Smart Poles
City of
Newcastle
They came to us for one product. They left with three.
A 2020 Good Design Gold Accolade Winner for Design Excellence.
Three connected solutions bringing Newcastle’s Smart Cities Living Lab to life.
The Brief
Newcastle City Council was exploring the opportunities and constraints of emerging IoT technology through its Smart Cities Living Lab. The initiative provided a practical environment for Council to demonstrate new technologies, engage with industry, researchers and the community, and understand how connected systems could work in the real world.
Design Anthology was engaged to develop a reconfigurable sensor stack for installation 11 metres above ground level on Newcastle’s existing Hess Smart Poles. The system needed to support the deployment and testing of sensing technologies while integrating with existing infrastructure.
The initial brief was to develop one product. As we worked through the technical and operational challenges, we identified opportunities to expand the system’s capabilities and make deployment significantly more practical.
Challenges & Opportunities
The first challenge was to install a reconfigurable sensor stack 11 metres above ground level on the Smart Pole. The product needed to integrate with existing infrastructure while allowing sensors to be changed and reconfigured as the Living Lab evolved.
As we worked through the problem, we identified a second opportunity at street level. We developed another sensor product that could utilise the existing access door in the Smart Pole, making installation and integration simpler while opening up a broader range of sensing applications.
The third opportunity emerged when we looked at deployment. Installing, removing, reconfiguring and reinstalling sensors 11 metres above the ground could cost thousands of dollars each time, requiring traffic control, elevated work platforms and multiple people. We designed the sensor platform to be snap-fit and plug-and-play, then developed a pole-climbing robot that could install and retrieve it. This created the potential for the system to be deployed and reconfigured by a single person, without traditional access equipment and its associated costs.
What started as one challenge ultimately led to three interconnected solutions: the elevated sensor stack, street-level sensing and a completely different approach to deployment.
The Results
The project delivered three interconnected products from the original brief, expanding what Newcastle’s Smart Cities Living Lab could do while making the sensing system easier to integrate, reconfigure and deploy.
The plug-and-play approach was also validated by Hess, the German manufacturer of the Smart Poles. When we delivered the test rig to their team in Germany, they told us it was the first piece of IoT hardware they had received that they could simply plug in and have work straight out of the box. For us, this was valuable validation that a complex sensing system could be made genuinely simple to install and integrate. The solution also helped convince Hess to modify its Smart Pole design to allow direct integration with our product.
The project was recognised as a 2020 Good Design Gold Accolade Winner for Design Excellence, demonstrating the value of combining product design, engineering and real-world deployment thinking to unlock more from an original brief.
