What if you kept working on one of your best ideas for eight years? + POOL founders Archie Lee Coates IV, Jeff Franklin, Dong-Ping Wong and Oana Stanescu are living proof that if you plan to build it, they will come to your website in droves—and maybe even donate enough money to make it real. It's four pools in one! It cleans the water just by sitting there! A floating, self-filtering, plus-shaped swimming hub thought up in 2010 that will eventually (we hope) be plopped down off the waterfront in the East River, + POOL is one of the few projects in recent memory that remind how seductive public infrastructure can be.

In conversations dominated by (important!) questions like who will pay for it, how much it will cost, and how far past deadline the finished product will be ready, we too readily forget how exciting it might be to put a 24-hour train underground that anyone can ride for $2.75, or make the internet available for free over floating radio waves. By contrast, + POOL feels almost utopian. It begs us to ask: what would we do if we set out to make life in the city as good as possible for the largest number of people?

In the spirit of taking a new approach to answer familiar questions, we asked Archie and Jeff (who also comprise creative studio Playlab) to illustrate answers to our most pressing questions about the project.

How do you want + Pool to make people feel?