Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.

In clean renderings, people are doing something most New Yorkers would hardly dream of doing on purpose: Swimming in the East River. But in this imagined swim session, the ickyness, pollution and danger of swimming in the river are gone, replaced with an ingenious solution. It’s called the Plus Pool, and it’s a plus sign-shaped floating swimming pool that filters the river’s water to create a clean and safe place for New Yorkers to cool off in the hot summer.

Designed by Dong-Ping Wong, Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin, Plus Pool was little more than an interesting idea when they first came up with it in 2010. But after a series of meetings, designs and a flurry of media interest, the Plus Pool idea has grown into a full-fledged concept. With more than $40,000 from a Kickstarter campaign and donated engineering and feasibility plans from the engineers at Arup, the pool guys have New Yorkers, designers and swimmers strongly behind them and their suddenly not-so-crazy idea.

Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.