The Choreography of City Work: Orientation Week at PoD 2024
Meeting the team! Welcome to the class of 2026 🤝
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
The first day at Products of Design is earmarked for our futures.
Designed to jump start the minds and motor skills of incoming students, this year’s annual Futuring Workshop was led by design researcher, strategist and educator Elliott Montgomery, and PoD alumni and Double Take Labs co-founders, Josh Corn and Eden Lew. Having stepped into the department for the first time just a few hours before, the incoming class of 2026 were thrown into a rapid sprint workshop focusing on discursive design– design intended to provoke conversation– speculating and imagining what the futures of city work in New York might look like.
What exactly are futures?
Elliott explains that futures are valuable fictions which activate us. There is no one single future, there are only futures, plural, spanning the “preferable”, the “probable”, the “plausible” and the merely “possible”.
Prompted with hypothetical signals– novel events with the potential to disrupt, grow, or shape the future– students are asked to extrapolate these signals into imaginable futures, and hypothesize specifically how those futures might impact the choreography of city work taking place around us every day: if this, then what?
Within the span of just a few hours, lean teams of fresh acquaintances went from ideating together to prototyping together, and then hitting the New York City High Line in Chelsea to test their models out in situ, where they shared their design proposals with New Yorkers via impromptu live feedback sessions.
The speculative works were highly imaginative, thought-provoking, and in some cases, delightfully weird. Keep reading below for more details! 👇
What Did We Make? Signals <> Products
Prompting Signal 1 : Increasing global temperatures lead to new regulations around safe working conditions for outdoor laborers.
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Product 1: A friendly flying drone that monitors workers’ body temps as they work, and provides a cooling mist when core temperatures reach a certain threshold.
Prompting Signal 2: Neural implants are commonplace and allow humans to connect directly with machines.
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Product 2: Brainbnb (think Airbnb meets life-streaming meets VR) allows hosts to rent the real estate of their minds, connecting remotely with virtual tourists hoping to experience a slice of someone else’s life. On the High Line, tourists don goggles, an earpiece and a handheld sensor, and connect with hosts living on the other side of the privacy shades in apartment buildings that flank the walkway, receiving an intimate tour of a host’s curated home experience.
Prompting Signal 3: Mushrooms are used to decompose construction waste.
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Product: The Metropolitan Museum Authority employs the appetites of city rats in an effort to organically control the growth and balance of fungal strains within construction zones. Workers coax leash-and-harnessed rats toward target fungi using signal wands, and rats wear adhesive sensor-strips on their tails to help mycologists map the microbial makeup of the city in real-time.
Prompting Signal: Hurricanes occur on a nearly weekly basis, reducing our ability to spend time outdoors.
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Product: the High Line’s concrete walkways are replaced with hydro-powered conveyor belt systems (think: moving sidewalks in the airport) to help manage high pedestrian traffic during the decreasingly frequent “fair weather” hours available to those hoping to get outside while its safe. Added bonus: Expandable buffer barrels to protect plants on the High Line during stormy times.
Prompting Signal: For its economic virtues, modular housing becomes a favored alternative to the regulatory-dense trad-build model.
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Product: A location-specific multitool measuring factors including wind-speed, and terrain stability to be deployed at potential build sites, helping urban planners and hobbyists alike in assessing safety and suitability of a given location for a modular construction project.
