Today we’d like to introduce you to Kirill Safin And Emily Perkins
Hi Kirill Safin and Emily Perkins, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
We lived across from the under-construction Metro regional connector for years, watching it be constructed from our window (jack-hammer sounds and all). After it finally opened in summer of 2023, we rode it and started to get around LA almost entirely by Metro. We’re not big fans of the notorious LA traffic, and the new station opened us up to being able to reach Santa Monica, Hollywood, Long Beach, Highland Park, and nearly anywhere we want to go entirely by train.
We love the human-scale and connected feeling of riding the train after years of much more isolating driving. It felt really special, and it became something we were excited about and looked forward to.
We wanted to celebrate the station opening, our relationship with it, and celebrate transit (both in general and LA Metro’s meteoric progress). There’s no city in the country building more rail transit (subway, light rail) than LA, which is incredible considering how notoriously car-centric our city is. We thought this was worth celebrating.
We build a prototype of “Metroboard,” our live subway map for LA. It was a simple circuitboard that connected to WiFi and got live data directly from LA Metro, then lit up lights to show where the trains were. It was really neat, and it felt like having the pulse of the city in our home. Every light that was on captured dozens or hundreds of people moving about the city, going about their day. It was a fantastic art/statement piece, and it honored something we cared a lot about.
We decided to make it for other major US cities and pursue an entire business around it, so we also went for making one for the Bay Area, Chicago, Boston, DC, and NYC. We got a little office a few blocks away from our loft in downtown, in the same building as The Last Bookstore. Over the course of a few months, we built the prototypes for all six, now much more refined, with a walnut frame, brushed aluminum panel, buttons to configure them, and a hidden away USB-C port for power.
We went on a train trip across the country entirely by Amtrak to visit the other five cities, taking the prototypes with us, riding their subways, and watching our little dot light up at different stations in different cities. In the past few months, we’ve been marketing and sharing the project online, and are about to launch it on September 30th.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
By most standards, it’s been pretty amazingly smooth. It’s a lot of work to bring a product to reality – finding materials, manufacturers, getting first versions that don’t look good – but ultimately the pieces came together pretty seamlessly.
We found our manufacturing partners pretty quickly and got great samples from them. The design was largely straightforward, and so were the technical hurdles, software, etc.
In sharing the project publicly for the first time, we received great reception almost immediately, and have quickly built a passionate community. We have over 9000 reservations and 15,000 e-mails accrued over 3 months, and have been connecting with many of the people following our project and staying in touch.
We send a special letter in the mail to everyone who reserves metroboard, which may arguably be the hardest part of the project. Ultimately, that’s meant preparing (printing, folding, wax-sealing, stuffing with a custom postcard and hand-stamped 3D glasses, then finally mailing) over 9,000 letters so far, and 9,000 more shortly (as we’re sending everyone a second letter). We’ve ended up with a mail assembly line in our kitchen that overtakes our table most nights.
Most of our evenings are 2-3 hours of working on letters, and we’ve had a number of weekends spending the entire day preparing materials for them. We lose money on them, but we’ve poured so much love into them, and they’re our way of thanking those who reserve and letting them know how much we appreciate their investment in our project, and their trust in us.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Kirill Response —
I graduated from Stanford with a degree in electrical engineering, and always planned to work on the very hardest projects I could. I joined a startup aerospace company straight out of undergrad as the 10th employee – it’s called ABL Space Systems, in El Segundo.
Over the course of my five years there, I designed the electronics that control and fly the entire rocket, and established the team of engineers responsible for the electronics. To be frank, I worked on dozens of other projects from electronics to control rocket engine tests, to wiring harnesses on the rocket, and a bunch of other stuff. My biggest contribution was definitely the Flight Computer for the rocket though, where I designed the entire assembly, from circuit boards all the way up.
I’m best known for delivering – always delivering. I can surmount any problem, and it ends up looking really easy. But that impression is the result of a really well oiled problem solving machine in my head, able to find the information I need, synthesize it well, learn quickly, question, move fast but in a well-informed way, etc. Though most of the work I can point to is electronics, it’s been a lot more than that, and I’m versatile in almost every discipline.
Emily Response —
I went to film school and worked briefly in the industry before 2020. During the pandemic I got a job at an aerospace company and worked in Strategic Development before managing the company’s Creative team. I work primarily in video and design.
I’m curious and interested and am proud of nurturing those traits into a practice. I’m good at and enjoy listening.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
We’re working on a record! We met a great artist on the T in Boston and put out a call for subway sounds to the folks on our mailing list. We’ve had a ton of great responses so far, from pros in the audio post-processing industry sending entire subway sound libraries to folks recording their commute home. We’re gonna try to synthesize that all into a handful of tracks that capture the feeling of those cities and train systems. Everyone who’s sending sounds is going to be listed as a collaborator on the record.
Pricing:
- $189 during our Kickstarter (month of Oct0
- $229 full price later (in early 2025)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.designrules.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designrulesco
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/designrulesco
- Twitter: https://x.com/designrulesco
Image Credits
the design rules company
