A Design Hackathon to Bridge More Than Foot Traffic
Written by Welcome to Chinatown
Every day, about 28,000 people walk across NYC’s Brooklyn Bridge. Typically, the landmark is on their bucket list, so they’ll come for the view, snap photos for socials, then hop on public transit to their next destination, without realizing how accessible Chinatown is just a few blocks further.
A wayfinding solution that engages and attracts foot traffic from Brooklyn Bridge, through Gotham Park, to Chinatown was the challenge we handed to eight teams this summer. They gathered over five days — the results and learnings reflect why the work we do is so vital to the surrounding neighborhoods we serve.
In partnership with grassroots organization Gotham Park, we launched our 2026 Summer Design Hackathon, where teams of four, built around roles among designers, engineers, and “wildcard” members, were faced with a prompt that was simple in theory, but hard to solve: design wayfinding or visual markers guiding visitors from the Brooklyn Bridge, through Gotham Park, and into Chinatown. Final pitches happened on the last day at our Hub, and judges from Pentagram, Once Future Office, and NewYork-Presbyterian attended to hear the pitches, see the designs, and select winners.
What excited teams the most was knowing the winning design will be piloted live at this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival during the first weekend of October. We chose to do this in support of Gotham Park’s mission to revive forgotten spaces on the Manhattan side under the Brooklyn Bridge, and because every visitor curious enough to walk past the park might duck into a Chinatown bakery, family-run tea shop, or craft shop that's been on the block for decades. We know that Chinatown small businesses are the reason this neighborhood feels alive, and foot traffic is oxygen for them.
Good wayfinding is seemingly unglamorous until you follow the process all the way through. A clearer path means more people discover a block they'd never have found on their own. That thread of discovery leads to stopping for a purchase — a scoop of ice cream, a bag of produce, a piece of jewelry. And that purchase turns into revenue for entrepreneurs who've built their livelihoods on this stretch of Lower Manhattan, especially those who have been doing this work for decades. We designed this challenge to give people a reason to discover something new, shop local, and connect with the neighborhood in a way that puts money in the hands of those who make it what it is. So really, the question was: how do you design something that turns a tourist into a customer, and connect that customer with a new experience, neighbor, or shop?
We also brought in industry experts to guide and tell teams how their ideas would translate into the real world. Thank you to Shigeto Akiyama, Senior Associate Partner at Pentagram, Taylor Hale, Senior Designer at Once Future Office, and Kelly Cheung from NewYork-Presbyterian for sitting in the room and pushing every team's thinking further with live feedback.
The Winning Designs (and What We Learned From Them)
Team Cyclopaths’ prototype, centered around a local bike!
The first winning concept came from Team Cyclopaths. Their design originated from an astute observation that's easy to miss if you're not looking for it: Chinatown is already stitched together by e-bikes loaded with lunch deliveries, cargo bikes hauling crates of produce. It’s that constant motion that makes the neighborhood's small business ecosystem run. The team proposed turning that everyday infrastructure into wayfinding itself: bicycles secured at key transitional points and stacks of milk crates placed through the open park areas, both functioning as eye-catching, movable landmarks that reassure and direct pedestrians along Park Row. It's wayfinding built out of the neighborhood's own pulse, not layered on top of it.
The second winning design came from The Four Fates. Their “Red Thread of Fate” concept draws from the old Chinese belief that an invisible red thread connects people who are destined to meet. In their design, a physical red rope and ground mural lead festival visitors from the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to the Mid-Autumn Festival, literally tying neighbors to local businesses along the path. Markers inspired by Chinese lucky knots mark key wayfinding points, battery-powered lighting warms up the stretch beneath the bridge, and a tri-fold “passport” nudges festival-goers to actually stop and support vendors — turning a walk into a relationship, not just a route.
Both of these very different design languages share one common intent to not just point people toward Chinatown, but embed the meaningful rituals, rhythms and traditions of the surrounding neighborhood in that process.
Our own mission is embedded within this overall challenge, too. Welcome to Chinatown exists to incubate and nurture new ideas from those willing to experiment, while staying anchored in the traditions and everyday realities of the neighborhood today. We're constantly building this bridge of our own, connecting new tools, design thinking, and generations of creative talent to a place with deep roots, without asking that place to compromise what makes it itself. This hackathon embodied that part of our mission, as we watched teams of designers, engineers, and wildcards built creative ways to bridge from a landmark everyone already visits, to a neighborhood everyone should.
Team Four Fates and their final “Red Thread of Fate” concept
Both winning concepts are now headed into the real design process for the festival, where they will come to life for thousands of festival-goers. Congratulations to all of our winners (Suzana Bentes, Sierra Chiao, Nick Hum, Maryam Ilyas, Joanne Wu, Kairu Tong, Nick Kaufmann, and Zihao Zhang) for taking a brief with real-world rules, red tape, and constraints, and turning it into something genuinely inspiring. You reminded our whole team why we push for creativity and why the rules are always worth challenging. And to everyone who applied, showed up, and gave five days of their summer to this — thank you! We were floored by your ideas and creative energy the entire way through. Lastly, thank you to our partner, Gotham Park, our judges from Pentagram and Open Future, and support from NewYork-Presbyterian, whose made this entire hackathon series possible in the first place.
Join us during Mid-Autumn Festival to view the winning designs, or stay tuned for the next hackathon opportunity!
