Mobile Service Stations, 2014
What services could NYC street vendors provide in 2035? The Extrapolation Factory was invited by NurtureArt to lead a five week short course on futures studies with students at Public School 147 in the spring of 2014. The students were challenged to imagine new mobile services that could change social scenarios in their neighborhood over the next 20 - 25 years.
Following a discussion and lecture on the evolution of mobile services, the students began their visioning process by generating a list of ideas and issues that they deemed interesting, important or exciting. Their list covered themes such as social media, pop culture, gender, food, and health. The students bisociated ideas on their list with four domains that may play significant roles in the future (climate, language, insects and robots) to generate concepts for their mobile services. After sketching several iterations on their ideas, the students’ final concepts were actualized as scale models, which were exhibited in the exhibition 'Multiplicity' at Invisible Exports gallery, which opened on August 1, 2014.
Some of the concepts that emerged:
INSTA-BUG
An animal-operated service that deploys wireless-enabled, photographing insects to document your daily life and stream images directly to social media.
SPARE CHANGE MACHINE
A robotic service that collects and digests scrap metal, mints it into coins, and dispenses spare change to support unhoused individuals.
EXPERIMENT-X
A mobile laboratory designed to treat and resuscitate infected wildlife using targeted, specially formulated therapeutic gases.
BUGFARM
A roaming apicultural service offering mobile beehives and pollination support to bolster local urban agriculture.
CLIMATE CART
A mobile microclimate chamber that regulates safe environmental conditions for sensitive flora and fauna, enabling localized public encounters with rare and endangered species.
Following a discussion and lecture on the evolution of mobile services, the students began their visioning process by generating a list of ideas and issues that they deemed interesting, important or exciting. Their list covered themes such as social media, pop culture, gender, food, and health. The students bisociated ideas on their list with four domains that may play significant roles in the future (climate, language, insects and robots) to generate concepts for their mobile services. After sketching several iterations on their ideas, the students’ final concepts were actualized as scale models, which were exhibited in the exhibition 'Multiplicity' at Invisible Exports gallery, which opened on August 1, 2014.
Some of the concepts that emerged:
INSTA-BUG
An animal-operated service that deploys wireless-enabled, photographing insects to document your daily life and stream images directly to social media.
SPARE CHANGE MACHINE
A robotic service that collects and digests scrap metal, mints it into coins, and dispenses spare change to support unhoused individuals.
EXPERIMENT-X
A mobile laboratory designed to treat and resuscitate infected wildlife using targeted, specially formulated therapeutic gases.
BUGFARM
A roaming apicultural service offering mobile beehives and pollination support to bolster local urban agriculture.
CLIMATE CART
A mobile microclimate chamber that regulates safe environmental conditions for sensitive flora and fauna, enabling localized public encounters with rare and endangered species.
More images from the project can be seen on flickr, and from the Multiplicity exhibition at Invisible Exports in a second album.
Exhibitions & related material
Exhibitions & public programs
- MultiplicityInvisible-Exports, New York. Curated by Marco Antonini. Models developed with PS 147 students through NurtureArt.
Articles, publications & talks
- An Archive of Schools at the fourth Istanbul Design Biennial — DomusDomus, 28 August 2018. Mobile Service Stations appears in the digital Archive of Schools feature accompanying the fourth Istanbul Design Biennial.
- Students Developed the Street Cart of the Future, and Their Ideas Are Awesome