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A few weeks ago, walking out of a bar in Chicago, George Aye felt a sense of hope for the first time since Donald Trump took office. Aye and his partner Sara Cantor are cofounders of Greater Good Studio, a design studio focused on social impact. Like everyone else working in the space in the U.S. in 2025whether at nonprofits or impact-driven businesses or government agenciestheyve spent the last two months stunned by the Trump administrations barrage of actions aligned with Project 2025. Trumps chaotic approach was deliberately designed to overwhelm opponents, with announcements timed to happen so quickly that they’re hard to track and difficult to know how to respond. Aye and Cantor wanted to avoid despair and paralysisand they knew others were feeling the same way. That led to an event they dubbed Angry Hour: the Happy Hour for Pissed-Off Optimists. [Images: courtesy Greater Good Studio] More than 80 people showed up. I think either thats a sign of how bad things are, or how much I think we might all need this, says Aye. This week, they partnered with AIGA, the professional design organization, to host the same event in Brooklyn, bringing together dozens more people. Other cities will follow, beginning with Philadelphia and Austin. The concept is simple: People meet in person, get a drink, and talk freely about the current challenges and what it will take to keep going. Theres no specific agenda, just a space to connect. (In the case of Brooklyn, that space was a distillery in an old industrial complex on the waterfront.) Part of the inspiration came from the fact that people are increasingly isolated. As a culture, weve been moving towards less and less contact with other humans, says Cantor, whod recently read an Atlantic article called The Anti-Social Century. Theres a million drivers of that. But I feel that in the course of my life, and see that with my children. Just feeling like, wow, I really miss people. And its not healthy for me or anyone to be in antisocial mode. Connection is even more important as the political landscape shifts. I feel like a lot of the good guidance in the days and weeks after the election was to hold your people close, and stay in community, she says. That is how historically groups on the wrong side of oppression have been able to maintainhold your people close. I went to the Angry Hour in Brooklyn, and it was clearly cathartic for people to vent. Everyone I spoke with had stories about how their work had already been affected. One freelance designer told me that new projects started disappearing in November after the election. An industrial designer working on medical devices said her company recently had to lay off half of its staff because of a loss in funding. A designer working on environmental justice projects said that her team had been told to reapply for grants without using words like equity, and that they were now trying to figure out whether state and local funding could keep the projects alive. Someone else told me that his nonprofit was seeing fewer donations because the Trump era had led donors to focus more on their own problems. Some of the people I spoke to said they felt powerless, and one person told me that he planned to pivot to a different type of project. But others were angry and motivated to double down on the work that they believe is critically important, whether related to healthcare or climate or education. They fit the mold of what Aye and Cantor call “pissed-off optimists”people who are both righteously angry about society’s problems and simultaneously hopeful (without being naively optimistic). As Aye explained in a recent blog post: A Pissed-Off Optimist is someone who sees the worlds injustices with clear eyes but views an equitable future as both necessary and possible. Theyre keenly aware of systemic problems but remain undeterred by the difficult work ahead. They take the long view on social change, channeling their rage into community rather than despair or cynicism. They are someone who can hold two contradictory truths simultaneously: that human suffering is real and deep, and that we possess the collective power to create something better. At the event, nametags came with spaces to fill in what made you pessimistic and/or optimistic. Once you get that anger out, it was good to be like, OK, whats bringing you hope? Cantor says. Because AIGA had partnered on the Brooklyn event, most of the people who showed up were designers. But Greater Good aims in its work to bring together people in the social sector and design world who might not normally interact. And the team takes a broad view of who a “pissed-off optimist” might be. “You could be someone who professionally identifies as an activist or organizer, a profit leader, etcetera,” Cantor says. “Or you could just work at a corporate job and be pissed.” Unlike a meeting of activists designed to organize a specific strategic response, the purpose of Angry Hour is just to help build connectionsrelationships that are crucial for moving work forward later. We often work on designing new systems, and something that Ive seen over many, many years is that systems are just made of people,” Cantor says. “And the relationships between people in the system are how the systems are made, broken, and changed.” Like Aye, the first meetup made her more hopeful, though it’s a long-term hope. “I do believe that we will come out of this time,” she says. “And when we do come out on that other side, were going to need the infrastructure that were building now. Were going to need the relationships. Were going to need the connections. That building of infrastructure is an act of hope that there will be another side. And that when we get there, well know who to call and bring them along.”
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E-Commerce
This nondescript piece of home decor is about the size of a narrow bookshelf, and it looks like a vertical soundbar speaker. In reality, it’s a new home fitness deviceand it hides a gym’s worth of workout machines. Amp is a $1,995 home fitness device that streamlines the clunkiness of a cable-based workout machine into the form of a thin, wall-mounted home accessory. It’s now available to pre-order for $99. Just six feet tall and one foot deep, Amp consists of a vertical mounted bar with a movable arm that pivots off the side and serves as the main workout interface. Unlike the typical gym machine with a stack of weights attached to a cable, Amp’s single cable interface connects to a magnetic resistance motor and electrical driver and can be adjusted to different heights to accommodate everything from bicep curls to squats to lunges. [Photo: Amp] Amp was founded by Shalom Meckenzie, a fitness enthusiast and tech entrepreneur. In 2020, he merged his betting software company SBTech with the sports betting company DraftKings for an undisclosed sum. Driven by the impact of losing his father when he was just 18, Meckenzie knew he wanted his next venture to focus on wellness and fitness. He scoured the market and came upon the idea of creating a workout machine that was more accessible than the large, complex and often ugly devices found in gyms. The starting point for Amp’s fitness device was to build something that “would look like a premium, luxury product,” Meckenzie says. “Not like a fitness device but more something like furniture that will blend into any house.” [Photo: Amp] This is a particular challenge for the multi-functional workout device known as a cable crossover machine, which Amp is intended to replicate, and is among one of the most used devices in any gym. Users can do a wide variety of exercises on this machine, but it’s often an elevator-sized metal cage strung through with cables, pulleys, and large stacks of weights. The solution would need the versatility of a crossover machine without the clunkinessMeckenzie wanted Amp to sit in people’s living rooms, not get tucked away in their basements, while still being useful. “We’ve looked into all of our competitors and we chose one thing. We said we don’t want to look like any of them,” Meckenzie says. [Photo: Amp] About three years ago, he convened a team to devise a different approach. They holed up in a villa for two weeks and started designing prototypes out of cardboard. “I think we built about 25 different mock-ups,” says Shahar Cohen, Amp’s CEO. At the end of this campout design sprint the team members voted on their favorite version of the device. Their selection was unanimous. This prototype became Amp. Amp’s magnetic motor has between five and 100 pounds of resistance, which may seem low for those accustomed to straining against hundreds of pounds of metal weight. Meckenzie says the team designed Amp to optimize how a user works out, not how much weight they can pull. It operates on three different modes that alter the way weight and resistance are used in any given exercise. A fixed mode uses the same amount of resistance for both pulling and releasing the cable. A rubber band-like mode increases the resistance the longer a user pulls on the cable. And “eccentric” mode adds more resistance as the user returns the cable back to its starting point, meaning a 20-pound curl will feel like 30 pounds during the release. [Photo: Amp] With custom-built motors, integrated artificial intelligence, and a companion smartphone app, the device can mimic some of the most common machines found in gyms, and also create entirely new types of workouts based on the needs of the user. “We have a lot of opportunity for different types of resistance that you actually cannot perform with standard mechanical systems,” says Cohen. About 1,000 of Amp’s fitness devices have shipped to customers and installed so far, mostly in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, and the company expects to ship to other regions in the coming months. The full $1,995 cost includes shipping as well as installation, which Cohen compares to mounting a television. Hitting a relatively low price point was important to Meckenzie, who developed the idea for Amp during the pandemic when people were buying up smart home fitness devices like Peloton, which sell for between $1,495 and $2,495. “For me, it wasn’t interesting to sell a device for $5,000 or $10,000 which will not be accessible to people,” Meckenzie says. “I wanted to do something that has a big impact.”
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E-Commerce
As the geographic center of Indianapolis, Monument Circle is in many ways the heart of the city. The 284-foot Soldiers and Sailors Monument towering in the middle is a beloved local landmark, and the plaza and fountain around its base has been a gathering place since it opened in 1902. But the way most people experience it is through the window of a car. Monument Circle is technically a traffic circle, which means the center of the city is little more than a place for cars to drive. The past couple of years, however, have shown another possibility. Since 2023, from June through November, part of the traffic circle has been closed to cars and converted into Spark on the Circle, a pop-up park that has activated the space and brought tens of thousands of pedestrians downtown. Created by the nonprofit art and design organization Big Car Collaborative in partnership with several local agencies, Spark on the Circle turns a quarter of the circle into an activated public space, with Astroturf covering the roadway, shade structures, games, vendors, and stages for performances. Now the landscape architects who designed the park are working on a plan that could make the pop-up permanent. Merritt Chase, a firm based in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, has been involved in shaping Monument Circle for several years through its work on the downtown resiliency strategy launched by Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett in 2022. One plan arising from the strategy calls for a renewed focus on improving walkability downtown and creating more public space for an emerging residential population. Spark on the Circle, and Merritt Chase’s design for it, was created to turn Monument Circle into a destination rather than something most people simply drive past. Historic Monument Circle: Soldiers and Sailors Monument, circa 1950 [Photo: W.H. Bass Photo Co., Indiana Historical Society] There’s been so much history there, protests and demonstrations, parades, festivals, and just the everyday life of the city that passed through that space. There have always been questions around the identity of the circle, the use of the circle, the future potential of the circle, says Chris Merritt, cofounder of Merritt Chase. Over the last couple of years, the temporary park we’ve put out there has definitely been a successful case study of new ways to reimagine and use the circle. So we’re building on that to continue to think about what a future permanent plan might be for the circle. [Rendering: courtesy Merritt Chase] Merritt Chase has just been awarded an 18-month fellowship to further explore ideas for redesigning or reusing Monument Circle. The firm is one of 10 fellows supported by Emerson Collective, a philanthropy started by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs. The 2025 cohort of fellows, announced this week, is focused on local leadership and community-centered place-based work, according to Patrick D’Arcy, senior director of fellowships at Emerson Collective. We really respect [Merritt Chases] community-centered approach. They believe that successful public projects require more than just really beautiful design; they also require community trust and collaboration and relationship building, says D’Arcy. Their vision for a more utilized and joyful Monument Circle is really inspiring. [Photo: courtesy Merritt Chase] A circle for the city Preparations for this summer’s iteration of Spark on the Circle are still underway, but its expected to open in June. Megan Vukusich is director of the city’s Department of Metropolitan Development, and though she says there is currently no funding or official plan in place to make the pop-up park a permanent one, the visitation numbers suggest strong community interest. According to a report from Big Car Collective, the 2024 iteration of the park saw more than 71,000 visitors, with more than 400 on an average day. More than 80% of visitors spent 30 minutes or more at the park, and 30% went to a restaurant or did shopping downtown after leaving. [Photo: courtesy Merritt Chase] We don’t want people to come and snap a quick photo. We’d like them to stay, maybe check out some of the local shops. These metrics are showing us that it is having an impact on the larger community, Vukusich says. Having activations such as Spark gives us a little bit more insight into what the community is looking for. It’s also a reflection of the changing shape of downtown Indianapolis. Like many city centers, it was deeply affected by the pandemic, with many companies shuttering offices or allowing employees to work remotely. But downtown development is coming back, and officials estimate more than $9 billion worth of projects are in the pipeline, including a convention center expansion and a new 40-story hotel tower. This is happening as downtown’s residential population has grown to more than 29,000, more than a 46% increase since 2010. [Photo: courtesy Merritt Chase] Merritt Chase has two other ongoing projects that feed into this growth. One is a pedestrian conversion of three blocks leading up to the convention center; the other will add a new park to the site of a historic downtown food hall, with construction beginning this summer. Spark on the Circle is the pop-up version of these larger projects. This is a way of leveraging a lot of that private investment and connecting it all across the city to create better everyday livable experiences, Merritt says. Projects like these and the way they connect will give more of a reason to not just visit but hopefully encourage more people to live downtown. Though some local commenters have bemoaned any street closures, downtown Indianapolis has a very tight downtown grid with city blocks that are smaller than those in other big cities. The closure of part of the circle, or even the entire circle, would require only a short driving detour. [Photo: courtesy Merritt Chase] Merritt Chase will use its 18-month Emerson Collective fellowship to expand its community outreach, research, and planning for the future of downtown centered around Monument Circle, using Spark on the Circle as one of the primary use cases. Chase Merritt cofounder Nina Chase says the 2024 visitation numbers show there’s a big appetite for this kind of unconventional public space in the city. That’s been really lovely to see, she says. We as landscape architects, we think yes that’s what you should do, but sometimes you never know. So it’s good to see it in action. Merritt says turning the pop-up park into something more permanent is one option, but it’s not the predetermined goal of the plan Merritt Chase will produce. They’re more interested in finding out how people in the city want to use the space and then designing around that. Whether it’s parklike and still open for cars or completely closed to cars, I think that’s still to be determined through lots of conversations with folks downtown and residents.
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E-Commerce
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