A collaboration between industrial designers from Sydney’s University of New South Wales (UNSW), urban technology planners from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Transport for NSW, Benchmark is a new experimental seating solution designed to better understand how women, girls, and gender-diverse individuals use public spaces.
Funded by Transport for NSW under the Safer Cities programme, the innovative outdoor benches were designed by Gonzalo Portas, chief investigator and associate lecturer in Industrial Design at the School of Built Environment, UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture, with assistance from four female industrial design students – Eleanor Tang, Grace Wong, Christine Chen and Eugenia Cheung – under the mentorship of senior lecturer Rina Bernabei.
