Although pirmarily focused on digital interfaces, I love good design. This inverted umbrella is an example of my attempt at industrial design.
Inverted Umbrella and Water Collector
What it is.
While visiting my brother in Portland, OR I noticed many outdoor spaces were left empty due to rainy days. Using an tradition patio umbrella was an obvious solution but I saw an opportunity for a more progressive, environmentally conscious design.
This inverted umbrella has several benefits.
- protecting an outdoor space from falling rain
- collecting water for reuse (gardening, toilets, etc.)
- overlapping umbrellas can be used to cover a larger area
- the inverted, upward shape reduces the feeling of confinement a traditional umbrella creates (when the water falls over the edge it forms a “wall” of water around those below)
- when collapsed into inverted triangle, its flat profile can be rotated to provide shade or let the sun through.
The Sustainable Stadium
What it is.
At a Colts game in my home town of Indianapolis, I noticed the potential energy produced by the crowd’s contant movement. This project seeks to harness that movement into electricity and encourage the production of that energy toward a completely sustainable event.
How it works
A stadium seat with a folding mechanism that propels a small generator ( like those found hand-crank radios), would create a small amount of power every time a crowd member sat down. The seats, which are already connected would from a power generating grid. With nearly 100,000 seats and constant standing and sitting at sporting events, the crowd would generate a huge amount of electricity.
The Digital Interface
The interface projected like the score of the game would offer the crowd real time accounting of the power being generated and crowd games, like “the wave”, would encourage even more energy production. Different sections of the crowd would also compete against one another, seeing whose section can generate more energy.