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STREET SEATS
Street Seats is a program launched by the New York City Department of Transportation to maximize public seating throughout the city. In partnership with School of Constructed Environments, Parsons School of Design, this public seating structure was designed and built by a multidisciplinary group of students.
Role
Physical Computing
UX Design
VR / 360 Film
Problem
In the Spring of 2017, the Street Seats design team expressed a desire to design a space that was environmentally conscious and utilize alternative materials that created a lighter environmental footprint than traditional architectural building materials. In addition to fabricating an environmentally friendly space, the team also envisioned incorporating a solar powered lighting system to illuminate the structure in the evening. This project can also be viewed on the project website at parsonsstreetseats.squarespace.com
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In order to accomplish this goal, the team received a donation from Voltaic Systems that gave the team the opportunity to make their vision come to life. Voltaic System provided 15 LED lights, 6 solar panels, 6 rechargeable batteries and wiring in order to power the lighting system. Once the team received this donation, they brought on two graduate research assistants including myself and Gabi Korac, a first year Parsons graduate student of Architecture and Lighting Design. We teamed up with undergraduate Architectural Design student, Mahalakshmi Sivakumar, who was organizing the lighting portion of the project for the Street Seats course.
Our lighting team was created along with the guidance and help of Professors Carlos Gomez de Llarena and Katherine Morwaki, we began to create their lighting design plan and began the process of execution.
From Left to Right: Jeana Chesnik, Professor Carlos Gomez de Llarena, Gabrijela Korac, Mahalakshmi Sivakumar
Process
We began by working with the undergrad students within the Street Seats course. Gabi began walking us through potential lighting design schematics and layout of the space while I started creating small prototypes of how the light sensors and coded Arduino. All of our process documents can be found on Instructables.com here.
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Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Since our lighting system was going to be powered by solar lighting panels we needed to calculate where within the space captured the most sunlight. In order to accomplish this, we completed a sun path reading at six different points where the solar panels could be potentially placed. We found our the best spot to place the solar panels would be at Point 6 near the beginning of the Street Seats area. We also began testing the prototypes I was building with Arduino and our light sensors.
Arduino Diagram
Final
As final documentation I organized a class website that could easily be maintained and carried on by future classes. My interest in virtual reality and especially 360 film allowed me to document the entire installation in 360 film. I was able to document the entire install along with interviews and a short segment of each team member within the space created by everyone involved in the project. Our Street Seats was also featured in the New York Times during the summer of 2017 as a Pop-Up Parks within the city to visit.
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