ALEXANDER VELAISE

“Transparency is a key catalyst toward a sustainable fashion industry. With transparent information on how, where and by whom a product was made, customers are empowered to make informed decisions, ensuring that everything they buy is designed, manufactured and handled with responsibility for the people and the environment. The more informed customers become, the more pressure they are able to put on companies to act sustainably.

This is why we decided to bring together the future generation, thought leaders and change makers with tech, sustainability and fashion expertise for a day full of ideation sessions with the aim of presenting scenario solutions for a transparent fashion future. We believe that if we collaborate across the industry and use new technologies such as blockchain and AI, we can push the fashion industry toward becoming fully transparent.

Representatives from various companies and organizations such as Patagonia, Reformation, Nike, Sustainable Apparel Coalition, Studio 189, IBM, The Current, BCG, iCash and Microsoft participated in different workshops and addressed topics such as:

-How we can set a standard and develop clear labels within the industry, so consumers can evaluate and compare garments on the market.

-How to use the data embedded in a product through a digital label with the use of for example blockchain and RFID.

-How to help customers understand the full complexity in all steps of manufacturing a product, and educate them in how they can reduce their environmental impact by taking care of their products.”

-H&M Group

For more Information, please visit:

https://about.hm.com/en/media/news/general-news-2018/HM-group-Transparency-Hack.html

All retail companies hide behind ‘made in’ tags that provide little information and exacerbates ‘country bias.’ We created this project instigated by Prada Group to shape a sustainable digital future for the retail industry.  TRACE uses Apple’s ARKit2 to scan any instore article, identify it and push a virtual tag to the buyer’s phone. The tag curates an individual environmental or ethical story about the garment, learning about what issues drive different individual’s purchasing decisions and showcasing what you care about at the point of purchase. TRACE aims to encourage ethical and sustainable supply chains by empowering consumers.

We have been working with H&M Group to further this concept, as well as others, with the mission of creating a sustainable future for the fashion industry. Information about the 2018 H&M Group Transparency Hack can be found here: https://about.hm.com/en/media/news/general-news-2018/HM-group-Transparency-Hack.html.

Partners: Samantha Monge Kaser and Vincent Caruso

Architecture is inherently inflexible, permanent and expensive. I designed cheap, modular brackets, whose forms remain unchanged and whose functions can be clipped in. These brackets are connected by glass panels, so that the configuration of the house can fit to a low-income family’s personal needs. These houses can be reassembled or added to as family’s grow and change, and are flat-packed for delivery and easily self-assembled with instructions.

In order to prototype this configuration on a lot in New Haven for recently homeless families, these modular units were fit to the dimensions of New Haven vernacular homes. 13 houses comprising 24 families or individuals were radially arranged around shared yards in order to give a gradient of public and private space for each tenant.

A ferry dock will soon be added to the Bronx’s Soundview Peninsula, a vibrant park that experiences many different user groups. Local vendors, who sell food and products to park visitors, will need new space to both cook and sell. Conversely, the new ferry stop will mean an inflow of thousands of commuters, increasing the market for local vendors as well as the need for commuter facilities.

A dock was extended from the road to the ferry pickup point, with the untouched park to the east and space for the market on the west. Along the east side of the dock, buried under the park, lies the commuter facilities such as ticket offices, bathrooms, meeting spaces and waiting rooms. Inside of the volume of the dock are 10 incubator kitchens that rent time and space to local cooks. These kitchens have cold storage for rent behind them, and they open up to the western market. The market is comprised of gridded holes on a concrete slab, where vendors can insert their pre-owned EZ UP tents or attach fabric to the top of provided poles. Every day, the market would grow and shrink, leading to ever-changing configurations.

This industry analysis draws primarily on company SEC filings to understand and analyze the competitive strategies of JetBlue Airways Corporation (JetBlue) and Spirit Airlines, Inc. (Spirit). In the increasingly consolidated domestic airline industry, these two carriers occupy similar niches. Nevertheless, each pursues a distinct strategy to position itself competitively in the market. Here, we compare and contrast JetBlue’s “affordable but enjoyable” value proposition with Spirit’s “ultra-low-cost” strategy using financial and operational data.

Partners: Ann Tobias, Chris Lash, Kanishka Sahni, Weiyu Wang

The Yale Design + Innovation Club is the second largest club at the Yale School of Management, with members representing half of the MBA student body. This year, we have organized and lead design thinking workshops, presentations and prototyping sessions. Club leaders also attended a day-long prototyping workshop hosted by Google.

As a first year leader of the Yale Design+Innovation Club, I have been organizing the 8th annual MBA Innovation Summit. MBA Students from Wharton, Columbia and Yale will come together on February 15th in New York City’s Downtown Dream Hotel for a full day of presentations by innovative industry leaders, hands-on design thinking workshops and interdisciplinary panels.

“The Design + Innovation Club is a function-oriented club that crosses all industries. The club educates and empowers SOM students to apply design thinking to business challenges and catalyze innovative solutions. Whether students are going into corporate life, the government, or starting their own venture, understanding how to generate ideas in a constructive and iterative process is a valuable skill.

Club members come from a whole variety of backgrounds. We encourage all students to join us in creating a culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration. “

-Yale D+I Website

As New York rushes to fill every spatial void left uninhabited, few unused spaces remain truly unused in the city. The largest of these spaces are cemeteries. This project seeks to reimagine cemeteries as destinations.

The Evergreen cemetery was once a must-see attraction. Tourists would use the subway to plan an all-day excursion in the Evergreen and its surrounding Ridgewood Reservoir, which supplied water to Brooklyn. Nowadays, the cemetery is a little-known hotspot for birds, boasting over 150 species sightings. Few people can be spotted on the ground level of the cemetery, though millions of people pass above or below in one of Brooklyn’s business subway intersections, Broadway Junction.

Two nodes were selected as catalysts for redefining a blurred boundary between the urban fabric and the cemetery. A partnership between Cornell Ornithology and the Regional Planning Association would spark these catalysts into action, creating research campuses and community facilities for the cemetery and the surrounding five neighborhoods. These facilities were designed with hybrid typologies for bird research and survival and human work and leisure.

Partner: Kassandra Leiva

As we have seen the Svalbard Doomsday Vault, the ability for rock vaults to provide failsafe protection against natural disasters has been compromised due to global warming. This is a design for an international seed vault on Yale Campus’s Science Hill that can react to a natural disaster. Classrooms, laboratories and an auditorium collide to form a courtyard. During a natural disaster, seeds would be released into a stream that would fill the courtyard. Seeds would grow into plants and their seed could be stored in the future.

Pedestrians movement was observed and mapped on one New York City block. I made a prothetic out of a white oxford shirt in order to interrupt the natural flow of movement on Orchard Street .  I mapped how people changed their paths based on my fixed gaze, which was facilitated by the headpiece.  My movements were made clear with the arm-attachments and people were faced with snap decisions based on safety, politeness and personal space.

Our hypothesis that pedestrian paths change direction and velocity when confronted with the prosthetic was tested and verified. The way in which my body responds to the prosthetic (and vice-versa) influenced every pedestrian on the street.

These projects explore form at a variety of scales.

These projects explore functionality within tight constraints or without limitation.

These projects explore the structural potentials, limits and aesthetics of certain materials.