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Weeble-Wobble: Deployable Urban Shade

Ithaca, 2021

An interactive and deployable urban shading device.

Drone image of deployable shading structure

Drone image of deployable shading structure

Designed in collaboration with Street Lab, NYC, Weeble-Wobble is a deployable shading device for urban conditions. Urban streets are hot places in the summer, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods that tend to have higher levels of development and less investment in street trees or other sources of shade.

Street Lab is a non-profit that deploys education and community engagement programs to under-served neighborhoods. Weeble-Wobble is designed to be an engaging seating installation that also provides shade to support these community programs.

The project is made up of a CNC milled weighted plywood base that offers stability for the overhead canopy and is profiled to allow the user to rock and swivel the canopy. The canopy is a cantilevered paraboloid, that is discretized to match the milled pattern of the plywood base. The canopy’s cantilever allows it to shade itself, or be turned to cast shade away from its base, enabling the shading of tables that other programs can be sited on.

Project Team:
Alexander Kobald (project lead)
Jordan Young (design & fabrication)
Cait McCarthy (design & fabrication)
Allan Mezhibovsky (research assistant)
Jane Jackson (research assistant)
J. Meejin Yoon (principal investigator)

Overhead rendering of proposed street installation

Weeble-Wobble is designed to be deployed in clusters, allowing the shade cast by the cantilevered canopy to be grouped and provide enough shelter for larger education programs underneath.

This prototype has also been designed to carry a small suite of sensors to measure the installations impact. The sensor arrangement allows the measure of air temperature above and below the canopy, as well as a ring of sensors that collect information on the installations impact on shading throughout the day.

The current prototype has six sensors, one above and below the canopy, and four in a ring around the base.

The sensors above and below the canopy measure the immediate impact of providing shade. In this trial deployment the shade device reduced the air temperature significantly.

The four sensors around the installation show the impact of providing shade at different times of the day. This is information that can help measure the most effective times of the shade deployment as well as the cumulative impact of shading surfaces that would otherwise absorb heat throughout the day.

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