofti-Jam, Ehsaan Mesghali, Katerina Petrou, Paul Tran, Wassim Shaaban, Maryam Zamani

Assignment 01
Part of the Atlas of Urban Connections project (TBD), the first assignment involved designing and fabricating a joint to connect something, anything, to a vertical street extrusion (such as a tree, street sign, light pole, etc…). The members of the Public Works Department in NYC are masters of improvisation, you can see it walking down any street here, and there is a lot to learn from their successful and not-so successful techniques for attaching to existing sidewalk infrastructure. This assignment was prepared to introduce the student to the capacity to breaching the gap between the pedestrian and existing streetscape objects, with the goal to test flexibility, safety, durability, adaptablility while exploring different possibilities for potential synthesis with existing urban forms.
Wassim, Katerina, Paul

Jared, Farzin, Ehsaan, Maryam

Assignment 02
Using Graffiti Research Lab’s projection bombing tutorial at Instructables, the class set up a mobile power station using a 75V marine battery, and set off around the neighborhood near Columbia to experiment and throw up some interactive light projections.
The last year has seen some truly inspiring displays of the potential light can have as an interventionist tool, and the class studied this problem using three main strategies: 1) messaging independent of site, i.e. you only need a blank wall, 2) site dependent projections, like those following the curving, horizontal bands on the Guggenheim, and 3) flexible projections that can adapt and interact to a number of different sites, taking advantage of the unique characteristics of each. Care was given to create projects that both actively and passively engage those passing by the site.
Wassim, Katerina, Paul

Ehsaan, Maryam

Jared, Farzin

Assignment 03 (FINAL)
Building off the first two assignments, the final assignment sought to synthesize the work and concepts of the class into a larger installation that could still be completed in our very tight time frame, but started to explore the core ideas of the course, in effect becoming a proof-of-concept, working model. By attempting to capture a broader audience for architectural interventions, a number of questions presented themselves and the students were challenged to anticipate a range of possible eventualities – how will it be used? Can its use be changed? Is it durable? Is it waterproof? Can it safely stand up? Fabrication was considered less from a formal quality, and more from a use, durability, improvisation and public participation viewpoint.
Ultimately, A successful project would accomplish three things: 1) display ingenuity in fabrication technique and material 2) re-imagine or re-design a specific urban site/condition to take advantage of its hitherto hidden potential, and 3) have a performative component, in that the intervention has a temporal quality that while engaged promotes public interaction.
Wassim, Katerina, Paul

Maryam, Jared, Farzin, Ehsaan