The Designer Who Electrified New York's Curbs | Tiya Gordon

At the Brink with Erica Brinker · Nov 11, 2026 · 43m

The whole world is supposed to go electric, Tiya Gordon points out, and yet in the largest city in the United States there was nowhere to charge an electric car. On a pandemic walk through Brooklyn, she and her co-founder noticed the solar panels going up on rooftops and asked a simple question: what if the buildings could power the cars parked in front of them?

Tiya is a Parsons-trained designer who had never worked in tech. She tells Erica Brinker how a sketch became it's electric. It started with cold-calling the experts and asking if they were insane, then pitching Hyundai in N95 masks…