SMIT@ Pratt Design Incubator 2005-2008

Since MoMA opening...

2008-03-10T18:01:00.000-04:00

Well, things have really kicked up since the MoMA opening. We have been blogged about in a number of different places. I met the co-founder of Ecolect, Joe Gebbia, back in early Feb at the Greener Gadgets conference and he ended up wanting to post about me on
his website.

Then that got picked up by Inhabitat and Treehugger and then that went all around the world it seemed in only a few days. We have been getting lots of calls and people have been asking to order GROW.

Things are picking up and we are just getting started with our AI2V coaching with Sharon Ballard. Hopefully this will prove to be a very productive time to have her coaching and we will be able to use it to our best advantage.

-Sita.

Opening Week at MoMA

2008-02-25T20:12:00.001-05:00

What a week!
The MoMA sure does know how to throw a party. We attended the opening of Design and the Elastic Mind which GROW is a part of, and met a lot of the designers for other pieces in the show as well as well-known artists and designers from varied backgrounds. It is such an honor to be a part of what is already an amazing show.

Installing GROW at MoMA

2008-02-06T17:14:00.004-05:00

We are the first piece being installed in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit...so it's hard to tell what the other pieces will be. We only know of one piece that is supposed to be in the show and it's a vacuum cleaner, so it'll be a surprise to see what else is in the show.

Here are some pics of us installing at MoMA:

GROW going up in the Design and the Elastic Mind gallery:

Sam on the ladder at MoMA:

SMIT putting GROW into MoMA gallery space:

Just outside the gallery space:

It's up and dusted and there are now some other pieces installed in the space as we are leaving:

We can't wait for the opening at the end of the month!
The Members' opening is Feb 19th and the public opening is Feb 24th, 2008.
Stay tuned!
-Sita.

Making panel for MoMA

2008-01-24T17:24:00.003-05:00

Here is what we have been doing since I returned from Amherst...

Testing the print-out of the leaves:

Testing the laminating of the leaves:

Old design vs. new design:

Possible grommets, rivets, stand-offs:

Possible copper rivet:

Wiping down the leaves:

Attaching the panels, using plastic rivets:

First 5 rows of GROW:

Getting set up to roll the panel onto a cardboard tube:

Coop and Kevin help start the panel on the tube:

Attaching the screws and grommets:

Moving along quickly now: (R to L) Sam, Kevin, Coop and Ben

Almost done:

Done. Ready to be packed up for MoMA:

Boxed up:

So there it is. Ready to take to MoMA.

We'll post more pics when it's installed!
-Sita.

original GROW panel redesign

2008-01-16T10:13:00.000-05:00

Sam has redesigned GROW from his original thesis design. These are a few options that he has been playing with for the redesign.

AI2V in Amherst, MA

2008-01-13T21:29:00.001-05:00

While Sam is redesigning the GROW panel for the MoMA exhibit, I am in Amherst, MA at an Advanced Invention to Venture (AI2V) with Sharon Ballard. Sharon is a Supercoach, and an entrepreneurial rockstar in general. I feel very fortunate to be able to attend this workshop while Sam and Ben are feverishly working away back in Brooklyn.

Some pics from the workshop:

MoMA responds to our images of GROW

2008-01-04T20:29:00.000-05:00

So, we sent in a few images of our working prototype of GROW to the curator and asst curator at the MoMA. Their feedback is that it doesn't look like the original design which they prefer. We are going to re-make a version of the original GROW for them to put in the Design and the Elastic Mind show. It's a bit of a setback, but luckily we have the time to make another version of the panel so we can still be in the show.

Soldering solar panels and cutting plastic

2007-12-20T16:17:00.000-05:00

We got the solar panels in and as you can see, we are all soldering away! We also got in the plastics for the leaves and have cut a whole bunch into our "leaf" shape.

Friends and Family support, provis patent

2007-12-12T20:30:00.000-05:00

Our family and friends have really come out in force to support us in getting our panel made for the MoMA! After doing some budget estimates, it looks like we will be able to get our panel made for sure with the support we have garnered over the holidays so far.

We will definitely continue to talk to our friends and family over the upcoming holidays.

We started a bank account for our newly formed LLC at Commerce Bank in downtown Brooklyn where all of our investment capital will be tallied.

Our GROW panel is under way. We have put orders in for solar panels and our support structure. We are also talking to our attorney about provisional patent on our new leaf design.

Things are moving!

Email sent out for F+F support

2007-11-16T18:19:00.000-05:00

Have gotten some initial feedback from the email that I sent out for family contributions. Our Aunt and Uncle in Vermont want to support us, and possibly Sam's landlord. A lot of Ben's family is interested also.

We will have to talk to people over the Thanksgiving holiday with Promissory Notes in hand.

Will let you know how it goes after Thanksgiving.
-Sita

LLC name, operating agreement, banking, friends and family email

2007-11-15T17:30:00.000-05:00

So we are nearly finished with our operating agreement. we are working with Dan Friedson on getting it complete by the 20th of Nov. He is also working with us on creating Promissory Notes for our F + F investors and Forgivable loan contracts.

Our official LLC name is: SMIT - Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology, LLC
It's long but will allow us to use SMIT without stepping on smit, llc's toes. Our attorney, Rick Hollingsworth submitted our articles of organization to the state of DE on Nov 13th, so we are an official LLC. We are going to have our operating agreement complete before the 20th and will submit it to Rick for the state of DE if it needs to be on record with them.

In order to open a new bank acct for our new LLC we have to get a bunch of paperwork from the state of DE and NY in order to be recognized as a business of good standing in NY state. I am ordering and faxing and applying for the necessary papers to be able to open a bank acct. We have chosen Commerce Bank. They are close, have a free small biz checking account so we won't lose money every month to bank handling fees like we did with our other bank.

Also, I am sending out our friends and family email tonight and will hopefully be able to announce lots of positive response to it soon.

-Sita.

LLC formation

2007-11-05T13:24:00.000-05:00

Sam, Ben and I have been working on how to set ourselves up as an LLC. We are talking with our attorneys, Kelly Talcott and Rick Hollingsworth at K&L Gates, also with Eric Cochran, an attorney who does mergers and acquisitions (a friend of the Howes family) as well as with an attorney in Pittsburgh, Daniel Friedson who is an old and dear friend of mine.

We are piling over other companies operating agreements as we form our own for smit as an llc and we are trying to come up with the best name for ourselves as an llc (smit, llc is taken). We want to have this handled before the MoMA show so that it's squared away, and also for our first round of friends and family investment (which we are starting in the next 2 wks).

We will post our new LLC name soon, and will hopefully be done with our operating agreement in the next week. Our goal is to have it done by Nov. 15th so we can receive checks from friends and family over the upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday.

More soon.
-Sita

LLC, MoMA, funding

2007-10-31T13:59:00.000-04:00

I was out sick last week with some kind of fever and cold thing, but am back this week, full speed ahead.

This week has been very busy with planning for MoMA. Ben, Sam and I had a meeting both Mon and Tues to structure out our timeline, work on finishing our Operating Agreement as an LLC and detail out parts for the MoMA panel.

I'll update again soon with more on the MoMA and our legal incorporation work.

-Sita

Back in Brooklyn

2007-10-17T15:43:00.000-04:00

Sam has returned safely after a few hiccups on his return flight (mad dash across Heathrow after a flight delay and lost baggage which then got returned to him 2 days late, having half of his things stolen). He has been in a few conversations with me about a stand he is taking for higher levels of communication and interaction design that works for everyone in the world as a result of his mishaps in travel. His trip to Rwanda was a big success and he was able to take over 1000 images of all aspects of their trip. After hearing about Africa and after many discussions about the state of the world, we are both getting more and more empassioned about what we are out to create on the planet through sustainable design.

MoMA update: I talked with Patricia Juncosa at the MoMA and she said that the space we would be installed will likely have 18 foot ceilings, so we are talking about the possibility of having 2 of our 4'x8' panels stacked vertically so that the viewer will be able to get an accurate feeling for what GROW would look like installed on the facade of a building. Sam and Ben have been talking at length about the design evolutions that have taken place and we are all excited about the design advancements that have led to the newest GROW iteration. We are going to need to talk to Kelly (patent lawyer) about the copyright issues about the integration of ready-made parts into our system and see what we will need to do to make sure that we are not infringing on anyone's designs.

Other news:
Prototyping has fully moved into the Navy Yard and our 2 prototyping interns have been working there with Sam and Ben every week. Brian Kerr is our Pratt intern and Raphael Zollinger is our ITP intern. James Daher had been working with us, but was not able to continue due to an increased work load at ITP, which we totally understand, and appreciate his honesty and frankness. Our marketing intern, Kenzan, has been in communication with Diego Portillo and his presentation is on a much more leisurely pace at this point, since our focus is on our prototype and the MoMA panel. However, Kenzan is going to have a presentation for us before the end of the semester, either way.

Lastly, the incubator space was redesigned before Sam left with myself, Diane and Sam talking about the space and how to reorganize it, since Deb has moved into her new office and new title as Director of Sustainability of Pratt. We have 3 teams that will be based in the Incubator space, so we reorganized it accordingly, allowing for space for the 2 assistants that Deb has kept on staff for her. The redesign looks like this:

Will share pics of what it looks like now, soon.

We got our high speed fan for prototype testing, but it was damaged. Sam fixed it and we gave it a "whirl." Seems ok, not as fast as we were hoping, though.

We also *finally* got our solar panels!

-Sita.

MoMA and Sam in Rwanda

2007-10-06T15:21:00.000-04:00

Sam made it safely to Rwanda and has been communicating via chat with me almost daily. It's weird to be in such regular contact with him knowing that he is so far away!

But there is some big news for us...we received an email today from Deb Johnson (Incubator Director) telling us that we have been asked to put GROW in the MoMA for a show titled Design and the Elastic Mind, curated by Paola Antonelli! We were going to be featured only in the catalog for the show, but now we are going to be in the show itself! We are so excited. But it means that we have a lot of work to do in very little time. The MoMA wants our piece to be installed by January 2008, so we are going to have to turn ourselves up to overdrive.

Our new business partner Ben has been an amazing addition to our team thus far. He has been working on some large scale renderings so that we can possibly include them in the show at the MoMA for an idea of what GROW looks like on a grander scale.

Also, we are trying to get ourselves incorporated while Sam is away, but it seems to be going sort of slowly. We are getting our name reserved as of now, and with the help of Rick Hollingsworth, will get ourselves incorporated as an LLC in the state of Delaware, doing business in NY state.

Some concerns that we have that we will need to address with Kelly and Rick (our lawyers at K&L Gates) are the issue of dessign patents, filing international utility patents, and making sure that we have every other protection available for ourselves to be in the MoMA.

I am working from home in Boston this week, but will be back in Brooklyn on Monday the 15th, when Sam will also have returned from his trip.

-Sita.

Sam in Rwanda, a day early! Prototyping, Interns, etc.

2007-10-02T19:28:00.000-04:00

So, Sam had a mix-up with his ticket. He is going to Rwanda to work on his freelance design project called "Lab on a Chip". Sam is the head designer on the project through the Incubator, so he is going there to do some design research and cultural research.

His ticket mix-up happened because the booking agency didn't correctly match his ticket to the person from Columbia University with whom he is traveling (Curtis Chin), so Sam had to drop everything (including a meeting with our interns scheduled for last Friday at 7:30pm in the SMIT Navy Yard space) and do a rushed pack job and head straight for the airport. As a result, he wasn't able to put in a few of our most recent prototyping orders nor finish a SolidWorks file for the Pratt student who is going to be milling a piece for us. Alas, he made the flight and all is fine.

I was able to get the orders in correctly, so our solar panels are finally going to be processed after a mix-up with SKU numbers at Sundance Solar and the Purchasing Dept computer debacle. Who knew that ordering things via Pratt's Purchasing Dept would be so laborious and time consuming? Thank goodness for Mitzi, our purchasing agent who has been working with us very patiently and now understands what we are doing. We are also going to get our high-speed fan next week for the "wind funnel" that will allow us to test our hybrid panel once the leaves are attached properly with the PV and wind devices. We're so close!

Interns:
Kenzan's update was very general. He has been struggling understanding the best way to glean information from the Boston Public Library - Business Library (Kirstein). We have pointed him toward Diego Portillo again who has over 8 years of experience doing exactly what are asking him to do. He says that his next update will be much closer to what we are looking for. We are excited to see what he can find out for us.

Because of the flight mix-up with Sam, the ITP/NYU intern meeting sort of fell apart. The interns had trouble getting past the guards at the Brooklyn Navy Yard entrance, so we rescheduled them to meet with Ben this Wed (tomorrow) at 7:30pm. I'll update how that goes once it has happened.

-Sita.

Kenzan's Second Presentation: Oct 1st, 7:30pm

2007-09-25T14:25:00.000-04:00

Kenzan will make his mid-term presentation to me and Ben this coming Monday in the Incubator at 7:30pm. He has been in touch with my friend, Diego Portillo, a market researcher and business analyst.

He will give us an update on how he is progressing with the numerical analyses we have been requesting of him for our future venture capital presentations down the line.

More after the presentation/update.

-Sita.

Kenzan's Second Presentation

2007-09-21T14:03:00.000-04:00

We scheduled a second presentation with Kenzan Tsutakawa-Chinn for the first week of October. Sam will be in Rwanda, but Ben and I will be able to give Kenzan feedback.

Will get details of the presentation and post later.

Planning Meeting : 9/18/07

2007-09-19T13:03:00.001-04:00

Sam, Ben and I met last night as a follow-up to last week's Big Dreams meeting and hammered out, in good agenda-ed fashion, the details of what will happen while Sam is in Rwanda from the 29th of Sept to the 14th of Oct.

We reviewed a few things from our last meeting, then moved on to the new business of planning out how to get the most out of working with our interns from ITP. We are working with two 2nd year ITP students, Raphael Zollinger and James Daher. We are trying to schedule a meeting for us and them with their advisor, Jamie Allen, our systems engineer for Friday the 28th of Sept at 7:30pm. Also, we still have Kenzan Tsutakawa-Chinn, who is a Pratt 2nd year grad student, working with us until around the first week of October. We finalized a date for him to present his final Marketing presentation to us and will see if that date and time works for him.

We discussed in great detail how to build the wind funnel and also how to finalize the testing device for our wind element. We are hoping that one of our interns will spend time working on and adding functionality to the wind funnel. Also, our work-study student, Ebbin Martin is finishing up milling the last pieces needed for the wind element testing device, and we are happy that it feels like all the pieces are finally coming together for us to be able to get the testing of the wind device, the building of the wind funnel and the final build-out of our first working prototype in place at long last.

The Pratt purchasing department has been having computer issues, so we've had to hand-in a vendor list for the 3rd time and also alter some of the vendors who have never been able to be reached. Due to this we have had MAJOR delays in placing and receiving orders, but have actually been able to squeeze some in here and there between the mishaps in their office.

Sam and Ben are going to meet again this weekend to hopefully have a chance to move the prototype over to the Navy Yard.

Our next meeting before Sam leaves is the 25th of September at 7:30pm.

-Sita.

Tues, Big Dreams Meeting

2007-09-11T23:05:00.000-04:00

We met to talk about what our Big Dreams are for SMIT and our partnership. We went to Chez Oskar and sat outside which was nice and quiet (amazingly, being on the streets of Brooklyn).

Our ideas revolved around what we want our business structure to be, what we see our future products being, what we envision the company to stand for, and what we envision the future of green technology being. Although I'd like to, I won't go into detail for company privacy reasons.

The other thing we talked about was what Ben and I will be working on while Sam is out of the country. Sam is going to Rwanda for work on a probono freelance project he's doing. He'll be gone for 2 weeks doing design research and data collection there. While he is gone, Ben and I plan on incorporating SMIT as an LLC acting as a C-corp. I will be asking and talking with my lawyer friend, Dan, and with our atty's office to make this process as smooth and economical as possible.

We also spent a great deal of time talking about our new website. Mainly we discussed how to go about improving it for our final version, how we plan to use it for the future, and what kinds of information are important to have on it.

We also decided that we need to move our working prototype out of Sam's studio and into the Navy Yard space that's designated for the Incubator teams. This will ease in having easier access for Ben and wil also allow our new interns from NYU/ITP to be able to enter and leave without Sam needing to be there. However, it also brings up additional issues about privacy and confidentiality. We have to be really careful about who can see our prototype and how it gets worked on while in a public space. We are still discussing how this will work and what precautions we'll need to take. More on this as it unfolds.

The last thing we discussed was our timeline for the project and how we will need to move foreward to keep in line with our NCIIA grant. Since we didn't get the check from the NCIIA until October of last year, we are requesting to have our timeframe extended (we actually did put an 18 month timeline into our grant application, but I think they saw it as a 12 month one). We are hoping to be complete with our ptototype and the NCIIA grant and be out of the incubator by late spring 2008.

Our next meeting is next week: 9/18/07 at 7:30pm at our office at Pratt. And this time we will have an agenda. (Freeform is nice, and dreaming is nice...but I like to have bullet points here and there!)

-Sita.

Ben Howes to be brought on as a partner

2007-09-10T23:03:00.000-04:00

Sam and I have been talking at great length with Sam's long time friend, Ben Howes about bringing him on as a partner on SMIT. We are now in action about it and have set a date to have a planning meeting and do the things needed to incorporate with Ben on the team.

Ben studied Architecture at Pratt and graduated in 2006 and is now working at an Architectural firm in Manhattan called Graftworks.

You'll hear more about Ben very soon...

-Sita.

Ben, Ebbin, Sam prototyping meeting

2007-08-21T15:07:00.000-04:00

Sam, Ebbin and Ben met at the studio and:
- Made a list for Mitzi of all the things that we will need to order through our grant for the next part of our prototyping
- posted list on google docs
- Sam will send email to Mitzi in Pratt purchasing

Ebbin and Sam prototyping in studio

2007-08-16T18:47:00.000-04:00

What they worked on: (most of it is proprietary so I'll have to be vague about it)

Designs of wind element...
- designed a bracket for the wind element.
- made up a list of materials to use to build bracket (proprietary design)

Ebbin will take on and complete the milling of a piece for the testing of the wind element.

Next meeting, 8/20/07

Leaving for UK, France, Turkey

2007-07-30T15:29:00.000-04:00

I will be leaving for 2 weeks to go to a wedding in Turkey via London and Paris. Sam will be working in the studio primarily and getting our purchasing power capabilities squared away (4th or 5th attempt) through the Pratt purchasing department. It's been a long laborious process but hopefully by the time I get back it will be squared away.

It's amazing how much we have done with such little money (although some of the important stuff was out of pocket, to be paid back from the grant) and ingenuity!

Look forward to touring Byzantium...Constantinople...Istanbul!
-Sita

7/25/07 Incubator meeting 11:45-1pm

2007-07-25T17:08:00.000-04:00

things we talked about:
- purchase orders for our prototype/grant, mitzi
- ben partnership
- incorporation, legal advice
- accounting advice
- spn advice from 2 CEOs
- linda's competition in october
- investor's circle?
- nciia, reworking budget to be able to pay down patent
- matthiah connection at trina solar (china), shekhar connection at tata power (india)
- cleaning shelf above sam's desk
- me away in august
- moma, paola antonelli

diane:
- woman from reno gave critical feedback on her biz plan, but gave actionable advice: sequencing wrong, timeline off
- not working with same advisor at rainforest alliance, now under rick hilton
- father head of cooperative (1 million members) in thailand

PDI:
- deb interviewed for head of center for sust design on pratt campus
- LOC going well
- anyone to donate to LOC?
- dumpster project on holding pattern next 4 mos.