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Cooper Lumen Challege by Toby Cumberbach and Paul Garrin A’82

Creating a working prototype for a Solar Powered Wi-F- hotspot & Charging station

The Cooper Lumen Design Challenge is an innovative, cross-disciplinary design challenge for students at Cooper Union, aimed at creating a working prototype for a solar-powered public WiFi hotspot.

Unlike other solar powered products, the “Cooper Lumen” will uniquely combine the functions of providing public wireless internet, emergency lighting, and a charging station for computers and mobile devices.

The semester-long design initiative will commence in January 2014, and will include students from the Cooper Union schools of Art, Architecture, and Engineering.

The Cooper Lumen is conceived to address the needs of Lower East Side and other NYC residents who were impacted by Superstorm Sandy.

These neighborhoods — much of which are made up of high-rise affordable housing developments — were particularly impacted by Superstorm Sandy’s storm surge, leaving thousands of vulnerable families and elders trapped without power, communications, transportation, or supplies. For many buildings, it took weeks to restore power and communications.

The overall goal of the Cooper Lumen Design Challenge is to help residential corridors impacted by Superstorm Sandy come back even stronger by encouraging the development and implementation of durable and reliable devices that will anchor these neighborhoods for years to come.

Design Team

The project team acknowledges the ongoing work and support of LES Ready!, (formerly known as the Lower East Side Long Term Recovery Group), a coalition of over 70 community groups and institutions that are working to cooperatively coordinate response, resources, preparedness planning and training in response to Hurricane Sandy and in the event of future disasters.

Deltaprintr by Andrey Kovalev CE’16, Eugene Sokolov EE’16, and Hunter McKane ME’16

We engineered the Deltaprintr to be simple, efficient, and affordable. We want as many people as possible to be able to get their hands on this exciting new technology without having to sacrifice quality or user-friendliness.

SIMPLE – Using a 3D Printer shouldn’t be a hassle. We designed our printer so that it requires minimal set-up, and so that there’s effectively no long-term maintenance. We’ll be shipping every printer with a construction manual (pictures!) to get you up and running in no time.

EFFICIENT – The polar coordinate system allows for faster movements (than those of traditional Cartesians printers) while achieving a 100 micron resolution.

AFFORDABLE – Because a Deltaprintr design doesn’t need as many parts as other 3D printers, we can pass the savings on to you.

Design Team

  • Andrey Kovalev, CE ’16
  • Eugene Sokolov, EE ’16
  • Hunter McKane, ME ’16
  • Shai Schechter, Graphic Design, SUNY Purchase ’15
  • Yasick Nemenov, Economics and Math, Williams College ’16

Tell Me A Sory: Interactive, Animated, Sci-Fi Experience by Damien Lopez A’02

Tell Me A Story… is an experience that will combine the interactivity of a video-game with the storytelling medium of a web-comic to provide the reader with a unique, immersive and evolving epic. Seamlessly incorporating both still and animated panels within a single page, Tell Me A Story… will be presented as an HTML5 based website, with audio accompaniment. Tell Me A Story… will give you the reader, control of the central character’s movements and choices as they make their way through bizarre 3D environments populated by alien beings. It’s the Mass Effect trilogy meets Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The story will unfold through your interactions/relationships with the other beings you encounter while moving through the environments of the Fractalverse. Each encounter with a character will take the reader to a new environment, animation, or short comic.

I created this Kickstarter project because I’ve taken the concepts and stories I’ve developed as far as I can on my own. To make my vision for the Tell Me A Story… experience a reality I will need support from many other people, including you.

With your support and funding my team and I will be able to expand upon the concepts and designs I’ve created, develop elements and content for the “Art of Tell Me A Story…” print book and complete the Tell Me A Story… website. The site will be free for all and it will feature 10 web-comics with animation, 8 unique fractal flame environments featuring original art/animation, and audio tracks. The site will host comics, art, and animation by several artists, laying the foundation for a broader community of contributing artists in the future, and highlighting the multitude of possibilities in this choose-your-own-adventure experience.

StepInGo Shoes by Steve Kaufman EE’86

Steve Kaufman EE’86 has designs on making shoes that are hands-free and easier to remove, for the elderly and physically challenged. Please help support his campaign over at RocketHub!

“About 6 years ago, my son started wearing a torso brace to help prevent the progression of his scoliosis (curvature of the spine). The brace prevented him from bending over to put his own shoes on, so every day I was enlisted for the task. After a year or so of doing that, I had the idea to create a “hands-free” shoe so people in his situation could do this task for themselves. Since that original idea 5 years ago, there’s been tons of prototypes made, lots of testing, many refinements and A LOT of time spinning my wheels with footwear manufacturers who eventually threw their arms up and said, “I can’t do this.”

So why am I still doing this?* My son, Alex, is out of the brace now and doesn’t even need these special shoes anymore! I’m doing it because I’ve met so many people over the past 5 years that really need them –either putting their own shoes on is difficult or painful, or just plain impossible and they must rely on a caregiver to do it for them -just as Alex relied on me. In either case, their quality of life and independence suffers.

One woman I met told me that her son with Cerebral Palsy can basically manage for himself -except for putting on his shoes and that my shoes will allow him to go away to college –Whoa! What am I supposed to say to her, “Sorry, I guess Junior will have to make other plans.” –I don’t think so!

Now, I’m talking real shoes here –not flip-flops, slippers or clogs, which, granted, are hands-free too, but they do not offer any heel support and can slip off the feet resulting in injury or even death. In fact, every 18 seconds, an adult in the U.S. falls down resulting in an ER visit. Our shoes provide an incredible amount of support and stability through a molded heel cup in the rear.”

FDR Hope Memorial by Meredith Gang Bergmann A’77

This campaign is raising funds on behalf of Roosevelt Island Disabled Association Inc, a verified nonprofit. The campaign does not necessarily reflect the views of the nonprofit or have any formal association with it. All contributions are considered unrestricted gifts and can’t be specified for any particular purpose.

Help us build the first memorial to FDR that focuses on his disability. We need to build this monument because people with disability, while loved, are pitied because it’s believed they cannot achieve anything substantial or independently. We need to dispel this belief which can even afflict people who are disabled themselves.

We are a group of people who live or work on Roosevelt Island in New York City — some of us are disabled, some are doctors, therapists, and others involved with the disabled. We have come together under the auspices of the Roosevelt Island Disabled Association to create a monument to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is a hero to our community: a man who, despite being crippled by polio, became a four-term president of the United States.