A laboratory for your beer. An app for your leftovers. A robot for your kitchen counter. A notebook… for your microwave? Check out 10 bright ideas from local innovators looking to change how we live, work and play.
By: Alexandra Cavallo
Cue the applause: The ArtsCommons is nearly ready to make its entrance, with two portable black-box theaters slated to start popping up across town this summer. It’s the brainchild of BostonAPP/Lab, a nonprofit spun out of the Boston Society of Architects that’s dedicated to invigorating the arts in public places. Its founder and director, Ron Mallis, first became acquainted with the notion of a creative “commons” from a friend in the theater community. “She saw her organization as a collection point for ‘people who make performance,’ ” Mallis recalls. “Somehow, that morphed into a ‘commons’ for all the arts, which became—ta da!—the ArtsCommons!”
Made from repurposed 200-square-foot steel shipping containers donated by the Eagle Leasing Company, the ArtsCommons will offer alternative spaces for performances, exhibitions, screenings, installations and community happenings. “The major design challenge is to keep the spaces flexible enough to accommodate and support arts and neighborhood collaborations of all kinds, while still designing something more than a minimally retrofitted shipping container,” says designer Ben Bruce, who got involved in the project while finishing his master’s in architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology. “In other words, a space with enough character to inform the art that takes place there and enough flexibility to adapt to many sites.”
Those sites will likely include Jamaica Plain’s Hyde Square, where the team is aiming to debut the ArtsCommons this summer. Artists will be able to apply to a curatorial team of local community leaders and APP/Lab members for a chance to showcase their work in residencies of anywhere from two weeks to two months. “At the same time, we want to make sure that the programming is loose enough to leave room for improvisation and for what someone called ‘surprise,’ ” says Mallis, who also hopes to see the ArtsCommons pop up at locations like the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Dorchester’s Four Corners neighborhood and the Outside the Box festival. “It takes patience to move through the process of rethinking the role of the ArtsCommons in completely new contexts,” Bruce adds. “Each neighborhood, each community organization, each partnership has a different set of needs, resources and visions. The challenge is to make sure the physical thing can address all of those—and then to understand how to implement the project one step at a time.”
Imagine That
By Improper Staff April 22, 2016
A laboratory for your beer. An app for your leftovers. A robot for your kitchen counter. A notebook… for your microwave? Check out 10 bright ideas from local innovators looking to change how we live, work and play.
All the World’s a Stage
By: Alexandra Cavallo
Cue the applause: The ArtsCommons is nearly ready to make its entrance, with two portable black-box theaters slated to start popping up across town this summer. It’s the brainchild of BostonAPP/Lab, a nonprofit spun out of the Boston Society of Architects that’s dedicated to invigorating the arts in public places. Its founder and director, Ron Mallis, first became acquainted with the notion of a creative “commons” from a friend in the theater community. “She saw her organization as a collection point for ‘people who make performance,’ ” Mallis recalls. “Somehow, that morphed into a ‘commons’ for all the arts, which became—ta da!—the ArtsCommons!”
Made from repurposed 200-square-foot steel shipping containers donated by the Eagle Leasing Company, the ArtsCommons will offer alternative spaces for performances, exhibitions, screenings, installations and community happenings. “The major design challenge is to keep the spaces flexible enough to accommodate and support arts and neighborhood collaborations of all kinds, while still designing something more than a minimally retrofitted shipping container,” says designer Ben Bruce, who got involved in the project while finishing his master’s in architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology. “In other words, a space with enough character to inform the art that takes place there and enough flexibility to adapt to many sites.”
Those sites will likely include Jamaica Plain’s Hyde Square, where the team is aiming to debut the ArtsCommons this summer. Artists will be able to apply to a curatorial team of local community leaders and APP/Lab members for a chance to showcase their work in residencies of anywhere from two weeks to two months. “At the same time, we want to make sure that the programming is loose enough to leave room for improvisation and for what someone called ‘surprise,’ ” says Mallis, who also hopes to see the ArtsCommons pop up at locations like the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Dorchester’s Four Corners neighborhood and the Outside the Box festival. “It takes patience to move through the process of rethinking the role of the ArtsCommons in completely new contexts,” Bruce adds. “Each neighborhood, each community organization, each partnership has a different set of needs, resources and visions. The challenge is to make sure the physical thing can address all of those—and then to understand how to implement the project one step at a time.”
By Improper Staff
Sparking Creativity
By: Jacqueline Houton
Art is an action word at New American Public Art, a Somerville design-and-build firm whose tech-savvy makers view brick walls, public parks and vacant lots as blank canvases for interactive work. “Our mission is to make places creative,” says co-founder Bevan Weissman. “We have a lot of space in the public world that we just sort of walk by and don’t really pay notice to. So what we want to do is make installations that empower people to look at their environment in a new way.” Such projects include Your Big Face, which let visitors project their faces, Wizard of Oz style, onto a giant 3-D visage at the Illuminus festival at SoWa, and Culture Tap, whose kiosks played hyperlocal oral histories by day and light displays by night, activating with the tap of a Charlie Card. Says Weissman, “We want to make spaces where people are encouraged to be more friendly, be more social, and disrupt the normal expectations of ‘Don’t go out at night; don’t talk to people in public.’ ”
Weissman met co-founder Dan Sternof Beyer about five years ago at a New England Foundation for the Arts meeting, and they formally launched the company in 2014 after several years of collaboration. Now New American Public Art’s half-dozen members create installations not only for Boston, but for cities across the country, like Philadelphia, where they just finished working with artist Candy Chang on an interactive mural inspired by the I Ching, and Baltimore, where this spring’s inaugural Light City festival featured Blue Hour—one of Weissman’s favorite works. “The inspiration for the name and the theme of the project is the blue hour of astronomical origin: that magical hour either in the morning before the sun has risen or the evening after it has set,” he explains. “We wanted to create lights that echo that visual character and give people the power to make the sun rise or set with these lights depending on how they move through it. That was rich in meaning for us because it speaks to where we are right now with technology—is it the dawn of an exciting new era or is it this new scary time where we’re more isolated from each other?”
They’re hoping for the former, and one way New American Public Art supports that vision is by making most of their projects open-source so that others can recreate and rejigger them free of charge. “Technology has taken so many leaps recently, and part of that has been people opening up their designs,” Weissman says. “We view open source as the tide that lifts all boats, so we’re very happy and honored to be able to contribute to that community.”
Top Right Photo Credit: Bianca Mauro
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Michelle Apigian: de Manio Photography
A Greener Blueprint
By: Matt Martinelli
New apartment developments seem to be breaking ground all over town, but the 65-unit complex coming to The Distillery in South Boston will be different. When the first 28 artist-occupied apartments open along East First Street this summer, it’ll be New England’s first multifamily passive house—an ultra-energy-efficient building designed to have comfy interior temps year-round with little or no heating or cooling required.
“What you want to have for a passive house building of any type is a continuous airtight barrier between inside and outside,” says Michelle Apigian, project manager at ICON Architecture, the Boston firm behind the project. That’s no easy feat. When ICON got its first estimate in 2010, the pricing for its plan was prohibitively high, and the project was at a crossroads until the property owner met a passive-house consultant at a conference. “He looked at the drawing and said, ‘You guys are following traditional German practices…. I can show you a different way,’ ’’ Apigian says. “We kind of reinvented it. The design basically stayed the same, but the way it was built changed dramatically.”
The team moved the airtight layer from the interior of the building to the exterior, simplifying the structure and reducing the installation expense. But the design doesn’t end with the airtight barrier. “The main thing you’re thinking about for mechanical systems is not heating or cooling, because there’s very minimal need for either one. The primary thing is you need ventilation,” Apigian says. “Historically, ventilation occurs naturally through leaky buildings. There’s a certain amount you need in order to be healthy. We’re using an energy recovery ventilator that lets all supply air and exhaust air run through this ventilator. In our case, each unit has its own small one.” Each unit also has triple-glazed windows, EnergyStar appliances, LED lighting and a shade system that will allow tenants to keep the sunshine from overheating their new homes.
With ICON planning two other multifamily passive houses elsewhere in the state, the team is looking forward to having the Distillery project serve as a showpiece of sorts. “We’d like to celebrate it, get a lot of data on it and how it’s running and operating, and let people understand the cost and savings associated with it,” says Apigian, who hopes to see many more multifamily passive houses built in the coming years. “Cambridge is considering them. Cornell is building the first high-rise dorm to passive-house standards. I think we’re on the precipice of a big shift, and more housing authorities are awarding more permits because they understand as a longer-term owner, there’s going to be massive savings over the life of a home. Not just a lower carbon footprint for our planet.”
By Improper Staff
Office Maxed
By: Jacqueline Houton
The cubicle farms that sprouted in the 1960s dominated offices for decades, but design pros are increasingly thinking outside the beige box, reimagining the spaces where we spend more than a third of our waking hours. Can design increase employee engagement? Impact the bottom line? Maybe even create joy? These are questions driving the Center for Workplace Innovation, a new Design Museum Foundation initiative launched in April that will produce exhibitions, a podcast and event programming, including the first annual Workplace Innovation Summit. Taking place Nov. 3 at the Innovation & Design Building, the daylong conference will feature presentations and panels as well as field trips to nearby workplaces of note. “We’ll have the whole Seaport available to us, all the new office spaces that we can go check out,” says Design Museum executive director Sam Aquillano, who cites the new Seaport Boulevard headquarters of Red Thread as one standout—no surprise, since the company is itself in the office furniture biz. “They’ve designed the space to be the latest thinking in workplace design. There are multiple different types of seating and different ways of working. No one has their own desk; no one has their own office,” Aquillano says. “Based on how you’re feeling and what you’re trying to get done, you can choose a private area when you really need to focus, a cafe area where you can sit on a comfy couch with a little desk, a standing desk. A lot of folks are moving to a sort of you-choose model, where things can morph and be more flexible.”
Photo Credit: Caitlin Cunningham Photography
Another company ahead of the curve? Aquillano points to Cambridge’s Genzyme. “They designed their new headquarters with natural light, open space, bringing nature into the building. They did a survey after the fact and found that compared to their previous workplace, 72 percent of employees felt more alert and productive.” But smaller changes may have an impact too. Aquillano recently visited Fidelity’s Summer Street office, where employees have taken design into their own hands, playing with different layouts to suit the needs of specific teams. Or consider Carbonite, an online-backup company that’s adopted a Star Wars theme throughout its Downtown Crossing office, from a Darth Vader mural to Luke and Leia icons on the bathroom doors. “There’s just this visual layer that they put on everything, and it’s really fun and keeps people engaged,” says Aquillano, who aims to tap a wide range of local perspectives for the center’s programming. “We want to be visiting different offices and getting multiple voices, from the decision makers in the C suite to people who are using the office every day.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Trevor Hoehne
Fashion Conscious
By: Sarah Hagman
Cara Bartlett and Vanessa van Zyl are looking to solve a problem some women face every day: a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear. After 15 years of friendship, the California natives launched their Boston-based brand Vetta last month, drawing on their impressive careers in the fashion industry—van Zyl is a trained designer, Bartlett a former buyer at Rue La La and Saks. “Vanessa can create these beautiful ideas and concepts, and then I come in and say, ‘I think this is what our customer would love; this is what would actually sell,’ ” Bartlett explains. “We’re a team in that way.”
Vetta’s Kickstarter-funded capsule collection ships in June, and the pair plan to debut their fall/winter line shortly thereafter. Each of the capsule collection’s five pieces—a blouse, a tunic, a two-piece dress, a vest dress and a pair of culottes—can be worn at least two ways, a big plus for ladies facing Cher Horowitz-like wardrobe conundrums. But versatility isn’t the only priority for Bartlett and van Zyl, who are building their business with social and environmental implications in mind. “Globalization has been a race to the bottom to find the country that will produce clothing for the lowest price,” notes Parsons grad Bartlett, adding, “Ethical fashion is something I’ve been thinking about for almost a decade.” Nearly four years ago, she committed to only buying apparel from brands with transparent manufacturing practices. With the help of Boston accelerator program Factory45, she and van Zyl have chosen a longtime family-owned factory in Manhattan’s historic garment district to produce their line. They’ve also sourced eco-friendly fabrics like Tencel, a biodegradable textile made from sustainably harvested wood—proving one can indulge in fashion guilt-free without compromising style.
By Improper Staff
One Step Ahead
By: Matt Martinelli
That gleaming 250,000-square-foot headquarters along the Mass. Pike isn’t the only new development at New Balance. “Products of all shapes and sizes are becoming digitally enabled,” says executive vice president Chris Ladd, “whether it’s your refrigerator or your coffeemaker or your car.” Your sneakers may be next. That’s why New Balance has partnered with Intel, Google, Strava and Zepp to build its new Digital Sport division, dedicated to creating new devices for athletes as well as sensor technology that can be embedded into footwear and apparel. “A lot of our competitors have been on an acquisition spree,” Ladd says. “We partnered with some of the biggest and best out there, so that they can remain great at what they’re great at and we can bring our knowledge of the athletic space as well as the running consumer.”
Ladd is hoping the partner approach can give New Balance a leg up on the competition, especially when it comes to the division’s first product: the smartwatch. New Balance’s research shows that 85 percent of its core demographic are currently running with a phone despite a desire to ditch it. So the company set out to create a standalone device that provides tracking and music with just a smartwatch and a pair of Bluetooth headphones. While the watch won’t be unveiled till August, and won’t start shipping till November, Ladd offers hints as to what runners can expect, including a heart-rate sensor on the wrist—a feature that Intel played a large role in.
“Heart rate is something you can’t get on your phone but that you certainly can get on this,” Ladd says. “As of this moment, there isn’t a competitor on the market today that offers the full suite of features and functionality that we will offer when ours comes to market.”
But the smartwatch is just the start for the Digital Sport division. Ladd knows that embedded sensor technology is the next step, and he hopes New Balance will be off and running from there. “We see ourselves as an athlete innovation company. In order to keep innovating for athletes, you have to have technology solutions and you have to have data. It’s clearly heading in that direction,” Ladd says. “This partnership has been so great for us. We have one of the world’s biggest and best technology partners, and we maintain our focus on the athletes, and together we can build these things that don’t exist yet.
By Meghan Kavanaugh & Improper Staff
Social Engineering
“I grew up with Star Wars in the 1970s, dreaming of robots that could interact with us as helpful companions,” says MIT professor Cynthia Breazeal. And after spending the past decade researching social robots at the MIT Media Lab, Breazeal is making that dream a reality. Meet Jibo: an 11-by-6-inch household companion that can shoot photos and video, announce reminders and learn users’ habits to better assist them with daily tasks.
Jibo will be able to gain even more skills through app purchases, but seemingly human features that take him past the point of a souped-up Siri come standard. “Jibo can see and hear you. He can recognize you by face and voice. He’s got a fun personality,” says Breazeal, founder and chief scientist of the Boston-based Jibo, Inc. “He can move in a fun and expressive way, but also a useful way to be able to turn and orient to you. He’s a shared family robot, but can interact with each member of the family in a personalized way.” Jibo can read kids bedtime stories and shoot silly pictures (a favorite feature of Breazeal’s 8-year-old son), while adults can use him to help with a recipe and capture the fun of a party when they’re busy hosting.
Breazeal says the family-friendly functionality is important since the last thing any parent or child needs is another screen to huddle over. “Technology should provide utility and value without detracting and pulling attention away from the family experience,” she says. “When I’m home, I don’t want my attention to be sucked into looking at my computer or smartphone. Jibo is a social robot. Interacting with Jibo supports face-to-face interaction with everyone in the room.” Early crowdfunding supporters who pledged $499-$749 for the first robots are still waiting for that interaction, but updated delivery times will be announced by April’s end—and there’s a wait list for the next batch. “I envision a future where there is a Jibo in every home, who makes a useful and meaningful contribution to people’s lives while also putting a smile on their face,” Breazeal says. “I want Jibo to win people’s hearts and minds.”
By Meghan Kavanaugh & Improper Staff
Cooking the Books
After conducting hundreds of interviews on the note-taking habits of fellow MIT alumni, Joe Lemay had what he calls an “aha moment,” realizing that people at the forefront of innovation still prefer to jot down ideas the old-fashioned way. So he developed a product that combines the best of both worlds, the Rocketbook Wave, which allows users to put pen to paper, digitally archive their notes and wipe pages clean using some very familiar technology: an everyday kitchen microwave.
Made of cellulose paper, the $27 notebook is compatible with Pilot FriXion pens, whose ink disappears when it shares the microwave with a mug of water for a few minutes. The notebook’s 80 pages can be used up to 10 times, and the bottom of each bears seven little symbols that correspond to different storage options personalized by the user. For example, when Lemay checks the star symbol and takes a picture of the page with his smartphone, the Rocketbook Wave app automatically sends the image to his meeting notes file on Dropbox. Another note taker uses the horseshoe to send to-do lists straight to her husband’s email address, and users can devote a symbol to a program like Evernote to turn handwritten notes into searchable text. “We realized that people didn’t want yet another system to log into,” Lemay says. “That’s why people find it super useful. … We’re just bringing this paper into the existing work flow.”
After successful crowdfunding campaigns, customers are already using—and reordering—their Rocketbooks. Lemay says he enjoys seeing the unexpected ways the technology is being used. (His 7-year-old daughter archives artwork to the family cloud.) And the Boston-based company hopes to expand functionality further, incorporating Slack compatibility and perhaps even a calendar function. “Notebooks are a place where we capture our ideas, where we’re most creative, and the item itself should be creative as well,” Lemay says. “I think this has been a long-neglected industry in terms of innovation, and there’s a ton of room to capture people’s imaginations and change the way they take notes forever.”
By Improper Staff
Farm to Tablet
By: Alexandra Cavallo
Waste not, want not: MIT Sloan School of Management grads Ricky Ashenfelter and Emily Malina are putting that proverb into practice with Spoiler Alert. Launched in November, the 2015 MassChallenge- winning startup is a B2B platform that connects businesses that generate surplus food with nonprofits and other organizations in need. Before the two met in grad school, Ashenfelter had previously worked with major food and retail companies to reduce their environmental footprints through sustainable initiatives. “I saw firsthand the amount of waste being generated at different hubs in the supply chain,” he says.
Spoiler Alert aims to reduce that waste with an app that makes the process easy for both parties, allowing restaurants, farms and food manufacturers to post what food they have available, send a notification to a network of participants—including local organizations like Daily Table, Lovin’ Spoonfuls, Food for Free and the East Boston YMCA Teaching Kitchen—and then make a transaction in real time. Users can message each other to coordinate pick-ups or drop-offs themselves, cutting out a middleman and ensuring that as little food as possible gets, well, spoiled.
Though the startup has only been operational for five months, Spoiler Alert has already grown a network of more than 125 businesses, recovery groups and nonprofits across New England. They hope the success their venture has seen locally will allow them to expand their reach. “Our goal is to create a scalable formula for expansion so that we can take Spoiler Alert to any major city in the U.S. and abroad,” Ashenfelter says.
“The 40 percent of our food supply we waste each year carries with it serious social, environmental and financial costs,” Malina adds. “If we can solve this problem, we can have a tremendous impact on our planet, our communities and food businesses large and small. It’s an issue that we can all relate to. No one likes to see food thrown away.”
By Improper Staff
Taming the Yeast
By: Sarah Hagman
Taste Aeronaut Brewing Co.’s latest offering and you’ll find some fruit notes, subtle hints of clove and a tangy finish. Oh, and a touch of wind captured in a petri dish on a fine summer day in the Middlesex Fells two years ago. Massachusetts Wheat Beer’s recipe got its start in the Somerville brewery’s newly expanded lab, which has been taking stock of a variety of yeast strains since opening its doors in May 2014. With the recent expansion, co-founder Ronn Friedlander and his team of three scientists are free to do a bit more experimentation, using shaking incubators, a PRC machine and other lab gear in a half-dozen ongoing projects, like Ygor Ortenzio’s look into how pineapple from his native Brazil affects fermentation and flavor.
The team is currently working toward building a permanent collection of wild yeasts gathered from fruits, insects, fields and gusts of wind around the world. The MIT and Harvard PhDs sequence a portion of the DNA and test to see if the strains can digest maltose, withstand the presence of hops and are otherwise fit for brewing. Suitable options move on to test batches—and possibly production. Once they acquire a substantial library, Friedlander says, they’ll be able to cross strains for more desirable qualities. For now, they’re designing recipes around the yeast.
It’s a creative process that departs from that of most breweries, which tinker with two main ingredients—grains and hops—to find their formulas, with style guidelines dictating the range of color, bitterness, alcohol content and beyond. “With wild yeast, no one’s telling you what it’s used for; it’s not defined by any existing parameters,” Friedlander says. “We’re free of any preconceived notions. We can make beer that doesn’t fit a style and let the yeast lead us.”
For example, the clove-like characteristics of Massachusetts Wheat Beer led them to start out with a hefeweizen-style brew, only to find out after fermenting it’s somewhere between that and a saison. Says Friedlander, “We can experiment as much as we want and sell that beer in the taproom until we find that exact recipe this yeast was meant for.”
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