Most of what we build at Constructive lives in a database and nobody ever sees it. This summer we got to help with something the whole city could see.
Illuminate, the San Francisco nonprofit behind The Bay Lights, calls San Francisco the City of Awe. For two weeks around the Summer Solstice, its founder Ben Davis and his team filled the sky with lasers, free for everyone. No tickets, no ads, no sponsor names.
The lasers themselves are Laser Space Cannons, built by Tim Anderson of Nu-Salt Laser: each about the size of a milk crate, and visible for miles. Our part was the software that controls them, the AwePad. Under the hood the software is called WaveGrid; at the installations, everyone just calls it the AwePad. It began as Ben's inspiration, and our founder Dan built it as our way of participating in the culture of generosity.
WELCOME
Illuminate's Summer of Awe began over Pride weekend with WELCOME: fourteen cannons in a 7×2 grid at Embarcadero Plaza, sending changing colors 4.1 miles down Market Street to Twin Peaks.
7X7
Then came 7X7: forty-nine cannons, one for each square mile of San Francisco, rising from a truss in Civic Center Plaza every night from the solstice through July 4. Ben's idea came together in under forty days.
The AwePad
Ben's vision was simple: an iPad that anyone could use to paint with the lasers, and that would always be beautiful. To us that meant the motion itself had to be artistic: colors don't snap, they blend; brightness doesn't jump, it breathes. Every gesture, even a careless one, comes out as a slow, deliberate crossfade in the sky.
So the screen is the installation. For 7X7 it's a 7×7 grid; for WELCOME, a 7×2 grid. Pick a color, paint across the squares, and the beams follow.
That's what let us hand the iPad to anyone. Grandparents, parents and four-year-olds picked it up and just understood it: changing the colors and brightness, drawing pictures in the sky, creating an experience for everyone below.
Why We Did It
We built AwePad using Constructive's tools, but the technology was never the point.
The point was to fortify culture.
To work alongside Illuminate to bring awe to San Francisco. To use software to bring our community together, in a city that has always been home to innovation and creative expression.
At a time when there are so many uncertainties around software and AI, we want to demonstrate that technology can bring us closer together, inspire creativity, strengthen our communities, and ultimately help us become more human, not less.
That's what this project means to us. And giving our time, our tools, and our creativity is how we participate in what Ben Davis calls the culture of generosity.
Thank you to Ben and everyone at Illuminate for the vision, and to Tim Anderson and the Nu-Salt crew for the lasers.
WELCOME and 7X7 are by Illuminate, conceived by Ben Davis. Lasers by Nu-Salt Laser (Tim Anderson). AwePad control software by Constructive.