Who Is NYC For?

NYCxDesign Festival

Arts & Culture

Category

Experiential Design, Event Identity, Marketing

Services

Background

New York City has never been a city that falls in line. At its best it’s a metropolis of boundless curiosity, where bullshit isn’t tolerated, the status quo is interrogated, and new paradigms are explored. It’s this same hometown spirit that drives our studio to question it all.

So as we approached our participation in the 2024 NYCxDESIGN Festival, we asked ourselves two big questions:

Why does a design festival centered in NYC talk so little about what it means to design for NYC? If historically New York City was meant to challenge convention and be a place for everyone, why has it become a place for the very few?

Big Idea

From these questions, an idea for an exhibit was born. We would transform our studio into an experience built around original works, aiming to bring people together to question how NYC is falling short and shed light on who in our city really benefits from decisions made by the powers that be.

Visual Identity

For the exhibit we designed an identity meant to embody the complicated relationship between the city and its inhabitants. We embraced a bold red to represent not only the “New York” attitude and the lifeblood of the city, but simultaneously the human cost of the government’s failure of infrastructure. Our system, like NYC, can feel familiar and accessible but at the same time uncomfortable and claustrophobic. We built tension through the way the typefaces and layouts mirror the architecture of the city itself. This system not only played out in the event’s design but was also a driving force to the intrigue and provocation behind our dynamic marketing efforts.

Exhibition

To bring our idea to life, we crafted a series of curated installations, each addressing pressing societal and governmental issues. The exhibit was produced in-house by our entire staff, from ideation to installation (with help from a few talented specialist partners along the way).

As guests moved through the transformed studio space, they encountered thought-provoking exhibits that raised essential questions about the city’s infrastructure, economic disparities, child welfare, and representation of marginalized voices.

At the heart of our exhibit was a NYC park bench designed with extra partitions, as a clear representation of how our city fails to consider everyone when making crucial decisions.

  • It was the first installation our team fully conceptualized and it served as the driving inspiration for everything that came after. We obtained a model of a 1939 World’s Fair Bench, and then partnered with a fabricator to add the obstructive partitions meant to make sitting impossible for most.

With this installation we wanted to question the influence of those in our city that hold great financial means and power.

  • We plastered an alcove of our office with re-designed $1 bills featuring the faces of some of NYC’s most familiar wealthy individuals and a number of lobbyists in NY who have been identified as double agents — along with representing Fossil Fuel companies, they also advocate on behalf of prestigious NYC cultural institutions, universities, charities, hospitals, and businesses whose activities are seen as positively impactful to society. What made this installation even more meaningful was the fact that it surrounded a site-specific artwork in our studio, by artist David Opdyke, which explores the consequences of climate change in action.

We visualized data on several of the pressing issues (violence, food insecurity, homelessness, racism) that impact the safety of NYC children.

  • Over the last decade, we’ve worked with a plethora of education and youth-focused non-profits that are dedicated to supporting young people in New York and beyond. One of the big insights that came out of our recent work for a progressive school in the city was that the challenges to children’s safety aren’t limited to only physical violence, but instead stem from a range of causes.

Folks don’t always know the full extent of their rights, or better yet, where their rights come from. So we polished off a past ThoughtMatter project — our redesign of the U.S. Constitution — and presented it in a new light.

We selected four quotes from past clients that highlight the need communities have for platforms and opportunities to get their voices heard.

  • Much of our work has supported the efforts of organizations that help communities get their stories told. Far too often throughout history groups have been silenced or ignored, and this event was the perfect opportunity to extend our role of shining a light on what they have to say.

Featured Clients

We believe design has a real power to provoke thought and inspire impact. “WHO IS NYC FOR?” was always meant to be much more than an event. It’s a call to action for ourselves and for others to constantly fight for and challenge the future of our city and our world. As we embark on our next decade as a studio, we remain dedicated to pushing boundaries, challenging norms, and working tirelessly to use the power of creativity to design a world we want to live in — one that’s a more equitable and inclusive society for all.

Read more about 'WHO IS NYC FOR?' as featured in The Dieline.