Tiya holds 20 years of experience in design, leadership, and operations across a range of disciplines for some of the country’s top firms and institutions. She is now venturing to spend the next 20 years on projects that use design to wage war against the Climate Crisis. Tiya's work has received the industry’s top accolades, including The National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the SXSW Innovation Award for Urban Infrastructure; the Inaugural Cannes Gold Lion for Creative Data; the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the Cannes Film Festival; and the designation of the second-most innovative design firm in the world by Fast Company.
What you’ll learn:
About It’s Electric and the purpose behind the company
The importance of equal access to public electric charging infrastructure
Challenges faced in setting up It’s Electric
About Movmi and their global EmpowerWISM competition
Quotes:
“ I feel like good design elevates the most mundane tasks and it makes our lives a lot better…But then taking all the experience that I had and trying to think about how can we map the power of design towards helping to fight the climate crisis?”
“It really quickly came to bear that I couldn't get any of these electric vehicles because I really had no place to charge it. There's no vehicle charging in my city in New York City in 2020. At least that wasn't immediately accessible for me the way that you could charge a vehicle”
“The chargers that are being deployed publicly [in the US], are strategically being deployed by the charger manufacturers in areas where they will see a decent utilization because the costs that they bear for the production and deployment of these charges are so great that they have to make some money on it. But what this means is that public charters that are going up in the world are going up in areas that have higher median incomes… there were far more charges to the tune of two and a half times more in census areas that were majority white areas. So we then started to ask ourselves this question, how can we deploy charters without discrimination?”
“So [It’s Electric] designed a really simple charger, that could be fabricated, installed for a fraction of what the other chargers out there in the United States require. And now we can truly then deploy these areas not only where there's very high utilization, where you have five Tesla's on every block, where people are taking their cars away to get away for the weekend. But we can also deploy those very same chargers, in neighborhoods where there's literally no electric vehicle adoption, because you want to be able to signal to communities that there's charging near where people live.”
“No one's going to make the adoption of electric vehicles If they literally have no idea where to charge or they have to spend hours researching it, or they download five different apps to try and figure it out. “
“ I have the most incredible experience with both me Sandra and Venkatesh who run [The Movmi EmpowerWISM program]. They were nothing but champions for every single person that was involved…. So I'm so thrilled to be even a small part of that community.”
Links:
It’s Electric via Linkedin, Instagram, and Twitter
Movmi’s website - the company behind the global EmpowerWISM program
Connect:
Connect with Tiya Gordon via Linkedin
Connect with Emily via email: emily@compassiot.com.au
Connect with Byte Size via LinkedIn
Connect with Compass IoT (the producer of this podcast) via our website
Democratising curb-side EV charging