Cleat: Street Seats Design Challenge
Cleat. Photography by Blake Morton, Colton Sanford, and Kale Caufman.
Introduction
As part of an independent study, Cleat was designed and created by six industrial design students at Western Washington University (WWU). Cleat was ranked in the top 20 submissions from around the world in the Street Seats Design Challenge of 2013, hosted by Design Museum Boston.
Research and prototyping
The prompt of the competition was to create a sustainable public seating design for Boston’s Fort Point channel in the city’s the Innovation District. Entries that were picked for the semi-finals would be required to build and ship a full-scale bench using real materials for further judging. Without any experience in public seating, we got to work researching, sketching, and building dozens of small scale models to quickly prototype and iterate on new designs.
Submitting our concept
After weeks of research, sketching, and building models, we landed on the final concept: Cleat. Our design paid homage to New England’s maritime heritage and could be built using sustainable materials like reclaimed wood. To complete our submission, we built a small scale model to submit with our research and documentation of our design process.
To our delight, Cleat placed in the top 20 submissions from over 170 entries, beating out many firms with much more experience and funding than our small team. With Cleat in the semi-finals, we moved on to planning how to build it full-scale bench, source materials, and ship it to Boston for the final round in the competition.
Building it for real
Our team was incredibly fortunate for the help we received from the staff at WWU, and local craftsman at G.R. Plume in Bellingham, WA. They helped us to sustainably source and build the bench. After weeks of hard work we had fully assembled the bench and had found a distributor that could get the bench to Boston for us.
Relying on materials like reclaimed Douglas Fur and stainless steel, Cleat was built to be robust and easily withstand the elements of Boston’s historic Fort Point Channel. The coolest part of building this while honoring the areas maritime heritage and meeting the prompt of the competition.
While Cleat didn’t win the competition in the end, we felt like winners for navigating our way through this experience for the first time. It taught us all that if we put our heads together we can contribute towards something bigger than ourselves, and we had a blast doing it,
You can read more about the Street Seats Design Challenge in this article by Boston Magazine.
