About us - Urban Materials

We design tools that help institutions engage more closely with residents.

We are a design studio creating mobile solutions for public institutions, social organizations, and local entities. Our main project is Echo — Mobile Meeting Point: a participatory cart for public consultations, workshops, educational activities, information campaigns, and meetings with residents outside the institution's headquarters.

We created the first prototype consultation cart in 2018 in collaboration with the Social Communication Center of the capital city of Warsaw. We developed the next version, also for CKS, based on research, tests, and conversations with people who work daily with residents: participation practitioners, cultural animators, librarians, and representatives of social organizations. After a year of work, another model of the cart was created, the prototype of today's Echo. Since then, until today, dozens of additional copies have been produced, and each production series is improved and includes further enhancements.

We design Echo as a durable tool for fieldwork — mobile, easy to operate, customizable, and created for long-term use. We do not produce anonymous event equipment. We create a product that supports real actions: conversations, workshops, local diagnoses, mobile libraries, and social campaigns.

Ecology and responsible production are important to us. We primarily use aluminum — lightweight, durable, and recyclable. We collaborate with local subcontractors from the Masovian Voivodeship, and where possible, we avoid gluing in favor of metal screws and rivets. This way, every single element of Echo can be repaired or replaced with a new one. Each copy is assembled personally.

Today Echo operates in dozens of cities, towns, and villages. We are particularly close to local institutions whose mission is to integrate residents and initiate social and cultural activities. It is used by local governments, libraries, cultural centers, social organizations, CUSs, and OPs, as well as universities across Poland, and we are also taking our first steps abroad, in Scandinavia.