Hacking at the Urban Innovation Festival

PAYETTE is thrilled to be participating in Design Museum Boston’s Urban Innovation Festival three-day design hack-a-thon event with teams competing to design solutions to urban problems. 

The festival will be held July 29-31 at Channel Park and will serve as the museum’s keystone event in their multi-year Urban Innovation Program, demonstrating that design can improve and transform the livability of a place. PAYETTE will be competing against a group of engineers, designers, architects and innovators from Autodesk, Fidelity Labs, Essential Design, Shepley Bulfinch, Wentworth Institute of Technology, CBT and MassArt.

Teams will be brainstorming, designing and prototyping solutions in full view of the public shedding light on the design process. The event will also show the importance of community involvement and feedback on a successful design. Throughout the festival all attendees will be asked to provide their feedback regarding the in-progress designs, helping the teams develop the most impactful, dynamic solutions. Students, residents, commuters and business owners will all have a voice.

PAYETTE is no stranger to designing for urban areas. Here in Boston you can pass the site for the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex at Northeastern University. The site is located between two urban neighborhoods – the Fenway and Roxbury and is separated from the main campus by the existing Amtrak and MBTA rail lines. Our final design has created a building and surrounding landscape that invites and engages the communities on both sides with the building and the campus. 

Having held a couple of hackathons at our firm internally, this event will give us an opportunity to test our hacking skills against outside competition. We really enjoy how the experiences have pushed us to think differently about all aspects of our work, and look forward to interacting with the public to create innovative solutions for urban problems!