Kickstarter

This morning at 9:00AM, our Kickstarter drive came to a successful close. We're thrilled with the results of the past thirty days, especially knowing that well over two hundred of you joined to help build the Uni. 

To our Backers: thank you! Sit back and relax. We'll be sending you an individual note, which will include details about rewards you selected and acknowledgment of your donation. Please contact us anytime: info@theuniproject.org.

To all: follow the story of the Uni at www.theuniproject.org, where you can stay connected via Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and even an old-fashioned email list here. MIT grad students Alex and David are hard at work, inventing and fabricating in the shop. The Uni Librarians are accepting donations of used children's picture books, poetry, and reference items. Exciting new partnerships are in the works. There's much to tell, and we aim to keep it succinct and engaging over at www.theuniproject.org.

A special note for book lovers needing more room in your apartments: this week we'll launch the first Uni Book Drive! We are gearing up to accept your donations of used books in Boston and New York. Details will go up shortly at www.theuniproject.org. Please email us if you would like to get involved.

Thank you! The Uni is intended to be a practical tool that conveys stubborn idealism about what can be achieved in our cities around books and learning. We are excited to be embarking on this journey with you. We're pleased to have done it here on Kickstarter. See you on the street.

Dear Friends of the Uni,

We are thrilled and honored that you reached out, gave, and brought the Uni to life. As of early this morning, the project broke the $20K Kickstarter threshold, and we can now build. You did it.

Whether you gave for love of books, public space, or simply the great city of New York, we are floored by your support. The city has given so much to our family over the years, and we are creating the Uni as a way to give back.

It’s amazing to think about the forks in the road which brought us to this point. We want to put the Uni in the path of other New Yorkers, young and old, who are contemplating where to go with their own lives. We hope it will inspire them to pursue something in their dreams, exactly the way New York has inspired us.

See you on the street,

Sam and Leslie

To our 150+ backers: thank you for joining us to create the Uni. Many of you have been working hard to spread the word, and we appreciate that, especially in these closing days. We've got ten days left to raise a remaining $5K, at which point the funding is unlocked and we launch. If we fall short, we go home with nothing. Kickstarter is not a traditional approach, but we like the decisiveness. Please recommend us to a friend or colleague who might donate (http://kck.st/q8K69t). We'll get there!

We're excited to build the Uni structure and also the institution behind it, which will staff, support, and run programs. In weak economic times, a new institution needs to be lean and effective. In our field, that means we need to be a catalyst and a value-adding partner for existing nonprofit institutions already doing good work. Our business model is to create a staffed, insured, attractive platform for reaching the urban public, which can be shared by all sorts of partners involved in education and learning who otherwise would lack capacity to "go public" in this way. Leslie wrote a post here about calls we've already received from organizations who want to use the Uni as shared infrastructure.

Starting today and through next week, we'll be on the ground in New York, activating existing relationships and making new ones in preparation for our future here. In keeping with the methodology of the Uni, we're going outside, near where you already are, so you can stop by and meet us! We have two prototype book cubes and "cones" in tow, and we'll grab a park bench in these locations, starting this evening:

• FRI 8/5 5:30-7PM Union Square near playground
  
• SAT 8/6 9-11AM Prospect Park near Grand Army Plaza
  
• SUN 8/7 12-2PM Central Park near Met
  

We'll post more detailed coordinates live on Twitter and our home page. (www.theuniproject.org) We'd love to meet you, answer questions, and show you a cube.

Finally, back at the MIT shop, Alex and Costanza have been working on perfecting the rubber mold for the Uni cones that function as covers/seats. These will be made of Smooth-Cast 65D liquid plastic supplied by Reynolds Advanced Materials in Brighton, MA, an amazing resource for all kinds of creative projects. As soon as we hit our funding goal, we'll put in the order and be ready to spin!

Thanks for reading and supporting. Please help us in these last few days by encouraging one friend or colleague to support the Uni. See you in the park!

Lots of progress on multiple fronts here at the Uni. We'll keep it brief and break it down by category:

Kickstarter

Two weeks in and two weeks to go. We're up to $12,000 and growing steadily, especially in the small donation range. During week two, we shifted focus from our address book to reaching new folks through press, blogs, and other outlets. We'll continue on, and we appreciate your help spreading the word.

For those of you who have already donated, a special word of thanks. Your support gives the team confidence about our work and optimism about the ideals that got us into this. The Uni is intended to be a practical tool that conveys stubborn idealism about what can be achieved in our cities around books and learning. Your contributions are building the Uni and stoking that idealism. We excited to be embarking on this journey with you.

The Library World

We've been rapidly reconnecting with library people who we met in our Storefront Library, and we're making new friends too. Here's a terrific article about the Uni in Library Journal and more library-related Uni coverage this week via Jan Holmquist, Library Bazaar, Bilingual Librarian, Alternative Library Spaces, Incunabular Illumination, and For the love of bookshops.

We've also been fielding requests from people who want the Uni in their city. After we build and make a successful Uni 1.0, we think the Uni can be replicated, but that's a bridge to cross later. Here's a call for the Uni in a Chicago neighborhood.

Design/Fabrication

In order to stay on schedule, we decided to order an initial batch of materials to build the base structure. The guys have leapt on the boards and pushed fabrication forward. See new images of freshly cut, white Uni cubes stacked eight feet high. 

We've also developed a great working relationship with Reynolds Advanced Materials in Brighton, MA, where we will soon order Smooth-Cast 65D liquid plastic, to be used in a zero-waste roto-molding fabrication process for the covers and seating elements. The plastic is our single biggest expense, and we're waiting until we get closer to our fundraising goal to pull the trigger.

In the mean time, Costanza and Alex at MIT have fine-tuned their DIY roto-mold machine. A new program for the controller will allow them to make the seating lighter weight, more user-friendly to lift and carry, and save materials overall. Below is movie from the shop showing the machine at work.

Books

Uni Librarian Chelsea Gunn, who will be joined by other librarians next week, has embarked on the intake process for donated books. Read more about our vision for the book collection. Over the weekend, this same link will also include our re-tooled online book catalog and wish list, which will go live shortly.

That's all for now. Thanks for your support. To stay in touch between Kickstarter updates, here are links to Uni sources updated daily:

Twitter: @findtheuni
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/uniproject
Web: www.theuniproject.org

We wrote most of this post before recent events in Oslo, and then suspended our fundraising outreach for a time while our thoughts were with Norwegian friends. We're returning to work, but we are not turning the page. All cities rely on a special kind of public trust necessary for living so closely together, but in Oslo (and all Norway perhaps) this trust runs especially deep. We have always admired this and sought it for our own community. It is incredibly painful when this trust is broken and children are victims. It makes us determined to build cities where this kind of harm is even more rare. Peace.

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This has been an exhilarating week on Kickstarter for us, hearing from old friends and making new ones, building our way towards the all-important funding goal that will unlock your donations and let us make the Uni. We're into it, and we hope the Kickstarter experience has been good for you too. Let us know.

You leapt out of the gate, and we're already 50% of the way there in less than a week. Thank you for backing us early; the momentum is key. This coming week, we'll be focused on introducing the Uni on blogs and to the press. Know someone we should chat with? Drop us a line.

The dedication of the guys in the MIT shop is full-on. Temperatures were high nineties outside and even hotter inside. Alex and David have identified a great new material choice, which will reduce the weight and cost of the cubes, while making them durable and weatherproof. And the material is white. Below is a movie of a test cut of the new material on the CNC machine. These guys love big machines that are controlled by computers. And they love them even more when making something for the public like the Uni.

Want more? Here's a link to 90+ images from the MIT shop and studio via Flickr, where you can see the work taking shape, included a steel frame being welded to hold the Uni in place, top and bottom.

Sweat, welding, dust, programming, late nights: this is what it takes to build things, and we're fortunate to have these guys applying their maker's passion to the Uni and the public good.