Partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Innovation and the SF Planning Dept
Market Street @ Yerba Buena Lane, San Francisco
Installed October '13 for three years
Market Street @ Yerba Buena Lane, San Francisco
Installed October '13 for three years
This is the first project our team did as SPS. I was responsible for the overall design of the space and structure. Working with the engineers and exhibit developers, we integrated two Exploratorium exhibits with the final design, each augmenting the experience of the other. To facilitate this integration and our intent to encourage passersby to stop for a moment and explore, I started with an ovoid and then subtractively molded it. I wanted to strike a compelling balance between cohesion/dispersion, openness/enclosure, transparency/opacity, grounded/ephemeral.
Six years ago, this project was my first attempt at inhabiting structure with not only Exploratorium goals of informal learning and open-ended discovery, but also our team’s goal of creating an invitation to pause and engage. All these goals inform the current arc of my interactive art practice. But, instead of science exhibits, these "skeletal" structures will be enlivened with sensory and AI technology to achieve the goals on the Vision page.
Six years ago, this project was my first attempt at inhabiting structure with not only Exploratorium goals of informal learning and open-ended discovery, but also our team’s goal of creating an invitation to pause and engage. All these goals inform the current arc of my interactive art practice. But, instead of science exhibits, these "skeletal" structures will be enlivened with sensory and AI technology to achieve the goals on the Vision page.
Even in 2013, when I designed this installation for the Exploratorium, I always intended for this "skeletal" structure to be layered with more pro-social and educational interactives. We succeeded then in creating an architecturally inviting space to augment the Exploratorium's listening dishes, but it was also a prototype for further interactivity. Some of those layers of engagement are illustrated below.