After months of planning, we are extremely excited to announce the final lineup of performances, panels, and projects for this weekend’s Urban Prototyping Festival! For the duration of the festival, 4 blocks of downtown San Francisco will be transformed into a living laboratory of urban experiments. The one-day festival runs for ten hours, from 12 noon to 10 pm this Saturday, October 20.

Three stages of live performance, four discussion panels, and three keynote talks will accent the true focus of UP:SF – the 20+ design and technology projects showcasing the ability of citizens to rethink how we use and innovate in our public space.

We could not be more excited about the lineup of activities for this Saturday and look forward to seeing you there! If you haven’t already, join 1200+ others who have RSVP’d on Facebook, and find us on Twitter at @urbanproto using the hashtag #UPSF. Read more about the lineup below.

– Projects –

The centerpieces of UP: San Francisco are the more than 20 design and technology projects created either as responses to our Open Call for proposals, or prototyped in 48 hours at our Urban Makeathon in September. Collectively, these projects showcase and celebrate principles of rapid prototyping, tactical urbanism, and participatory design – supporting an environment where the city itself serves as a platform for citizens to contribute to improving the public realm.

All of the design and code for the projects will be open-sourced and available online for anyone to replicate and build upon shortly after the festival in San Francisco.

Read more about the UP Program Model to learn how urban prototypes can become replicated, scaled, and adopted by cities around the world.

UP Projects will be installed on the street for the duration of the UP Festival on the 5M Project site, from 5th St. to Mary St. and from Mission St. to Howard St.

– Performances –

Our three stages of audio, visual, dance, and theater performance will explore an extraordinary variety of creative acts in public space. Check the full performance lineup now!

GAFFTA Stage (Minna St. Tunnel at Mary St.)

In addition to three SF debut live performances, in the spirit of collaboration and raising awareness of the city around us, GAFFTA has invited resident DJ’s from 8 of San Francisco’s most essential electronic crews to collaborate with our community of code based visual artists and represent the vibrancy of the Bay Area electronic music community.

5M Placeworks Stage (Natoma St. at Mary St.)

The 5MPW Stage will feature a live performance program with up to a dozen acts and 50 performers, which includes live music, dance groups, comedy, theatre, djs, visual art and more, as well as the UP:SF keynote talks.

Hallidie Plaza Stage (Market St. at 5th St.)

The Hallidie Plaza Stage will feature live dance and musical performances is one of San Francisco’s most central public spaces, curated by the Burning Man Project and Trolley Dances.

– Keynote Talks –

The UP:SF keynotes represent three fascinating perspectives on the application of prototyping to the built environment.

The first keynote is from IDEO General Manager Tom Kelley, a leading author, advocate, and recognized expert in the fields of prototyping, design thinking, and innovation for over two decades.

Second, we’ll hear from Alexa Arena, Vice President of Forest City, Vice Board Chair of SPUR, and visionary behind The 5M Project, which is rethinking real estate development and serving as the host site for UP:SF.

Finally, San Francisco Planning Director John Rahaim will speak about the past, present, and future of public space and citizen participation in San Francisco.

3:00 PM // Welcome: Josette Melchor, GAFFTA and Deborah Cullinan, IFTA

3:15 PM // Tom Kelley, IDEO

3:30 PM // Alexa Arena, 5M Project

3:45 PM // John Rahaim, San Francisco Planning Dept.

4:00 PM // Close

All keynote talks will take place on the 5M Placeworks Stage on Natoma St. at Mary St.

– Discussion Panels –

The four-hour lineup of panels has been curated to include a range of discussions around the festival’s theme: Placemaking Through Prototyping: How Citizen Experiments Can Reimagine the Public Realm. One of the incredible parts about UP: San Francisco so far has been the incredible array of disciplines brought together to create new projects and discuss the future of digital and physical urban interventions. The panels reflect this diversity, featuring representatives from The City of San Francisco, IDEO, Rebar, Stamen Design, the Stanford d.school, CCA URBANlab, Gehl Architects, Arup, CMG, Trulia, and more.

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM // Art as Placemaking Tool 

5:00 PM – 6:00 PM // Design Thinking in Cities

6:00 PM – 7:00 PM // Formalizing Experimentation: From Prototype to Infrastructure

7:00 PM – 8:00 PM // Urban Insights: Learning about Cities from Data & Citizen Sensors

All UP: SF panels will be held in the Intersection for the Arts Gallery, 925 Mission St. at 5th St.

On September 28-30, we held the first-ever Urban Prototyping Makeathon in San Francisco. We challenged 50 incredible participants with an exciting and ambitious proposition: to rapidly prototype new physical and digital urban interventions, going from concept to execution in just 48 hours. After pitching over 30 ideas on the Makeathon stage, the room rallied around 11 projects to produce over the course of the next two days. And then the making began.

We saw designers, developers, hardware and software technologists, architects, urban planners, carpenters, metalworkers, and other artists and makers of all varieties join forces to bring incredible new work to life. Besides the time constraint, teams were given just $500 in materials stipends to work with – limiting their outcomes to projects that would be easily affordable and replicable across the world. But with a wealth of experience, drive, and the tools of TechShop and the Autodesk Instructables Lab behind them, teams accomplished more than we ever could have imagined.

So, what exactly did they build? The quick answer: a lot. The less-quick answer: everything from projection-mapped murals to digital hopscotch to a USB scavenger hunt to interactive street signage that talks to you. Collectively, the projects tackled widespread urban problem sets such as neglected alleys, blank walls, and a lack of play space.

One team constructed a working, full-scale model of a tourist telescope, like those found near the Golden Gate Bridge and other attractions. This was no ordinary telescope, however, and will surprise most who peer through it. A look through the lens doesn’t give viewers a magnified view of the landscape in front of them, but instead puts them in control of a remote-controlled video camera in a distant part of the city or beyond whose movements are controlled by the telescope itself, and whose sights might otherwise go unseen. [Turn to Clear Vision]

Another brought their background in digital projection mapping to the world of street art, bringing new life after dark to an existing mural on an underused alleyway. After developing a full vector map of the mural, the team choreographed a site-specific visual performance in a single day, and a plan to bring it to the street. After sunset on Saturday they took their project outdoors, drawing fascinated spectators around their guerrilla projections the entire evening. [Highlights]

A third began the weekend interviewing street performers in downtown San Francisco to identify their main challenges earning income through public performance. Then, they quickly started prototyping a way to address these needs. The result: a modular, portable, affordable Street Stage made from shipping palettes and PVC pipe that can be deployed anywhere in the city. In addition to being a literal platform for amplifying the impact and visibility of performance, the project utilizes Arduino sensors to both light the stage, and to upload recordings of performances to a website that acts as a living catalog for this community of artists. [Street Stage SF]

Of the eleven prototypes built during the weekend, these three and two others, CitiPlay and I Just Wanna Hold Your Hand were chosen to receive additional materials stipends and be featured at our Street Festival and Exposition on October 20 in San Francisco. Make sure to RSVP on Facebook for the Festival now, and share with your friends to spread the word! You can also get a deeper look into photos from the weekend on our Facebook page.

More information on all of the projects can be found on the Makeathon Projects page – soon after the festival, the open-source designs and code for the projects will also be available online so that the projects can be replicated and built upon by anyone, anywhere. We could not be more excited to see this work out on the streets in just two weeks!

Additional coverage of the Makeathon can be found on The Wall Street Journal and WIRED.

Last week, representatives from GAFFTA, Intersection, 5M Placeworks, IDEO, REBAR, the SF Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, and the SF Planning Department collectively reviewed the proposals and narrowed the selection down to 18 projects. These teams will work on preparing their projects for the next two months, culminating in their public display at our Street Exposition the weekend of October 20 in downtown San Francisco.

Stipends ranging from $300 to $1,000 have been awarded based on the teams’ proposed budgets and scale of their proposals. These budgets are affordable by design, allowing them to be quickly replicated, built upon, and iteratively improved in cities around the world through knowledge-sharing and open source code and design.

The open call sought projects exploring new possibilities in the public realm through physical and digital design interventions. The selected projects employ a wide variety of technologies, including web and mobile applications, SMS interaction, sensors, microcontrollers, video projection, and on-street lighting, and design tools ranging from urban agriculture to modular shade structures to pop-up windbreaks. Collectively, the projects seek to breathe new life into underexplored components of urban infrastructure, from stairways to fire hydrants to fences to blank walls.

A full list of the open call selections can be found below, and a complete gallery with images and more information is available at sf.urbanprototyping.org/open-call/projects. We’re very excited to work closely with these teams over the coming months – sketching, building, hacking, and (of course) prototyping!

The open call is one of two ways that new projects are being sourced for the October Exposition. The second is our Urban Makeathon, to be held September 28-30 at Intersection for the Arts and TechShop on the 5M campus. Applications for participation are being accepted on a rolling basis through September 14; the event is free, but space is limited. Apply now at: sf.urbanprototyping.org/makeathon/apply.

If you’re interested in learning more, sharing ideas, supporting UP:SF, or bringing UP to your city, contact us at sf [at] urbanprototyping [dot] org.

Finally, follow the latest developments from UP:SF on Facebook and Twitter!

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AnyType is a creative mobile application that lets people transform elements and objects in the physical world into novel digital typefaces. Awarded $300.

Auditory Information will transform a ubiquitous but ignored aspect of our cities—the chain-link fence—into a compelling sonic feature wall. Awarded $1000.

CLIP + SLIDE transforms stairs into slides and musical instruments, creating moments of play and joy in an urban game of chutes and ladders. Awarded $1000.

Darkness Map is a crowd-sourced data visualization that portrays the amount of light and darkness in the nighttime urban environment. Awarded $1000.

Death of the Bench is a flexible, secure, and scalable platform for deploying movable chairs to facilitate flexible and dynamic public spaces. Awarded $1000.

DIY Traffic Counter is a low-cost, open-source measurement device that allows anyone to accurately measure and visualize street traffic counts. Awarded $500.

Fruit Fence is a planting structure tailored for fences in public spaces that features web-enabled sensor devices to improve community care of distributed neighborhood trees. Awarded $900.

Glowing Crosswalk provides increased visibility of pedestrians within a crosswalk at night via high-output LED lamps at crosswalk entrances that will complement existing street lighting. Awarded $500.

INSTANT [play]GROUND is a portable pedestrian-scale gameboard which fits in a suitcase and activates alleys and other neglected sites. Awarded $500.

PPPlanter is a scalable, reconfigurable public urinal and sink using modular biofilters to treat wastewater. Awarded $1000.

Pulse of the City empowers pedestrians with self-awareness of their heart rates in a fun, playful manner with the goal of encouraging a constructive dialogue on how to design the healthier and more livable cities of the future. Awarded $1000.

Shared Cinema is a public video jukebox that activates urban spaces for pedestrians. Awarded $800.

Smart Bus Stops Done Dirt Cheap provides passengers with a text messaging service that answers local questions using a specific bus stop ID’s geo-spatial database. Awarded $500.

Street Sensing uses an Arduino AirCasting sensing platform to transform common light poles into pollution measuring units that give real-time insights into their local air quality. Awarded $1000.

Swings is an installation that gives people a chance to see familiar surroundings from a new perspective using movement and location-sensitive sound mixes. Awarded $500.

The 10-Mile Garden will temporarily convert San Francisco’s fire hydrants into sites for bio-swales or mini gardens, which add green spaces to the city and create a new water system in support of the urban ecology. Awarded $1000.

URBAN_Parasol is a modular series of shelter-shade structures assembled from a combination of open-source design 3D-printed joints and ready-made objects. Awarded $1000.

Wind I Break is a series of modular windbreaks exploring how space can be activated during uncomfortable moments of high wind activity. Awarded $500.

Missed the deadline, but still want to get your get your hands dirty with urban prototyping? APPLY for the makeathon today. Applications are already being accepted on a rolling basis and slots will fill up quickly.

Logistics

Date: Tuesday, August 14th, 2012
Time: 6pm – 8pm
Location: Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission St, Suite 109, San Francisco, CA 94103

Agenda

Welcome and Overview — Jake Levitas, Research Director, GAFFTA
Park(ing) Day: A Case Study — Matthew Passmore, Principal, Rebar
Urban Prototyping in San Francisco: The 5M Site — Laura Tepper, Program Director, 5M Placeworks, IFTA
Brainstorming Workshop — Hilary Hoeber, Portfolio Lead, Public Sector, IDEO

Register

Do you see the public realm as a canvas? Do you have a design or technology project that could transform the way people experience the city? Bring your project to life at SF’s 2012 Urban Prototyping (UP) Festival!

UP: San Francisco is a design and technology festival focusing on replicable digital and physical urban interventions in public space. UP is offering $25,000 in stipends to support new projects. The festival’s series of events includes an Open Call for proposals, an Urban Makeathon, and a Public Street Exposition. We are taking over the tunnel at 5th and Minna for TEN HOURS of live A/V performances and musical talent.

Join us Tuesday, August 14, 2012 from 6-9PM for a meetup at Intersection for the Arts at 925 Mission Street between 4th & 5th. We will be hosting a Q&A / Happy Hour for UP participants to get more information about the schedule of events and how to bring their projects to life! RSVP here: http://upsfinfosession.eventbrite.com/

UP will bring together thousands of participants and attendees and build a community around civic engagement through creative work. The final October 2012 UP Exposition will serve as a high-visibility public venue for showcasing San Francisco’s leadership in the fields of technology, design, civic participation, and maker culture. Start by clicking the banners to get involved!

UP Festival is a locative media festival that explores placetypes (i.e. alleys, benches, bike racks, billboards, bus stops, crosswalks, curbs, facades, fences, fire escapes, kiosks, manholes, newsstands, parking spaces, planters, sidewalks, stairs, streets, traffic lights, trash cans, trees, tunnels, vacant lots, walls, windows…you get the idea) as platforms for creative and civic intervention. Every project produced will be open source, publicly documented, and replicable in any city.

Visit sf.urbanprototyping.org to find out more details about the initiative. We are looking forward to your submission!