The community's favorite content from the Soofa Sign in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

We're engaging our community with beautiful art and unique content. We wanted to share some of our favorite pieces to date.

Just around the corner from our office, Kendall Square is the ideal testbed for our newly launched 42” Soofa Sign, the world’s first digital community bulletin board.

A former industrial district with a storied past, Kendall Square is now an internationally recognized innovation hub propelled by the imagination and ingenuity of the 50,000+ people that show up to work here each day. Curiosity, openness and collaboration are prevalent in every lab, startup and yes, even the public spaces. These are characteristics we hold dear and do our best to foster.

Since 1964, the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority (CRA) has focused on implementing imaginative and creative initiatives, working tirelessly to achieve social equity and a balanced economic ecosystem. With thousands of tourists, students and commuters finding their way to and through Kendall Square each day, part of CRA’s effort is to provide clear messaging.

Our team collaborates closely with CRA to test new features, communication and engagement strategies. With other options available to deliver information to the public, Tom Evans, executive director of CRA, tells GovTech Magazine one of the reasons the CRA partnered with Soofa is because solar powered electronic paper is an “interesting new format we want to explore.”

As an early adopter of our technology, our relationship with the CRA is highly collaborative where we work together to co develop our technology to best meet the needs of the Kendall Square neighborhood.

The Sign in Kendall is strategically positioned in front of the outbound T-stop. Giving commuters transit information in real-time is a key feature of the Sign with the ability to show site specific arrivals and departures of the red line subway. Along with train schedules, we are curating content featuring local artists, memes we love and neighborhood happenings. Easy to install using just 4 bolts and completely self-contained with solar power and wireless connectivity, the Sign offers a flexible solution that can grow with your spaces and evolve as your neighborhood changes over time.

Over the coming months, we will have dozens of Signs across Boston, Cambridge, Atlanta and others to be announced. The Sign functions as a single unit as well as a network, linked together through our cloud-based content management system called Soofa Talk.

Check out some of our favorite, creative content that's been displayed on the sign over the past few months.

Find your next great hire for your business

Local startups are excited about the potential of the Soofa Sign to help them attract great talent from the MIT community. Hiring doesn't stop at just startups though - do you have a small business and have a critical role to fill, do you have a restaurant and need more wait staff or dedicated chefs? Our sign is here to help. In just a few clicks your job post will land on the sign or signs you want in your neighborhood.

Engage people in creative new ways by bridging digital and physical worlds

The term public engagement is hot right now, but the definition is loose and measuring it is hard. We're spending countless hours on site in Kendall testing different types of content and counting how many people stop, how many take action, and ask them why. Thus far, the internet high five has been one of the most successful - hundreds of people have given the sign a high five.