Rings of soft white light encircled lamp poles up and down a block of St. Paul’s Dayton Avenue, just off Lexington Parkway, one recent misty evening.
Suddenly, all of the lights on the even side of the street became red. Then, they reverted to their original color, and the odd-side lights became red.
This happened many times: white, red; red, white.
Watching this street display were a couple of shadowy figures — including one continually tapping a smartphone screen.
The tapping caused the lights to switch colors, as any casual observer could discern. It wasn’t as clear why he was doing this, but the iPhone user — part of a tiny tech startup called Flarean — was happy to explain.
Jason Barnett told one baffled resident to imagine himself during a snow emergency. Where to park is the eternal question, he said, and the red-white lighting scheme would make this obvious. Red: You get towed, dude. White: You’re cool.
Imagine such lamp-pole lighting all over St. Paul, with the city’s blessing, Barnett told the man. Imagine what a difference it could make. Now, imagine other potential circumstances.
Visualize, he says, how lighting grids with colored prompts could convey information across urban centers, on corporate or college campuses and other settings.
Picture this as a warning system. Go this way, not that way, such lights would warn university students if a gunman was on campus. Head far inland, the lights would urge residents of coastal regions amid tsunami warnings. Here’s the house where the 911 call originated, the lights would tell paramedics.
Flarean’s little lights, said Barnett, could save lives.
‘2016, YOU’RE MINE’
In 2008, Barnett was reaching down to snatch his newspaper off his front stoop when a crippling spasm sent him crumbling onto the concrete.
“It was a knife stab in my back,” Barnett said. “I couldn’t move.”
Just then, his 3-year-old son bounded down the stairs, running up and down the sidewalk, believing this was all a game.
“If he had run into the middle of the road, I would not have been able to stop him,” Barnett said.
The back spasm wasn’t a fluke. Barnett would end up on his kitchen floor more than once as his alarmed school-aged daughter looked on, “and there was no solution other than laying there for two hours before I could get up.”
Barnett was born with spina bifida, a birth defect that often leaves people severely handicapped but largely spared him early in his life.
“I ran everywhere” as a kid, he said. He played soccer as a teen.
But beginning in 2012, his back repeatedly would go out, and he entered a period of endless therapies and one major surgery.
“Until then, I never understood what it meant to live with chronic pain,” said Barnett, 45. “I don’t think my wife ever understood it, but she was incredibly supportive. I couldn’t have gotten through it without her.”
At the time, Barnett headed TheUptake.org, a St. Paul-based journalism nonprofit, and his 2014 departure was health-related.
It was not the only reason. Like so many other would-be entrepreneurs, Barnett was consumed with a desire to start something new. And so he did — rashly, he admits — when he launched Flarean amid his medical troubles.
“It was insane to launch a startup in the state I was in,” he said. “But with so many entrepreneurs I have known, insanity is what you do. They don’t do it because they want to do it, but because they have to do it.”
Besides, without his startup, he would have been out of work. “No one would have hired me in the condition I was in,” Barnett said.
He recalls meeting with one new Flarean worker, project manager Dawn Messerly, and realizing he was making little sense.
Messerly would later confess to him that “she had no idea what I was talking about for weeks,” Barnett said. “She got the thread of my idea, but I was so scatterbrained and drugged out of my head with painkillers that I must have sounded like a raving lunatic.
“But the mental exercise of developing an idea was so liberating,” he added. “It helped me cope, day to day.”
Barnett said he began to feel better in May 2015, roughly a year after his big surgery.
“I noticed I wasn’t using my cane,” he said on Facebook. “The pain was still there, but highly diminished, and I could run! I actually played soccer on and off over the summer and fall.”
Best of all, he is in good shape to chase his dream.
“I beat 2015,” he said. “2016, you’re mine.”
SMART THINGS
A year or so ago, Kristina Durivage of Minneapolis constructed a “Tweetskirt” — a stylish skirt that happened to incorporate an 8-by-32 grid of LED lights that could display Twitter content.
It was a creation very much in line with the “Internet of things,” a recent technology-industry push to imbue everyday objects with Internet features. The skirt could flash across its LED screen any tweets containing either “@tweetskirt” or “#tweetskirt.”
Durivage, a software engineer by day and a “maker” in her spare time, said she created the Tweetskirt just “for funsies.”
But the skirt today could very well be one of Flarean’s prototypes. Durivage, who came on board last summer as the startup’s fourth of five workers, is doing similar work at the startup.
It all starts with a brain — inside the device.
Durivage’s Tweetskirt, along with Flarean’s lamp-pole lights and other experimental products, have at their core a device called a Particle Photon.
That teensy control apparatus, essentially a microcomputer, does two important things. First, it connects to the Internet. Second, it receives pre-programmed commands via that connection and carries them out.
This is how Durivage’s smart skirt knew to translate prompts via the Net into the correct LED sequences to display tweets.
In the same way, the lamp-pole lights do Barnett’s bidding. Taps on his phone become online directives the lights receive and heed.
Durivage said she would have been essentially useless to Flarean without the prior training her Tweetskirt provided.
Flarean owes its existence to technology like the Photon that saves it from having to create its products from scratch at a great expense.
A decade or so ago, said Barnett, such a project would have cost him a fortune. Today, he can snap up Photon brains for his gizmos at $19 a pop from Particle, a Minnesota-spawned startup now making a name for itself in Silicon Valley.
There is a rich tradition of startups building, legitimately, on the work of others, said Justin Grammens, who joined Flarean as chief technical officer — and its fifth staffer — in February.
“Sites like Stack Overflow and GitHub have a lot of open-source libraries that allow people to quickly write code on top of other people’s work,” Grammens said.
“This is a beautiful thing,” he said, and it’s how fledglings like Flarean can “stand on the shoulders of giants.”
‘I CAN DO THAT’
One day in 2013, when Barnett was feeling the worst of his physical pain, he was at the wheel of his car during a Minneapolis snow emergency and couldn’t figure out where to park.
He felt an upwelling of rage, and blurted a “couple of choice words,” he recalled. “When you live with chronic pain, you live with your temper at the very edge of reality.”
His son, then 8 years old, happened to be in the back seat and overheard his father’s profane outburst.
“He was, like, ‘Dad. Dude. What’s wrong?’” said Barnett, who recalls explaining his predicament with scant patience.
OK, the kid said, “What would you do to fix it?”
Barnett, off the top of his head, said he’d have the street lights change color, somehow, to signal where motorists can and cannot park.
All right, the boy went on, “Why don’t you do that?”
Barnett felt a visceral impulse to scoff at his child’s seemingly nonsensical suggestion. And, then, “I stopped for a second or two, and realized, ‘Hey, I can do that.’”
ART …
As a child, Barnett liked nothing more than mucking about in clay pits to feed his budding inner artist.
In South Carolina, where he grew up, “I had clay everywhere. I’d go into a ditch in my backyard to scoop out clay and sculpt stuff.”
Later, in college, he was on a pre-med track. “But in one class, I did illustrations of a pig we were dissecting. My biology professor pulled me aside and said I should look into an art class.”
Barnett became an art major, devoting himself to oil painting and bronze sculpting, which prompted “my parents to tease me that I was getting a major in ‘pre-unemployment,’ ” he said.
Barnett proved them wrong, parlaying his education into a thriving career as a commercial sculptor. And after he went on to other things, he realized how profoundly he missed his art.
Today, he is again an artist, in a way.
One recent afternoon, he grabbed a huge, square-shaped chunk of green jeweler’s wax and heaved it onto the milling machine in his cluttered office and studio above his garage.
In the ensuing days, bit by bit, he carved strips off the block until it took the form of a fancy desk lamp. He then used the wax figure to fashion a plaster mold. That mold spawned the final product: a lamp made of fired porcelain.
Then came the final flourish: Barnett added a Particle Photon and a small, circular bank of LEDs. Presto: A smart lamp.
Barnett has been fashioning such Flarean prototypes for the sheer artistic joy of it — and also to make a point. Tech gizmos do not have to be humdrum in appearance, he said. They can be gorgeous.
Yet, a flood of home-automation and other Internet-of-things gizmos into the market all look “like a soap bar, all white and sleek, but pretty boring,” Barnett said. “With 3D printing, there is no excuse not to be interesting.”
Barnett has other reasons for revisiting his artistic persona: It’s only way for Flarean to make stuff on a budget of basically nothing. Even a small 3D printer is beyond the startup’s reach, for now.
Besides, Barnett said, art has been “cathartic.” During his bouts of severe back pain, dabbling with sculpture was “a big part of the healing process.”
… AND SOUL
Traditional companies are driven mainly by profit. Other considerations are subordinate to the main mission: satisfying shareholders with continued income or share-value growth.
But in early 2015, a new breed of Minnesota company emerged.
Called a public-benefit corporation, or B-Corp, this legal business entity has greater latitude to chase social goals and embody value systems that are not fundamentally profit-focused — though it is still a profit-seeking entity and not a nonprofit.
For Barnett and his team, the B-Corp’s arrival was perfectly timed.
As Flarean’s workers placed makeshift light rings around city lamp posts not long ago, they thought about how their tech could someday become a force for good. If they teamed up with municipalities or other civic entities, they could make society run a bit more smoothly and safely — all with these colored, flashing smart lights.
“Our company has the stated mission of developing products and services that will benefit public safety,” Barnett said.
Money is not a primary motivator for Flarean at the moment in an abstract sense, nor in a practical one. As a barely-there firm with no offices — except Barnett’s chaotic studio — no clientele and no shipping products, it has yet to make a penny.
None of its staffers draws a wage. They’re volunteering their time while holding down full-time employment elsewhere.
For them, Flarean is a cause — or causes — though each describes this a bit differently.
“Some people who go into business to make money and get rich,” said Messerly. “We are not like that. We are driven by something bigger than making a boatload of money. We want to do something meaningful.”
Diversity is another Flarean imperative in a predominantly male and white industry.
Patrick Rhone, Flarean’s communications manager, likes to point out that the startup has “two women and one African-American on a five-person team.” (He’s African-American.)
“In technology, especially, this is extremely rare,” said Rhone, a tech consultant. “I can’t think of a single other tech startup that is majority women and minority.” This is vital, because it “brings fresh ideas to the table.”
That diversity plays into Flarean’s public-safety emphasis, he added. Minorities statistically are much more likely to live in areas with high crime rates. Women, meanwhile, face the risk of sexual assault as men rarely do, he said.
A roomful of white dudes, said Rhone, can’t properly appreciate any of this.
Barnett, who is white, said he never would have conceived of an all-male or mostly white staff for Flarean. This, he said, would be a failure.
A LIGHT TOUCH
Flarean’s technology — specifically the smart lamp — had a coming-out of sorts in the Minnesota north woods last summer.
The Camp CoCo event, operated by Minneapolis-based CoCo coworking network, was an eclectic mix of learning sessions and low-tech recreation.
At an evening social with music and drinking, “I set up the lamp in the back of the room … and waited,” Barnett said. The lamp drew attendees like moths.
“People came over to it and said, ‘That’s beautiful, what is it?’ ” he recalled. “They wanted to touch it, hold it, play with it. They kind of petted it. It was fun to watch people interact with it.
“There was a lot of confirmation that I was on a good path, that I actually had something,” he said.
Barnett had rigged the lamp to be touch-sensitive, so users could make the light change color and trigger different sequences with simple taps.
“There is more user acceptance of technology when it is tactile,” Barnett said. “A lot of the smart devices out there are taking that away from you. I think that is a huge mistake.”
With a Photon brain, though, the lamp also is designed to react as it gets online commands. This notion fired a few imaginations that weekend.
“People helped me to brainstorm functionalities,” Barnett said.
LAUNCH
The Flarean light ring that wraps around lamp poles has a catchy moniker: FlareBot.
For all of Barnett’s talk of hardware gorgeousness, however, the FlareBot is a utilitarian apparatus embodying none of his artistic sensibilities. Touching it achieves nothing.
The Particle Photon is stored in an outdoor electrical-socket box that Barnett painted red and imprinted with official-looking instructions. The Photon is powered with ordinary AA batteries, also inside the box.
Barnett procured LED lights built onto long, fabric-like strips and encased them in plastic water tubing he bent into a ring-like shape.
He then sheathed the tubing in a rubbery engine hose, to make it more grippy, but cut the opaque black hose open at intervals so the LEDs could shine through.
The finished gadget, though hardly a piece of art, does have an alluring aesthetic when lit — a bit like a sci-fi prop, particularly when a half-dozen are switched on at the same time and placed in a tidy row.
The FlareBots took on a somewhat mystical aura as Barnett wrapped them, one by one, around the metal street-light poles, their light softly bathing their progenitor’s face and hands.
The recent street testing, conducted by Barnett and Grammens, the chief technical officer, involved only a handful of FlareBots.
But for the next FlareBot test, Barnett is thinking bigger: He aims to recruit a city, county or other civic entity to participate in an exercise covering several square blocks, or the equivalent, with dozens or even hundreds of FlareBots.
Even users of Barnett’s porcelain smart lamps could join the fun. Any such indoor gadgets within the experimental grid could display the same light prompts as the FlareBots outside.
The smart lamp could actually become Flarean’s first shipping product — even though, in the grand scheme of things, FlareBots look to be vastly more important.
Barnett plans a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to offer the lamps as desirable objets d’art for tech nerds. Income from the campaign would, in part, fund FlareBot development.
And things are looking up a bit financially: Barnett said he has recruited his first angel investor to kick in a sizeable but undisclosed — and nowhere near game-changing — hunk of cash.
He said Flarean has come a long way from its first stage, when it lacked a name and existed merely as rough sketches on an artist’s drawing pad, along with the mildly crazed ramblings of its drugged-up founder.
Now, a much-healthier Barnett hopes those existential light rings will show him the way forward.
